Welcome to Ramblings
Howdy Folk…Scott Sample here.
For those that know us, we’re excited you’re reading our first official blog. For those that don’t know us, we’re a regenerative farm in South Shreveport focusing on enhancing biological diversity through Management Intensive Grazing of livestock. We move our cattle to fresh forage daily. We manage perennial pastures as if grasses are a cash crop and our cattle are our combines. Our cattle are here today, gone tomorrow, thus allowing grasses to be grazed for a short period of time, and are then given able time to regenerate new growth. We raise pigs, too. They move their way across the farm as well. However, pigs don’t move at the same speed as cattle, and therefore are moved every 10-14 days. They are excellent at cleaning an understory, like the overgrown pecan groves we rotate them through. By knocking down the understory, sunlight is again able to penetrate the ground floor spurring on new growth. Our layers produce some of the finest eggs this side of somewhere, and we mean that. Our flock of 500 is housed in a mobile coop. We use portable electric net fencing to move them across our pastures. They are moved twice a week, leaving a wake of chicken shit behind. It’s beautiful. The residual from a chicken move will enhance biological activity in our soils for years to come.
We do all of this to enhance biological diversity across our farm, and it all starts in the soil. By improving soil health, we improve forage quality, we improve animal performance, we increase carrying capacity, we increase diversity, and become less susceptible to drought. It’s a simple, yet complex system that strives to be in-tune with the cycles of nature. Those cycles being the carbon cycle, the water cycle, the microbial cycle, the nutrient cycle, the mineral cycle and on and on…we’ll be ramblin’ about soil health and these cycles in newsletters to come for sure.
So…we told ya that to tell ya this. It’s no secret we’re kicking this blog off in an effort to drum up new business. Here on the farm, we believe where you put your food dollar is very important. If most consumers knew what we know about our industrialized food system, they’d ONLY buy their food directly from small farms. Consumers can choose a food system that raises and slaughters animals humanely, a system that allows the animal to express its instinctive behavior. This is a food system in-tune with the cycles of nature. OR, a consumer can spend their food dollar on a different, commodity-driven system. Did you know that commodity farmer’s get less than 15 cents out of every dollar that you spend on food? Moreover, these 15 cents is probably going to a farm in Russia, China, Mexico, or some other country. The other 85 cents the consumer pays is for freight, marketing, shareholder profits, and all the other operating expenses it takes Big Ag to produce our food. It’s a commodity driven system that is failing our land, our animals, and our rural communities. And if you ask us, it’s failing the consumer too.
So, here at Sample Farm, we want 100% of your consumer dollar. After we pocket our share, we’ll pay our neighbor for the quality hay we feed out cattle in the winter, we’ll pay our local butcher in Sibley, Louisiana, for processing and packaging, we’ll pay our local feed/seed stores for supplies, we’ll pay the salaries to the employees we need to make this farm work. In other words, by spending your food dollar with us, you’re choosing to support a local food system that will undoubtedly make you feel good.