Dear Friends and Partners,
Welcome to Alderspring’s longer “weekend edition! Here, we have stories, quips, deals, and pics from life on the ranch this week.is letter is Glenn’s weekly story, a suite of pics about work on the ranch this week, and what’s happening in our freezer!
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.
Next shipping day is Oct 25!
Place your order by Sunday at midnight to get it shipped out on Monday!
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 ribeye, ground beef and Wild Hunter pet provisions! Also, lamb and chicken are both back in!!!
This Week on the Ranch
We’re having a lovely fall here. Days often get up toward 70 degrees; nights hover around freezing. The beeves are hairing up nicely with their winter coats, and contentedly graze pastures ever increasing in size, as rapid grass growth is finally slowing down, and the likelihood of “regrazing” growing grass becomes less and less. It frees us from having to build “backfences” while practicing our rotational grazing scenario. Grass still gathers sunlight and builds root reserves, but rarely grows significantly above ground after October 15 at our latitude and high elevation.
It’s beautiful seeing the beeves sprinkled like light pepper across the big green meadows of the ranch. They just fan out and pick until they have a belly full, and I’m watching some of the nicest beeves I believe we’ve ever had.
But I probably say that every year. And that is OK; it’s a lovely situation to be grateful every year, especially in this year, the worst drought year our state has ever seen, at least in recorded numbers. But resilience through regeneration of our living soil matrix has carried us sweetly into a coming winter, making it the most productive year we’ve ever had.
-Glenn
Quote of the Week
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
―F. Scott Fitzgerald
When King quits crown
It’s leaning toward winter…slowly. Today was the low 70s, and lovely, but I think I can smell change in the air. The aspens around the house are brilliant. The geese are practicing for the big trip. The sandhill cranes have already slipped silently away.
It’s time to think about how we’ll fare through the winter. Jeremiah is working on old reliable—the ancient 580B Case backhoe we still run. It is as old as I am (nigh 60 years old), and I think it might have more steel from us welding on it than what came out of the factory in ’63. We just fire up the welder, strike an arc, and let ‘er rip, laying new steel on frame members that tire with age.
But what we really need right now is another draft horse team to pull the wagons full of hay to our wintering beeves come January when diesel fuel turns to jelly and engines freeze. The horses always start, with steam rising from their thick coats soon after we set to work. They enjoy it, I think, especially when it’s brisk out, and they get first dibs on that green grass hay.
We have a shot at a big black team from southern Idaho, we hope. We’ve had a few of our draft horses pass away in recent years. Just old age—long after we retired them. We miss them as friends and partners in the work at hand.
Here’s a story I put out there a couple of years ago—a sort of memorial to one of my favorites, Jingle. Jing’s sweetheart partner, Belle, still hangs on here at the ranch. She’s on permanent retirement, and lives a peaceful life with the Alderspring horse remuda.
Featured Weekly Cuts
A quick summary of this week’s deals
(As always, only you newsletter readers have access to these discounts)!
This week you can get 10% off on both the following cuts:
- The popular 3F package, and its cousin, the Steak Special, are both back in!
- Regular Ribeyes are on sale (we almost never put these on sale!)
- Wild Hunter, the perfect blend for pets (and even for humans, too), is 10% off
- Chorizo sausages pack just the right amount of punch…and you can get them at 10% off this week!
Also note: Some chicken and most lamb cuts are both still in stock!
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.
Weekly Happenings: Photos from the Ranch
This week, we brought the cattle on the 3 mile journey from a ranch near the home ranch that we’re leasing. The ranch is certified organic and run by Jeremiah, longtime Alderspring hand, and we’re working on using our cattle to add some organic matter to the soil over there! However, our grazing there was done, and it was time to make the trek to the home ranch to the fall grass we had ready for the herd here!
Above is Jeremiah, with his partners Pal and Ted, gathering up the herd for the big move! You see there is still plenty of grass on the ground, even though it has been grazed. This is our goal going in to winter, because it means the ground is covered and protected and soil that is protected is soil that doesn’t blow away or flood away in spring runoff!
Here are youngest daughter Maddy and Jeremiah ready to go!
On the way to the home ranch! We take the cattle up this dirt road that goes along the foot of the mountains here and above the ranches in the valley bottom. It’s easier than taking the main road that cuts directly through the bottom of the valley, because there are lots of cars and driveways along that road that make herding cows complicated. Here, it’s pretty simple and the herd knows where to go!
Here’s Maddy again, bringing up the rear! There were only 3 riders (Jeremiah, Maddy, and 3rd daughter Linnaea) on this ride, so they had to make sure to be in the right place at the right time. Usually you’ll have 1-2 riders in the back bringing up drag, and 1-2 riders either in the front leading the herd or along the flanks. You go wherever you needed, and it’s important to watch carefully for potential problems so you can be proactive and in the right place at the right time! Herding cattle is all about looking ahead for potential issues (a hole in the barbed wire fence, a gate that’s open, etc) and being ready before they happen!
And there they are, turned out happily on that fall grass! And that is the Buster Border-Pup in the foreground, ensuring that they settle.
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!
Leave a Reply