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: “Depleted Soils on the High Plains”

This Week’s Store Update & Coupons

NEXT SHIPPING DAY: Monday, March 18!

What’s In Stock

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

Some steaks + roasts
Ground beef
A few 16ths!
Lots of salmon still in
Cheese still in
We also listed 4 quarter beeves today that are available at the link below!

This week’s coupon cuts

We are unfortunately too low on inventory right now to run a weekend flash deal, and our other coupon cuts for the week have sold out. We restock next week, so stay tuned for coupons then!

Get this week’s coupon codes + 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…

Melanie captured this shot a few days ago of clouds settling over May Mountain. The weather has been unpredictable lately–some days have been warm and sunny and close to 60 degrees, while other days the wind picks up and blusters for a few hours. It does bring in some epic views, however!

Ranch hand Jed (in the plaid) spent several hours in open warfare this week…with a recalcitrant backhoe tire. We need our backhoe every day to load hay on our hay-wagon to bring it to the cattle. Jed spent most of a day this week working on this tire in order to get the backhoe back up and running to get hay to the cattle!

And here’s Wesley working on a different project in the shop. Some days ranching just looks like construction work! He and Linnaea spent a few hours fabricating a new gate to go inside of our big stock trailer. The gate enables us to separate livestock into different compartments when hauling in a trailer. In this case, we needed to put both pigs and cattle in the same trailer. Without separate compartments and a sturdy gate between them, the cattle would step on the pigs. The gate the crew built into the trailer held up and kept both bovine & porcine safe (and separate) during the ride!

Here they are wrapping up after dark with their trailer gate project. The boards on the side of the gate are there to prevent any cattle from getting a leg stuck in the gate panels.

A little flash flood came through the ranch this week! There is a creek up in the hills above our ranch that doesn’t always run, but occasionally fills with sudden bursts of spring snowmelt or rain. Several years ago, we moved some ground around on the ranch to build this hilly, winding channel to catch and absorb these sudden bursts of water in order to prevent the water from flooding onto our fields and damaging the ground there. We make sure to limit grazing in this spot so that we always have root systems and aboveground grass here to help control the water and prevent erosion. Managing our land comes down to creating systems that are resilient even under extreme conditions. Whether it’s floods like this or the 100-year drought we had two years ago, our land & soils should have the capacity to absorb occasional shocks to the system.

Photo series: testing hay for nitrates

Annie and Linnaea tested some hay for nitrate levels yesterday! High nitrate feed can cause a mama cow to abort a calf, so it’s important for us to test nitrate levels before feeding hay to the cow herd. For hay that shows a high percentage of nitrates in our test, we ensure that hay is only a small portion of the mix we feed the mama cows in order to avoid any risk for them (and the calves inside of them that will be born in about 2 months)!

Linnaea here welding a hay probe to take a core sample out of a hay bale.

Here, Annie is drilling the probe into the bale. The probe is a pipe that will fill with hay to get a sample of the bale contents.

Annie labeling a sample! One sample is a mix of 20 bales from a given field so that we can get a good idea of the nitrate contents of each field.

Above are two photos showing our lab results from 2 different samples (2 different hay fields). The pinker the color, the higher the nitrate content. The blue dot bottle shows a baseline nitrate content that is dangerous for pregnant mama cows. As you can see, one of our samples is almost white and very low risk. The other sample is higher risk, so we’ll feed a lower percentage of that hay.

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

Quote of the Week

“Without the herbivore, grass is without value. Without the valuable cover of grass, the soil is without life. Without life, the terrestrial world becomes valueless and simply unhappy. The uniform diversity of the meadowland demonstrates that value co-creates the valuable via the tool of time. Time and value. Seeing and being. Grass is nothing at all. The community of grass is all.”

-Daniel Firth Griffith, Dark Cloud Country: The 4 Relationships of Regeneration

This week’s story: “Plain Dirt on the High Plains”

This is a story Glenn wrote in March a couple of years ago about soils, gophers, and crop farming. Click below to read the whole story!

A faint trace of green covers the ranch on this lovely March day, a break in the spring storms that caroused through the Northern Rockies this past week. Despite the weather, Alderspring’s resident gophers (aka Columbian ground squirrels) showed up this week after being underground for nearly 7 months (what do they do down there for all of those 200+ days? They don’t have internet, iphone or a flatscreen). The fact is that our version of the prairie dog hibernates over half the year. Stacked up on top of each other like cordwood in their underground tunnels, their respiration rates slow to barely perceptible, and they live off the fat of their bodies for months…

Read the story below!

Click here to read this week’s story: “Plain Dirt on the High Plains”

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.

This kind of “cow flipping” isn’t something we’re willing to do. It simply goes against our standards.

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.

We know that the reason many of you order from us is because we’re small scale. It’s our family and a few ranch hands. We butcher our cattle at a small processor that only has capacity for about 80 head of cattle per week (compared to thousands at a big facility). This also limits our ability to expand, because they, too, are at capacity right now. We also raise only as many cattle as our pastures can support without degrading our soils. We’ve actually doubled our grass productivity through improving soils, which means our ranch now raises more cattle than it used to…but there is a limit to just how many animals this land supports. We’re also still small enough that Glenn personally looks at every single steak before he puts it in your box to ship to you. We feel that even that piece is important.

These factors are why you order from us! But it also means limitations!