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This week on the ranch…

There they are, last week’s beef packing crew lined up outside of our shipping warehouse after a great day of packing beef to send out to you all! In the middle, Glenn is holding a package of ground beef. The unique thing about this package is that it was our last pound of ground beef! We sold out of almost everything last week, including all ground beef except this final pound. Thankfully we’re back in stock now!

Unfortunately, Stew the border collie (making a dive here to lick Brittany’s face) had to stay outside in the nearby yard during shipping!

Here’s the range crew last week, lining the herd out for home. The last leg of the journey home from the range involves a walk along the steep cliffs of the Salmon River. We take the pressure off on this stretch and let the cattle pick their own way and spread out so that no one gets shoved or pushed off the edge by too much crowding.

After the cliff road, it’s only a few miles further down a stretch of Highway 93 and this little paved backroad that goes up to the ranch. Luckily the beeves always cover this stretch quickly; the ones who have done this before know they are heading home and green pastures lie ahead.

There’s Linnaea, watching the mob of happy grazers as they spread out on home pastures.

And home pastures is where they’ve been grazing now for the last several days. Even as we miss the range, the beeves are quite content. These fall pastures are some of our best of the year because they are rich with a summer’s worth of built-up nutrients.

Linnaea took this while up on the range retaking some “photopoints” from previous years this week. A “photopoint” is just what it sounds like–a set of photos taken at a specific GPS point that you can return to year after year and see changes over time. While on her hike, she also took some photos of the stream she was walking alongside. We’ve rested (avoided any grazing in) this stream for 9 years now in order to allow it to regenerate. As you can see, it is now a healthy-looking riparian area with a wide diversity of plant life present.

Ranch hand Rachel took this photo recently of the mama cows just after hitting a new break of grass. They are quite fat and happy out here, even while supporting a baby. You can see the calf closest to the camera is actually nursing as mom grazes (a common sight out in the cow pasture). Good nutrients in our grass means good milk and a healthy calf. Sickness among calves is quite common on many ranchers, but we’ve been blessed this year to have only 4 cases of pneumonia (usually caused by sudden changes in weather).

We think there are a few reasons the calves are so healthy. First, we avoid any stress for them whatsoever for their first month after birth. We leave them alone as much as we can, and we don’t tag the calves until they are at least a month old except in special cases. Tagging isn’t very painful for a calf, but it does cause stress and separation from the mama cow that can lead to sickness. Eventually putting a tag in is important because the number on the tag helps us keep track of each animal, but it isn’t necessary to do it immediately after birth. Second, we keep them on one pasture for a while after they are first born even if it means that the pasture gets overgrazed a bit, because moving to a new pasture exposes the calf to new bacteria and diseases that might not have been present on the old pasture. And third, we make sure there is no mud whatsoever in a pasture. Mud ends up full of festering bacteria, and calves will sometimes try to drink from mudholes if they don’t realize there is better water available. Between these three factors, this year’s calves are thriving out there!

And here’s a photo of one of our tester steaks this week (we test a NY strip from every beef to make sure each beef meets our quality standards)! Right after that, a graphic highlighting nutrients found in Alderspring beef compared to grain fed beef. This data comes from a study from Dr. Stephen Van Vliet comparing Alderspring grass fed beef with grain fed. The link there leads to a recent podcast episode with Dr. Van Vliet. If you’d like to skip to the part about Alderspring, Dr. Van Vliet describes his visit to Alderspring at minute 35:33 of the episode.

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Dear Friends,

Caryl and I watched an indie movie last week that was filmed on location in Italy. Many scenes were shot in piazzas (plazas), bustling with people. Hundreds of ‘extras’ were captured in the background of the film, simply going about their business. And after seeing multitudes of these folks captured near and far by the cameras, we both noticed that not a single obese person was among them.

Was there a crew filtering the overweight people out from the thousands in the camera view? Pretty unlikely. I asked daughter Linnaea about it. She and her sister Annie backpacked in Italy for part of last fall, just staying in Airbnbs and hiking around.

“Most of them actually are that healthy-looking,” she said. She went on to say that if there was an overweight person on the highways and byways of Italy, she and Annie found that by listening to their accents as they passed that they were almost always American.

Yesterday, Caryl and I had to pick up some building materials about 3 hours away in Idaho Falls. It’s one of our nearest moderate-sized cities (population 66K), and it struck us just how overweight Americans were. We agreed that it appeared as though it was around 60 percent…

Continue reading the story on our blog by clicking below!

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And that’s it for this week!

Thanks again for partnering in what we do!

Glenn, Caryl, cowgirls and cowboys at Alderspring.

L-R: Evan, Webb, Annie (6th daughter), Melanie (oldest daughter), and Jed.

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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 with alderspring directly supports our mission to improve soil health, wildlife habitat, and animal and human wellness through regenerative ranching practices.

Here’s what we’ve accomplished with your help & support in just the last 12 years!