Here’s the weekly roundup from Watson Farms and your direct connection to your farmer. Enjoy the latest edition of Pasture Posts! (Web versions of this newsletter can be found here on our website!)
Last week, we discussed how we view and deal with weeds in our pastures. This week, let’s look at the diversity in our pastures and the species that graze them and compare that to other types of agriculture.
Here’s the weekly roundup from Watson Farms and your direct connection to your farmer. We hope you all have a wonderful Fourth and take the time to be thankful that we are able to enjoy so many freedoms. Enjoy the latest edition of Pasture Posts!
At Watson Farms we use several different methods for weed control, none of which employ herbicides or chemicals.
First, we don’t define weeds the same way that many farmers might. We only consider a plant a weed when cattle show a complete refusal to eat it. When in a mob setting like our herd is, we find that cattle will actually eat many plants that others would consider weeds. And it’s not like they don’t have anything else to eat either. The fact is that they develop different tendencies when they are grazed in larger, tighter groups. And the end result is fewer undesirable species in our pastures.
Continue reading Pasture Posts #19Here’s the weekly roundup from Watson Farms and your direct connection to your farmer. Enjoy the latest edition of Pasture Posts!
The Ag and Art Tour was a great success! We saw nearly 200 people come through, and gave 5 tours during the day! Each tour lasted about 45 minutes and I (Matt) gave an informational overview of each enterprise on our farm as we visited the different animal groups. Alan, my father-in-law, was gracious enough to be our tractor driver while a team led by Kelly stayed back at the store to handle sign-in and store operations. It truly was a team effort!
In case you missed it or if you’re curious as to some of the questions that were asked on tours that you weren’t on, here’s a quick rundown of some of the conversations we had with various attendees (in no particular order).
Continue reading Pasture Posts #18Here’s the weekly roundup from Watson Farms and your direct connection to your farmer. We hope all the dads out there have a great Father’s Day! Enjoy the latest edition of Pasture Posts!
The Ag + Art Tour at our farm is Saturday, June 26! The time is 10am – 4pm. Just come to the farm (713 Colony Road, Chester, SC 29706) where we will be offering free tours every hour throughout the day.
It’s a great event for the whole family where we encourage questions and curiosity about how we produce, process and market pastured proteins. We always have great conversations on the tours so come on out and see us!
We will have a food truck as well as a ton of other vendors! Here’s a list:
Here’s the weekly roundup from Watson Farms and your direct connection to your farmer. Enjoy the latest edition of Pasture Posts!
Our discussion from last week centered around water that we pump; so this week let’s discuss the water that falls in the form of rain.
Much of our summer grass depends on timely rains in late-May through early-June. While we didn’t get many of these in May, we are better off in June so far. These early summer rains help to jumpstart a particular grass species that is key to our grass-fed beef: crabgrass. That’s right, common crabgrass that many people consider a weed we consider a great asset. But it does best when it has some heat and humidity mixed with a few rain showers, which more times than not is exactly what we get in South Carolina.
Here’s the weekly roundup from Watson Farms and your direct connection to your farmer. Enjoy the latest edition of Pasture Posts!
As we get in the summer routine here at Watson Farms, it’s hard to overstate how important water is to everything we do here. Every time we move a set of animals, the question at the top of our checklist is “do they have access to drinking water?”
Of all the equipment and infrastructure that is on our farm, it’s easy to see that things like ponds, wells, pipe and drinkers are among the most important. This is why over the last 15 years, we have laid thousands of feet of water line, and we’re not done! The goal is to have access to water in every possible paddock that we might create.
We think of water as the single most important nutrient that we provide for our livestock. Life, much less growth, cannot happen without it.
Water serves another critical purpose other than hydration, and that is cooling. There’s nothing that our pigs love more than to wallow in a puddle on a hot afternoon. Soon after that, they proceed to their second favorite activity: eating. By allowing them to cool off, we are allowing them to gain weight like they are genetically predisposed to do.
We also use water to provide some supplemental cooling for our broiler and layer chickens. Our pasture houses for our laying hens have been equipped with misting nozzles that are connected to the water supply in the field. We simply open a valve to charge the misting line while we gather eggs in the heat of the day. We run these misters periodically through the hot afternoons. This keeps the hens happy, healthy and producing eggs.
For the broiler chickens we mist them with a tank, nozzles, and pump attached to a tractor. We drive this rig around the birds throughout the hot afternoons, but only when the birds are big – within 2 weeks of processing. This is when they become especially susceptible to heat.
When we properly care for all the animals that we have the privilege of stewarding, they reward us with health and vitality which produces a meat product that we can feel good about marketing, and you can feel good about consuming.
Here’s the weekly roundup from Watson Farms and your direct connection to your farmer. Enjoy the latest edition of Pasture Posts!
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It’s estimated by the National Chicken Council that each American will consume on average 98 pounds of chicken in 2021. In 2001 that number was 77 pounds, and in 1981 it was just 49 pounds.
That’s a huge shift. Chicken cannot be ignored by any pasture based farm that wants to meet the full demand of consumers.
One reason consumption is so high is because chicken is relatively cheap in most grocery stores. This is due to the ability to mass produce these birds in confinement houses and process them in massive, centralized processing plants. Of course, it is increasingly evident how fragile these industrial systems are to things like disease – whether in the animals or the workers.
But for the ever growing number of wise, well-informed consumers who know the pitfalls of mass producing chicken, better practices exist in which they can be proud to support. Our farm uses these better methods and the video below illustrates this. Take a look!
Shoot an unboxing video just like this one of your next order! Tag us and use the hashtag #unboxingwatsonfarms where ever you upload your video! (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc.)
When you place your next order, remind us in the comments section that you uploaded an unboxing video, and we will include a whole chicken (under 4 pounds) in your order!
Continue reading Pasture Posts #14Would you like a free chicken in your next order? If so, then shoot your own unboxing video after you receive your next order. Then just share it to Facebook or Instagram and tag us! (As you place your next order please remind us in the comments that you shared an unboxing video.) Help us create some buzz!
Here’s an example!
We are in the midst of several projects here on the farm right now. The driving purpose behind any project that we undertake is to somehow better serve our customers. As a full-time farm family, we know that if we fail to serve our customers to the best of our ability, then we likely will fail in every other aspect of our farm business. In our eyes, our customers are our most valuable partner!
As we alluded to last week, we are excited to soon be offering the opportunity to shop through our inventory here at the farm. It will be small, but our new farm store will be complete with glass-front freezers and coolers where we can hopefully display and sell all of our available products for you to browse through. We also intend to extend our hours in order to offer more convenience for you. We hope to have it fully operational by the time of the Ag + Art Tour on June 26th! Stay tuned.
Here’s the weekly roundup from Watson Farms and your direct connection to your farmer. Enjoy the latest edition of Pasture Posts!
We are met with a certain “good problem” each year around this time: lots of fast growing grass! Our farm’s stocking capacity (the number of cattle that we have forage for) doubles during April and May when compared with the rest of the year. This happens despite April and May not being historically wet months. What is happening is that days are getting longer and temperatures are getting warmer. There is also usually sufficient soil moisture to support rapid plant growth. The grass detects this and does it’s best to put out a seed head as quickly as possible.
Our goal during this time is to “reset” the plant’s growth back to it’s adolescent stage where it can start over in its effort to capture as much solar energy as possible in order to develop its seed head yet again. The grass plant will generally grow back a little shorter after each grazing. We repeat this cycle of disturbance and rest or growth-pruning-regrowth throughout the year. The more cycles we can complete, the more solar energy we are turning into grass-fed beef!
Continue reading Pasture Posts #12