Tasty Happenings: Stories from our farm to your table.

WHY IS DIRT IMPORTANT?

Sustainability or organic?

Did you ever think how important dirt is in our lives?  Well if you haven’t let us look at that subject today.  Everything that lives came from the soil, GOD took a handful of earth and breathed life into it and it became man.  Our sustenance comes from the soil that plants grow in, animals eat plants, people eat plants and animals.  So soil is our very existence.

Now here comes the hard part our soils are becoming depleted due to mono cropping, that is growing the same crop year after year.  We use more and more chemicals on our soil to maintain fertility so our food is becoming more depleted in nutrients.  We continue to grow bulk but are we providing nutrition?  Are our current health problems related to soil health?

I believe the answer is yes, but how do we change? Is organic the answer?  In my opinion organic is not the solution but merely a part of the solution.  Sustainability should be our emphasis, by being sustainable it may involve areas that are not organic but necessary for survival.  Any situation that is not sustainable will not last.  Let’s look at the past and see how agriculture functioned.  Crop rotation was followed to produce nutrients from one crop to be utilized by the next crop, as in growing nitrogen fixing crops followed by a nitrogen consuming crop or legumes followed by grasses. The utilization of livestock and different species of livestock on the farm to produce manure.  Manure was then added back to the soil releasing macro and micro nutrients.  Growing biomass and the use of cover crops to increase organic matter that invites fungi, microbes and earthworms do increase soil fertility and organic matter.  A higher organic matter increases water infiltration and holding capacity which lessens drought conditions.

When the soil is healthy the plants it produces are healthier and more apt to ward off disease and insects, crop rotation breaks the life cycle of disease and insects also.  So if spraying for weeds and insects is reduced because of improved health and farming practices there should be an increase in the health of the people and animals consuming these plants also.

Our cattle are raised on a Managed Intensive Grazing system.  We have over twenty small paddocks on our farm; the cattle are on a paddock for up to three days and then move to the next paddock.  The cattle are always eating grass in the vegetative stage that is high in protein and the grass is rested for up to thirty days between grazing.  A large amount of manure is left scattered within the paddock which breaks down for nutrients to grow more grass, also the fly and worm cycle is broken by constantly moving the cattle.  Some grass is stockpiled for winter grazing, (allowing paddocks to not be grazed and grass continue to grow), in that way we are not spending time and diesel to harvest hay and feeding hay in the wintertime, also manure is spread around the paddock instead of accumulating around a bale feeder.  By raising cattle this way I believe we are more sustainable by reducing cost and improving the environment along with the health of our cattle.  So the beef from Middleton’s All Natural Meats will always be -   all natural grassfed beef.           David

Welcome to our blog on agriculture and farming practices

When someone starts to blog do you question their expertise, knowledge and reputation?  I do, I want to know the person I am getting information from is an expert in their field.  So may I introduce myself, I am David Middleton and I own Middleton’s All Natural Meats.  My goal is to give you information about our farm and the meat we raise and sell, this includes nutrition, health and our farming practices “So if you eat to live or live to eat” I hope you will follow me as I touch on many subjects.

Who am I?  I grew up on a hog and grain farm in northeast Missouri. All grandparents and great grand parents were farmers, so it’s in my DNA.  I love farming especially raising livestock.  My entrance into my farming experience started in 1966 when  I wrote an essay in FFA to win a bred gilt (female pig) from that first sow grew into a120 sow internationally recognized Yorkshire and Landrace herd with breeding stock selling to 38 states and 14 foreign countries many national and state champions and top selling individuals.  A registered Angus cattle herd was established in 1985 and breeding stock sold to many producers - both registered and commercial.

In 1978 I watched a neighboring family as they stood under the spray from an airplane spraying their wheat field for army worms.  Six months later they had a daughter born with serious birth defects, she lived until age two.  A heartbreaking experience for our entire neighborhood, but it made me think, did the chemicals cause her birth defects? So I started searching for answers as my family was starting, I wanted to protect them from any harm.  Were my farming practices putting them at risk?

The decision was made to farm our land without commercial fertilizer.  We started buying a natural fertilizer from Wonderlife out of Des Moines, Iowa.  A crop rotation of soybeans, followed by wheat with clover interseeded, next by corn and back to soybeans were used.  Herbicides were eliminated by using mechanical weed control.  We never fed any antibiotics to our livestock as our goal was to do genetic evaluation for superior breeding stock not environment and our results were always among the best.  Our calves were not creep fed to evaluate the mother’s ability to raise a calf by converting grass to meat, We were grassfed before we knew we were grassfed!

Change is always with us and as agriculture changes adaptation is the key.  With the vertical integration of the hog industry occurring there were fewer and fewer independent farmers to buy breeding stock.  The way I could keep my genetics and stay farming was to offer half and whole hogs to friends, so began our entrance to direct marketing of meat.

Customers would ask about beef so we began selling our poorer performing bulls as meat, upon a cost analysis it was discovered we could make more money by butchering our bulls than selling them as breeding stock.  Then customers asked if we would raise chickens so we did.  Our sons were showing lambs in 4-H and FFA so we included lamb to our product line.  Eggs became the next addition to meet our customer’s request.

In a few paragraphs you can see the birth of Middleton’s All Natural Meats, it has only taken 49 years to get to this point.  We are not some Johnny come lately, we know what we are doing and this has been a life long endeavor to get to this point.  I ask you to trust us with your family as I have taken care of my own.  Until next time, David