Scroll down for Glenn’s thoughts on the mRNA vaccine and updates from the ranch this week!

A QUICK SUMMARY OF THIS WEEK’S FEATURED CUTS:

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This week on the ranch…

Melanie captured some beautiful photos while out looking over some of the horses this week. The winter light makes for some beautiful imagery, and she has the eye and skill to capture it well. In her words, “Winter is long, and sometimes hard. But the beauty we see in this wintry landscape in every day sometimes stops us in our tracks.”

Montana, one of our summer range riders from the 2021 season returned recently to work for us at our new (to us) ranch in the Lemhi valley. Because that property was primarily used to grow potatoes, there is very little infrastructure designed for livestock. Montana has been helping out with a lot of new jack fence construction. There won’t be a shortage to build in the coming weeks, and winter is the time to do it.

Glenn and daughters Melanie and Linnaea traveled to North Dakota and Montana recently to meet with members of the Rancher Stewardship Alliance and attend the annual North Dakota Grazing Lands Coalition Winter Conference. There, Glenn spoke concerning ranching resilience – something that is very relevant throughout the industry where so many owners are subdividing or selling. They returned with a sense of community, despite the geographical difference.

Montana snapped this photo over in the Lemhi’s of some of the herd that is wintering there. They are well prepped for the snow that’s been falling, though it falls on their backs their thick winter coats keep them warm.

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Quote of the Week

“Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”

—Theodore Roosevelt

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Dear Friends

When ranching, we often think that in the winter, we’ll have time to pick up all the pieces of stuff we didn’t get done during the year. For 30 years I have fallen into that thinking trap, and I’m now at a point in life where I need to get real or maybe make some changes!

First, the weather often comes waltzing in unannounced, and pickups don’t start, and water freezes, and the cattle might need us to provide a strategy to deal with wind. Watching the weather forecast certainly helps, but chaos strikes hard in winter.

Then, we start working through the piles of stuff we left for the winter months. There’s a lot. I finally got back to my organic inspector today. He found some inconsistencies in my maps, and that they did not correctly delineate and describe our buffering procedures along the neighbor’s non-organic ground to ensure that we have no contamination from his commercial alfalfa field. He probably spreads granular chemical fertilizer on it, and I needed to show that we had an ungrazed buffer of at least 10 feet along this obscure piece of fenceline.

Each piece of fence out of the sixty plus miles of boundary fence that we operate in is accounted for. This particular piece is only about 100 feet long where we contact his operation. My inspector (a typical one in terms of their questions) just needed to know we had it handled (we did) through documentation. I thought for a minute about all those people who say that organic certification isn’t worth the paper it is printed on.

Two words come to mind: ignorant and/or delusional. They have absolutely no idea what we do to be organic, thereby ensuring that your food has absolutely no contamination from any kind of synthetic chemical residue.

Then, it seems like other folks find themselves surrounded by unanswered questions that surge through the media. And we start getting a deluge of something they are reading or hearing about. And it’s not like they are talking about the Kardashians or something; they are genuinely concerned. This month, it’s about mRNA vaccine technology being manufactured for livestock use.

It’s a completely valid concern. So there is no story on Organic Beef Matters this week. Instead, I’ve written about our response to this new vaccine technology. We’ve certainly been thinking about it. It’s important, and relevant. I hope you find it interesting! I certainly do!

Happy Trails,

Glenn

Read 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.

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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.