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.

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Next shipping day is Nov 15! This Will Be our Last Shipping Day before Thanksgiving!

Place your order by Sunday at midnight to stock up before we take a break from shipping…and to get a turkey in time for your Thanksgiving dinner!

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Looking for this week’s featured cuts? Head to the page below. Scroll on down for Glenn’s story and other newsletter stuff!

This week’s cuts include Rump and Chuck Roasts, New York Strips, and Ground Chuck! Also, we’ve added wild sockeye salmon and some Thanksgiving turkeys to the store!

This Week on the Ranch

The pastures get bigger…and bigger as the beeves work through their lovely fall grass. Grass growth has really fallen flat with the nights hitting the teens, and yet, there is still a lot of green to be had.

I think it’s one of the best falls we’ve ever seen. Our grass is holding up well, and we haven’t cracked the hay pile yet, and that means, we are saving a lot on forage! We’re a little less freaked out about hay prices (we buy about half of our hay from a partner organic ranch in the next valley), and hay is double what it has been, and it is literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in expense this year.

But every day we graze, we save a little on that cost. And we’re so grateful.

Snow is hitting the mountain peaks hard this week; Melanie and I passed through a blizzard in the central highlands on the way to Boise on Tuesday, but it was so beautiful. We are looking forward to winter work of feeding, and winter fun on skis, but for now, we’ll enjoy grazing the fine green of fall while we can!

Here are some of those turkeys we’ll talk about later, out foraging on pastures on the A+ Ranch! This turkey is certified organic and raised free range as turkeys should be!

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Quote of the Week

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”

―Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Caryl and Glenn can so relate to this one!)

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This Week’s Story From the Ranch: When Horse Runs Rogue

Glenn wrote part of this story about 6 years ago, and its relevance comes real for us today, as we are currently trying to find a nice feeding team to replace the ones that are now retired. The drafts we have on the ranch today are older, and deservedly placed into retirement. Reading this article again reminds us that they are not without commitment, and when we invite them to Alderspring, it’s a relationship always that requires our time…and love.

The horses have run ranch-rampant. But they’re on vacation at this time of year. They’ve put their time in on the range over the summer season. There, they worked off fat and built muscle mass from carry rider and camp gear over nearly a 1000 miles during the grazing tour. But that’s all over; shoes are off, and hair grown thick. We still use them to gather cattle on sort days and feed hay with the massive drafts.

The horse cavvy ranges over 100s of acres on the ranch. Sometimes, at night when the moon is bright like it was last night, I can hear the rustle and thump of horses running through deep snow. Was it a lion that they spotted? A wolf on the big meadows? Only they could tell. They can feed themselves though the white, so maybe they were just moving briskly off to new grass….

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Featured Weekly Cuts

That’s wild sockeye salmon above, sustainably caught up in the waters of Bristol Bay, Alaska by our friends at Kwee-Jack Fish. We’re so excited to now be offering this salmon on our store (after literally years of talking and testing with the folks at Kwee-Jack)! You can find it via the link below!

And then…THE HOLIDAY SCHEDULE!

If you’re thinking of giving Alderspring as a gift this year or just want to know when those shipping days will be over the next two months so you can get your beef when you need it, here are the details!

• We will not be shipping on the Mondays before both Thanksgiving and Christmas. Your deadline to get an order before Thanksgiving is this Sunday the 14th at midnight! Your last chance to get a gift order shipped before Christmas is to place your order by December 12!
• We will be switching to 2nd Day Air shipping only starting after Thanksgiving and until the 1st of the year. This is to make sure your order gets to you quickly and still frozen even during typical UPS holiday delays. If you’d like to order with regular shipping rates, this week is your last opportunity until January 1st.

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.

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Weekly Happenings: Photos from the Ranch (and Beyond!)

This week, three of the girls (Annie, Becky, and Linnaea) returned from a 2-week trip down the East Coast! They’re glad to be back in the swing of ranch life now, but they certainly enjoyed exploring some different country & culture. Below is a shot of Annie and Becky overlooking the view from the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina. We just don’t get that kind of color out here (the photo really doesn’t do it justice)!

And shown below are Annie and Becky with good friend Matt (and range rider last summer). Matt showed them the sights in South Carolina, including this giant Live Oak tree near Charleston. Known as the “Angel Oak,” it’s considered to be the largest live oak tree east of the Mississippi.

While the girls were off traveling, work on the ranch must go on! Below, Jeremiah and Maddy are shown sorting for fat and finished beeves this week. After gathering nearly 300 head in the corrals, they get in close for a horseback height view at fat deposition and with an experienced eye.

Below, these wild bighorn sheep have made themselves known time and time again down valley from us. They’re always turning heads of even the valley residents with their massive sets of horns. Glenn grabbed this pic near the ranch on Thursday.

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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

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!