Hi y'all. I'm trying to sell a cow and have been working hard cutting brush to make the money for winter feed. Just wondering if anyone is interested in any grass fed products.

I am posting to see if anyone is interested in supporting my operation for their own dining pleasure. Fronting me the funds to grow the animals allows me to give a discount price on your farm purchase.

I am going today down state to pick up the rest of the herd of Icelandic sheep I started with this summer. I have 3 ramb lambs possibly available this year, I also will be butchering a 5 year old ram for my own winter meat supply. I am going to winter over 10 ewes and hope to have 15-20 lambs out of them for 8-10 more slaughter lambs next fall. I have butchered one lamb so far this year. His carcass was 43 pounds, after I trimmed off nearly 10 pounds of grass fed back fat!
I sell them for 300 dollars, plus butchering fee which usually runs about 50 dollars. However of course we can do it on the farm for free. It runs around 7.20 a pound. You have to figure out whether you want lots of roasts or grind them up for ground lamb.

I can also raise beef, pasture raised muscovy, turkey, pork or really whatever you want, if you front the money to grow it, I'll grow a very high quality, kelp fed, grass raised animal. As you know, Iodine is important for preventing nuclear radiation and the best source for us humans is from animal fat. My sheep eating Thorvin Kelp means they are getting 10000% more iodine then regular sheep.

I will post pictures as soon as I can the next few days! Working, working, working for the winter!

I give you my oath to always sell animals that have been raised healthy, with a high plane nutrition from natural grass and legume based pastures, to the best of my economic ability!

I will explain more about my methods in the future!

Talk to you soon.

next year i will be marketing grass fed lamb, grass fed chevon, grass fed rose veal, pastured pork products and sausage, swamp fed muscovy duck, acorn fed turkey, cow pie fed chickens and eggs and  pumpkin fed duck eggs. my goal is to have a six hundred acre grass farm, four hundred acres rented.          thirty or so sows, three hundred or so goats, three hundred or so sheep, fifty or so beef cows and around thirty dairy cows would be an approximate end tally for that many acres. a large tractor will be needed for planting high yield summer crops and winter annuals. two or three acres in ten will be planted in crops most of the time with double cropping each year. crops can be hogged down or eaten or sold direct market. there will be a mi based buying club. basically to make an order you have to get enough orders to make it economical to ship. im going to hazard that orders in mi must be a minimum of one thousand dollars for each city we ship too per order unless we farmers market in that city. we are looking at sending a cow share service down state. out of state orders would be a minimum order of two thousand dollars i would hazard. we are going to focus on producing the highest quality forages and the highest quality animal products with the a high organic iodine kelp and micro mineral supplemented. the tractor will allow us to implement the lacerator forage wagon system to make high omega three and vitamin a plus sugar vacume haylage. animals will be harvested primarily from mid winter to mid summer but some will be finished on sudan and corn and beans sans seeds and other green summer forges stockpiled for the fall and some will be finised on perennial and high quality hay and some finished on haylage with perhaps giant forage beats.  animals will be sold through farmers markets, restaurants, health food stores. there may be a mobile kitchen for events, even catering and camping and an on farm shop.

I just read that meat doesn't freeze until twenty five degrees and at twenty seven it will extend the shelf life of meat cuts to over three months.!

For your enjoyment and my bragging.

I have the creeping feeling of failure. I should not feel this way because I am not and I have accomplished a lot. However I keep running into walls I cannot penetrate. The more walls I run into the more I slow down and the more walls I encounter and the more they prove impenetrable.

I am a very talented and intelligent individual but I lack the organizational skills and support to be successful in the heavily flawed situations I have been in.

I don't want to farm by myself anymore. I think if I had the right setup in the right place I could do it, but I don't even want to. I never wanted to do it all by myself.

I have had a great journey and learned tons but I am distressed and sick from stress and cannot think clearly. I am waiting on the butcher to call me back so that I can start eating good beef. I thought I was eating halfway decent but I recently had a virtual health collapse after 7 years of doing really well.

I have an understanding and experience of ecological production and economics of virtually any and all species of livestock, I am ready to be a successful grass farmer and have a very profitable business, but I can't make it go. I am almost out of emotional energy.

Now I'm considering whether to sell all or most of my animals. If I sell all of them I will probably travel for some time.

Leaning at moving back to where I am from in NY as that is probably a much better environment for me than the middle of nowhere in Northern Michigan (which is awesome, just not by my lonesome).

I hope if I move back to NY to be selling at a NYC farmers market and having a NYC grass fed buying club by next spring.

Very few people responded to my adds I posted. I don't understand why.

I'm done learning the hard way, success soon please. 

http://centralmich.craigslist.org/grd/3795599207.html

I want to get all of those lambs and perhaps some of the older ewes.

If you want in, for 300 you can get a full lamb, 150 a half lamb. If you get the full lamb you can even have the pelt which is a steal. I believe they will end up with 40-50 pound carcasses in the fall, though I need to do more research, but I think we are talking 35-40 pounds of meat, perhaps 50. I might have to charge a bit more if it's 50.

Icelandic sheep are awesome. They were brought to iceland 1000 years ago by Vikings. They are not related to any modern sheep breeds. They are the most primitive commercial sheep breed, the best for grass fed (no grain in iceland, icelandic sheep have larger rumens). They have the best flavored meat of any breed, perhaps of any commonly eaten species of animal, they really are up on top. They are triple purpose, have two kinds of wool, very valuable pelts and wool that is great for felting, milk and meat. They don't require the inhumane practice of tail docking which most breeds supposedly require. Beautiful animals.



