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 29! we aren’t shipping this coming week due to the thanksgiving holiday!

Place your order by Sunday at midnight on the 28th to get it shipped on our next shipping day.

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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

We had a few lovely rain and snow events this week. You’d think I’d reserve the word “lovely” for those glorious days of deep azure blue with long shadowed light typical of fall in our high mountain valley, but the fact of the matter is that our hearts fairly ache for the land. 

This, our driest year ever, needs recovering from. It’ll take several winters of deep snow and quite a few fall and spring rains to recover our low ground-water reserves.

But don’t despair, dear reader.  There is still hope, and it is found in the living soil.  I just finished calculation of our hay and pasture yields over the past 10 years. The surprising truth is that despite the drought, we were up 20% from last year and 50% from 10 years ago.

How can this be possible? Our soil testing program gave us the answer; it turns out that because of our abundant soil biology, the sponge of that matrix held enough water to fuel the growth of more grass than ever before–because the heat of our hotter than ever summer made the processes of plant and soil biota fast-track more than ever before. Our soil measurements showed that our living soils held as much as 5 times more water than other grasslands in our valley.

Where you have heat and sun, plants will respond in spades, provided they have enough water.  
And we had enough water–held captive by abundantly living soil. Exciting stuff. Who knew? Drought resistance sponsored by organisms we can’t even see!  -Glenn 

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

“If all agricultural, garden and public lands were a net sink for carbon we could easily drawdown sufficient CO2 to counter emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.”

―Australian Soil Scientist and Regenerative Agriculture Expert Dr. Christine Jones

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This Week’s Story From the Ranch: The Way of Human, Horse, and Hay

“Pet.” I looked at her as I spoke, and the mare’s ears rotated back as she heard her name. In response, the big Belgian leaned forward into the great leather collar, conveying true horse power to the thick cowhide tugs behind her. There was a brief jingle at the beginning of the pull, but now that was silenced as all was taut and unwavering. The doubletree chains glistened in the high noon sun as if they were magically transformed to solid steel, humbled thereto by the sheer magnificence of draft horse power.

Pat was her equine partner, on the left side of the buck rake, and I saw her eyes and ears flick back in attentiveness–but not in movement. They knew their names, despite being pretty green at the rake, and Pet moved on, while Pat stood, a little nervously treading the ground, alternating her massive hooves in place as I held her with a gentle but steady hold on the snaffle bit.

The loaded rake responded to Pet’s slow walk, and began a wide arc around the pivot of Pat. The two horses were oddly about 12 feet apart, separated by the long wooden teeth of the rake itself. It could hardly be called a rake, as it had no tines pointed to the ground. Instead, it was armed with about 15 tines of peeled and pencil-point sharpened lodgepole pine tree trunks, each about 2 to 3 inches in diameter, and about 10 feet in length, laid out in parallel, emanating from a common wooden frame. Most of the odd contraption was made of pine and fir wood from the local hills, fit together with a few key pieces of iron and steel hardware bought at the feed store in a buckrake kit a short 70 or so years prior.

Click below to read the rest on our blog!

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Featured Weekly Cuts

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 this coming Monday or the Monday right before Christmas. This means 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!)

That’s Stew the nearly black border pup, in his favorite spot riding on the ATV…even if that ATV is currently non-functional. He, Annie, and Linnaea towed it out of the field with the truck there so we could fix it and get it going again!

That’s Maddy and Linnaea there just after putting up a new hotwire paddock for the cattle this afternoon. Though the grass has started to brown with the arrival of frosts and even a bit of snow, it is still packed with the nutrients of captured summer sunlight. We’ll continue to graze even into December, until snow settles onto the ground and it’s time to start feeding hay!

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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!