Dear Friends and Partners,
Welcome to Alderspring’s weekend edition newsletter!
In this letter is Glenn’s weekly story, a suite of pics about work on the ranch this week, what’s happening in our freezer, and a recipe to cook!
Want to follow along more day-to-day? Find us on Instagram and Facebook.
And, as always, if you have any questions, observations, or comments, just shoot us an email to Kelsey at help[at]alderspring[dot]com (just fill in @ and a period where it says [at] and [dot]. That’s just to keep spammers away)!
Next shipping day is September 13!
Place your order by Sunday night on the 12th to get it shipped out on the 13th!
This Week on the Ranch
We’re finally at a place where all beeves graze in one big bunch, and it’s a relief. It’s so much easier to manage the entire herd in one mob. There’s nearly 600 head in their group, and we move them at least one time a day. They’re helping us practice a sort of mob grazing, where psychological effects of animals grazing proximal to eat other facilitate better and more even utilization of plants. In other words, they eat with less pickiness. And our plant communities benefit from it.
Quote of the Week
“I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.”
― E. B. White, Letters of E. B. White
Glenn’s Story This Week: On Making Horse Sense
The forest-fire-smoke-induced-orange ball of sun broke the jagged 10,000 foot spine of the Continental Divide as I braked my truck and trailer to a gentle stop. I had the big gooseneck with 8 horses on board, and I chose the open grassy spot next to a massive crack willow trunk. The spreading branches arched over the two track that ushered arrivals into the century old main ranch cabin, barn and outbuildings that made up the 1800s vintage Broken Pick Ranch.
Broken Pick is still owned by the Morton family, of Carmen, Idaho. Bob is a good friend of ours, dating back to our former days in Carmen in the 1980s. The district of Carmen is and always has been little more than a tiny log post office (zip code 83462) and a Grange Hall (of which Caryl and I are still members, even though now we live over an hour away)….
Featured Weekly Cuts
We’ve changed this section up a little. Rather than a bunch of different links to the stuff we talk about here, you can now find it all in one place in the web store for your convenience, so you don’t have to chase items around. Let us know if this makes things easier for you (you can comment at the bottom of this page on what you think of the new setup)!
A quick summary of this week’s deals (as always, only you newsletter readers have access to these discounts)!
- Specialty ground beef (ground brisket, chuck, and ground round!) using the code “korean NY“
- New york strip steaks! Just use the code “korean NY” to get the deal!
- Broth bones to stock up for some of those fall stews! Again, use “korean NY“
Remember, our inventories are VERY dynamic! Our goal is to turn it over 2 times a month to offer you the very freshest product right off of Alderspring’s pastures.
Recipe From the Ranch
How to make bone broth!
Here’s how Glenn likes to make a simple, gut healing, and flavorful bone broth from Alderspring bones!
Weekly Happenings: Photos from the Ranch
This Monday we brought the herd of range cattle from the certified organic lease property they’ve been grazing for the last few weeks back to Alderspring ranch headquarters. Here, daughter Annie is putting some air in the tires on the trailer before we head out!
Here’s Annie again, this time leading the charge as we head down the road with the cattle. It was about 3 miles from the lease pastures to the home ranch. The herd, used to following a rider on horseback, lined out nicely! The front riders (like Annie here) are also responsible for checking gates along the road and sometimes standing in gaps as the herd passes by.
Here’s Linnaea on Rip, one of the lease horses this summer, for his last ride before he went back to his owner. Rip, though only just over 3 years old, turned out to be quite a cool little horse! We’re sad to see the last of him.
Annie and Maddy (Maddy is riding Flint, her horse that she wrote about last week) bringing the cattle into the pasture at the end of the ride! They’re herding them across the field here to a nice break of fresh green grass before we all head back to unsaddle.
The herd just a few days later just before dawn breaks, content and full on green Alderspring pastures.
And that’s it for this week! Thanks again for reading and partnering in what we do!
Glenn, Caryl, cowgirls and cowboys at Alderspring
We’ve been crafting our pastured protein here in Idaho’s Rocky Mountains for nearly 30 years and delivering it direct to our partners for nearly as long. This is wild wellness, delivered from our ranch to your door.
Your partnership in Alderspring helps us maintain what is unique in today’s agricultural world; Alderspring is a Carbon NEGATIVE and Climate POSITIVE operation. We ran the numbers, and our cows help us capture more carbon in the ground each year on our irrigated pastures than we release!
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