If you are interested let me know!

100 acres... fencing, pay, livestock, excellent pristine location! People looking for the good life, hit me up! Hoping to get some help planting a garden and such thing spring. Whatevs. Peace!

French gourmets won't give up on horsemeat

Haha, I got a kick out of this one.

Ted Talks just hosted Alan Savory and he did a 20 minute piece about how grass fed, holistically managed livestock can reverse desertification and climate change!

http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change.html

I have owned his books for over a year now. Skimmed through them but haven't really totally plowed into it yet. It's thiiiick and hard to wrap my mind around, it also doesn't help that he is African and has a more intelligent way of using the english language such that my poor unintelligent American brain has to re-read half of the paragraphs. But I did read at least half of it and am starting to wrap my brain around it and I definitely got my head around it. The really tricky part for me is all the record keeping they do, it's practically mind boggling. It's a real textbook. Holistic management, a new framework for decision making.

What's great is that if this catches on, basically there would be surplus meat for humanity, eating healthy would be cheaper than eating grains. Imagine a world like that? The only problem is, how to stop ourselves from breeding like bunnies thereafter?

I'm not sure I have read many people talking about this subject on this forum. I think it is incredibly important.

All life came from the oceans. They are vast reserves of the brine that spawned life, compared to the limited life recourses us landlubbers have at our disposal. Our blood mineral composition is close to identical to ocean brine, as is the blood of all animals.

I have read the point made that oceanic fish are healthier and more vibrant than freshwater fish and that they are much less likely to succumb to disease. Also it is seldom argued that freshwater fish are healthier than sea fish. Sea foods are commonly referenced as being some of the healthiest of all foods.

Like I said, life was spawned in the oceans or rather, back then, "the ocean", as it could very well be looked at today. But it wasn't simply fungus, animals and plants evolving to live on land that caused the verdant land we have today, it was actually the migration of ocean life onto land, via transportation up river and the consumption there of by predators. I have read estimates that the volume of salmon in the US coming up river was equal in nutrient value to 1/3 the amount of chemical fertilizers used in the US every year.

And then! Couple that with the knowledge that millions of years ago (can't remember exactly when but after the dinosaurs died out), the earth supported 6 times the amount of biomass (life) on land than it does today.

Finally, one has to question the quality of the soil. Man isn't the only thing that is hard on soil. The other thing is time. If I remember correctly the Appalachian mountain range is the oldest in the world. It's been rained on for so long that the soil has inherited a low cation exchange. High cation exchange is what promotes the most verdant vegetative growth and in turn the healthiest, shiniest herbivores and predators that feed off of them.

Chemical fertilizer harms the soil in a similar way to time and rain, but it's more like 1000 times as fast!

Also, on another topic but worth mentioning. The age that we slaughter modern farmed animals is a very new thing, less than 100 years old. Beef used to be 4-5 years old. Porkers were raised to 400 pounds or more. The average chicken in a pot wasn't no spring chicken! It was a spent hen!
The greeks preference was for a 5 year old bull. Native Americans hunted the biggest, oldest bucks and bulls they could find. They ate the tough parts and it wasn't uncommon to leave behind the tender pieces of meat.



Just some chuck roast for y'all to grind up into hamburger and add to your personal diet dictionaries.

I think some of this stuff is key. Especially since man has such an intrinsic and historical relationship with the sea.

Chew on some high meat and stew on that one for a minute folks. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the next step to be taken for those diligent raw dieters to surpass the sound barrier in age prevention and reversal.

Personally all sorts of seafood are about my favorites.... though I might be saying that cause I haven't had hardly much in so long.

I have been in stasis for the past year and a third. Slam jammed by calamity after calamity.

Now I have a plan lined up and just in case, a backup plan.

I am moving into the proverbial wilderness, in one of the least populated areas of the lower peninsula of Michigan.

6 cows, 16 goats are going with me, hoping to get into some icelandic sheep after I settle.

Will have a 3 bedroom apartment and 100 acres to romp on.

I am going with the animals and my lonesome, I remember quite a few people here were interested in my projects, so if anyone is interested in helping out or whatev hit me up.

Northern Michigan.

From what I understand there is no danger of fracking happening anywhere near by.

Well, I don't know when people started aging beef or rather, calling it aged beef. They have probably been aging beef for a long long time. But I bet whatcha don't know is that before the great depression, Americans ate another kind of "aged beef". Back then, local cow country fare was an old cow that had failed to have a calf and got fat. City beef were steers that were shipped by rail and often driven hundreds if not thousands of miles. These steers were allowed to graze on their journey and it was often planned that they would gain in weight on the trip, especially if the reason for the drive happened to be a bad drought.

I read all this in Ben Green's book "Wild Cow Tails". He claimed that such beef was tougher, but better flavored and gave more energy to work through the day. He said when he was little it was his job to go every morning to the general store and buy a steak for every member of the family for breakfast. He also claimed that the switch was made because of cheap corn, because people no longer had the money to age beef that long and because most people were riding around in cars by then so didn't have to work as hard and didn't think to complain. Their next generation grew up never tasting the taste of the previous generation and thus grew up not knowing what they were missing. Now Americans have a taste for juicier, paler, tasteless and mushy corn fed beef.

The Native Americans tried to kill and eat the biggest bucks, bull moose, elk and bison. Remember Ajonus said they ate tougher cuts? They killed the toughest critters they could. Similar to the Greeks whose preference was for 5 year old bull meat.

I definitely prefer tough shank cuts, neck muscle, organs and fat to the rest of an animal. I prefer older, darker meat animals.

How about you?