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This Week’s Story: How to Capture Wild Protein

Ted, my older rancher-turned-butcher friend, handed me the white package, as we wrapped up business in his spotless cutting shop. His apron still had some telltale marks of his trade, the color red slightly Jackson Pollock-ed across the canvas of his white cotton frontispiece…..

Store News

Next Shipping Date: Monday, October 27th

We generally ship every Monday, holiday weeks excepting (see calendar). You’ll get a tracking number when we ship your order. UPS may initially show an extra day of transit time, but will correct late Monday night when orders hit the Salt Lake hub.

Next Restock Date: Wednesday, october 29th

We restock every Wednesday and send out a sale flyer on Wednesday in the early evening with the week’s deals.

This Week’s Reader-Only Deals

Use the code “ALLSIXTEENTHS” to get 5% off all sixteenths.

To access these sale items, and for more deals and products, you can click the button below!

Ranch News

 The sun’s going down, but that doesn’t mean that the beeves quit grazing. Fall grass is the most powerful grass of the year. Lowered plant growth from cool night temps and our abundant sunshine at high altitude leave a surplus of sugar in the stems, and the beeves know it! We feed them a little bit of hay to slow them down in grass consumption. Too much, and it just goes right thru! Photo credit Glenn Elzinga.

This is a cell phone pic that Glenn took of his refractometer gauge that measures brix, or the solute concentration of plant sap. Fruit, vegetable growers, beermakers and wine makers all use this device to measure the percent sugar concentration. This is the brix 2 days ago of pure orchardgrass. It’s an extremely high grass measurement, probably unheard of in the grazing world. For comparison, blueberries average around a 15. Sweet corn kernels at the peak of ripeness average around a 14, and at the very highest go 22. That means that Alderspring’s grasses are like sugar cane sweet, a testament to the power of a high altitude sun and biologically dense soils–full of diversity and quantity of microbial species. Photo credit Glenn Elzinga.

Proof of Life of Bonnie and Clyde. They are Glenn’s two stalwart border collies, now getting older. They are passed out on the floor of his pickup on the way to Alderspring North to see how Rebecca and Scott are doing on the Alderspring cowherd.  Photo credit Glenn Elzinga.

It is Alderspring North–the Tendoy Ranch, along the Continental Divide and the Montana border. As many of you have been following us, you’ll probably recall that this place was once a bare-dirt run down potato farm. Potatoes can be a very extractive form of agriculture, especially when farming conventionally (Glenn knows several organic tater farmers who maintain plant cover on healthy soils). Chemical ag dominates in spuds. Anyway, it took 5 years, but soil biology is finally restored and after 3 years of cover crops, perennial plants that Caryl put in a seed mix finally are really rocking. Some of those grasses are up to Glenn’s eye level (over 6 feet!). Photo credit Glenn Elzinga.

Annie is laughing because the old freezer is on rollers–old fenceposts–and slowly making its way out of Aldersprng’s long term warehouse rental after staying below -10 degrees F for 20 years. We moved it out like the Egyptians moved the pyramid stones…inches at a time (it weighs several tons, even empty). Glenn happily sold the old walk-in Freeze behemoth on Facebook Classifieds to someone just down the road for an undisclosed amount of Ben Franklins. We are so grateful to be in our new space. It is squeaky clean and brightly lit! Photo credit Glenn Elzinga.

We ended up moving the beast of a freezer largely by hand. Here’s Wesley, Josh and Aaron lifting it inch by inch using jacks and old fashioned leverage, getting ready to load it on our cargo trailer. Photo credit Glenn Elzinga.

Glenn and Caryl’s daughters were brought up on the range, horseback, herding cattle, stretching wire on the home ranch, running bands of goats and sheep, and one time a week, fulfilling orders and building boxes for the webstore biz. The most regular and time consuming task was simply building boxes. They’d have loud music on and build them as fast as they could, because they were paid sometimes by the piece and then by the hour, once they became proficient. They started this work as soon as they could get on a horse. Here is the hour time keeping that the youngest daughters kept as a log for some of their work. They were between 8 and 12–and you can tell, sometimes the days got long. Look at the bottom ones on the right on the line below “end time…NEVER!” It was a beautiful time in the business! Photo credit Glenn Elzinga.

The grass is deep. It is often deeper than a cow’s back, and their calves are often lost in it. They are all reaching for the “ice cream” first–in the green understory. It will give them enough protein to digest the coarse stuff above, and still raise a calf with her own milk. It’s on the Tendoy Ranch, run by Scott and Rebecca. Interesting point: Glenn and Caryl’s very first ranch, over 30 years ago, was just below those distant cottonwood trees on the far left. Photo credit Glenn Elzinga. 

Caryl and Glenn are out on the high ranges one more time before winter hits. The white fiberglass stake represents a water valve; they all need shut off and drained on their 23 miles of underground pipelines before winter. There are many, and most of them can only be reached by dirt bike and on foot.  Photo credit Glenn Elzinga.

It’s a beautiful time of year. It’s “the Big House,” Glenn and Caryl’s homestead log home that they built (and are still building!!!) to raise 7 daughters in. They are all grown up now, and most are married. The house served them well–all of the daughters had a hand in the home raising, and rather than just a house, they built memories. Now, they have big family dinners in the home, and often seat over 30 people for holidays and celebrations. Caryl always wanted more space after living for 20 years with many kids in tiny ranch shacks that averaged 900 square feet! Photo credit Glenn Elzinga.

Your purchase supports our regenerative work. For more information go to https://www.alderspring.com/regenerative/.