Dear Friends and Partners,

Welcome to Alderspring’s weekend edition newsletter! Thank you for partnering in what we do!

Below you can find beef discounts, Glenn’s weekly story, and lots of photos from the ranch this week!

Scroll down for this week’s story: “100 Days, 600 Miles”

Bulk beef + sockeye salmon back!

This Week’s Store Update & Coupons

NEXT SHIPPING DAY: Monday, April 29!

What’s In Stock

Beef was restocked earlier this week. Unfortunately, many cuts have already sold out, but we still have:

A few a la carte cuts
Bulk beef is fully restocked!
Lots of salmon still in
Cheese in stock!

This week’s coupon cuts

We’re unfortunately too low on stock to put any of our regular beef cuts on sale! We’ll have discounts again next week!

Get this week’s cuts + more here!

If you have any questions, observations, or comments, just send Kelsey an email at help[at]alderspring[dot]com.

Photos from the Ranch This Week…

This past Sunday we took a horseback ride up into the hills near the ranch, started a campfire, and grilled some hotdogs! Amid the busyness of springtime ranch work, it was nice to spend some time together as a family!

Here’s Annie feeding horses this week! These are all horses in training–many of them will be up on the range this summer herding cattle and will become solid and reliable mounts!

We’re feeding the cattle lately on a “stockpile pasture” we saved for this season. Stockpile is grass that was left standing going into winter. It’s not high in nutritional value, but with good hay fed with it, it makes for good feed for mama cows! This is a great pasture to graze while our other pastures are beginning to green up, because we can then keep cattle off that growing grass elsewhere on the ranch!

And here’s youngest of the Elzinga sisters, Maddy, with her gelding Flint. Maddy trained Flint herself a few years ago. He’s become a reliable and steady mount!

With springtime comes work like this! The crew has been hard at work all week digging this trench to replace an irrigation pipeline. It’s hard digging in rocky ground! Here, Maddy (photographed by Wesley), is going at it. Crew members Josh, Jed, Wesley, Annie, and Maddy have all put a lot of work into this job…but it’s almost done!

Want to follow along more day-to-day? Find us on Instagram and Facebook.

Quote of the Week

“We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

-Aldo Leopold

This week’s story: “100 days, 600 miles”

Dear Friends,

As spring slips in, there’s an almost imperceptible event happening in the granitic crags around our valley: the high mantle of perpetual seeming snow has started the slow migration upward. Its goal: the horizon; the sky itself.

I’ll admit–I’m not sad to see it go, especially because cloak of white is being replaced with girdle of green. It starts with us in the valley, and soon will race upwards to cover all.

What that means is that we’ll soon venture forth horseback into the backcountry on this season’s long grazing journey. I went back into the archives and found this story I wrote that I felt captured the essence of what that’s about. It was a reflection of summer, just as we were gathered up and beginning the trip back to our winter headquarters.

So come with me on that reflection, and share the anticipation of our journey. You see, it’s not only our story– it’s actually yours, as it is exactly where your food comes from. It may seem to be sort of unique that food has a story in this era of feedlots and factory food, but it wasn’t always so.

Because all food used to have a story. The hunter hunted it; the gatherer gathered it; the shepherd husbanded it; the gardener tended it. Each plant, each animal was raised with relationship to their raiser.

It’s not too late to go back.

Happy Trails.

Click here to read this week’s story: “100 Days, 600 miles”

And that’s it for this week!

Thanks again for 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.

Why is Inventory Low Lately?

Here’s where we’re at on the “low inventory” situation…and why it’s low in the first place! We know many of you have been with us for a long time and rely on us as your source of protein (and we’re so grateful)!

In the last few months, we’ve been hit by a lot of unexpected demand.

When it comes to raising beef, changes in demand can be very difficult to respond to quickly. It takes us 2-3 years to raise an animal to finish. That means we plan our inventory needs about 2 years in advance.

Many companies and producers we know of that sell direct-to-consumer respond to sudden increases in demand by buying outside cattle (often at sale barn auctions) and then selling that beef under their label. This is VERY common.

But this kind of “cow flipping” isn’t something we’re willing to do.

We know the entire history of every beef we sell. That’s important to us, and we know it’s important to you and part of why you trust us to raise your beef.

We’re working right now to gradually increase our available inventory to hopefully provide more beef! But at a certain point, we actually can’t expand further without compromising our standards.

We know that the reason many of you order from us is because we’re small scale. We butcher our cattle at a small processor that only does about 80 head of cattle per week (compared to thousands at a big facility). This also limits our capacity to expand, because they, too, are functioning at capacity right now. We also raise only as many cattle as our pastures can support without degrading our soils. And we’re still small enough that Glenn personally looks at every single steak before he puts it in your box to ship to you. These factors are why you order from us! But it also means occasional inventory limitations.