Farmer's Market

We entered farming after a long period of working and saving to purchase land. Purchasing a property to raise our family on was a long-term goal of our family, and in 2018, we made the leap and began our ranch. We were meant to find our land, especially when we look back on how the pieces fell into place to find our specific property. We had talked for years about what our ideal property would look like, what features we wanted on the property, the location where we would like to settle, and the size of property we wanted to buy. We had searched many times for a property that met these criteria, but to no avail. Randomly, after talking over coffee one day, an internet search finally yielded a promising result. We found a property that possessed all of the characteristics that we were looking for. After a hastily planned drive up from south of Houston, an in-person look confirmed that we had indeed found our spot. Once we bought our land, we lived 4 hours away, so began the next challenge of figuring out how to move our lives to our new location. After purchasing our land, we bought two high-cube shipping containers and built a cabin inside one of them to live in while we constructed our house. And when we say built, we did just that. We completed every portion of the build, from running underground electric to tying into an existing septic system from an old, partially built structure that we eventually tore down, and finishing all aspects of the building’s interior. We had a small cabin on our land to live in. The plan was to live here for around a year while we built our house, but then COVID shutdowns hit, and subsequent supply shortages and cost increases ensued. We ended up living in our tiny cabin for much longer than we planned, but this put our family in a much better financial position to pay for our house build as we went. Growing up on a small cow/calf operation was a firsthand experience at the small ranch operation model that we did not want to repeat. Selling animals was not profitable enough to sustain the agricultural operations on a smaller-scale ranch. While sheep were new to both of us, we began to educate ourselves on raising sheep as a more viable alternative, given the wide range of forage that the animals consume relative to a cow. Several of our neighbors told us that we were crazy to consider sheep, since we were located on the Becker bottoms, a feeder water tributary to Cedar Creek Lake, which is a pathway for many different predators that like to eat sheep. We started small to see if we could keep the animals alive, healthy, and free from predation. We were sure that when we introduced our first small handful of sheep onto our land, we had just bought our local predators a nice lamb dinner. To read more, continue scrolling, or visit our Products page to see what we offer. We educated ourselves through other farmers and holistic management classes to experiment with different paddock sizes, layouts, and the utilization of electric fencing for managing sheep grazing. The methods we learned about made sense. Move sheep off of their recently grazed areas (poop areas) so that their food is not contaminated. When sheep poop, they release the larvae of the parasites that normally inhabit their gut. These larvae grow and travel through the soil, eventually returning to the grass that the sheep then eat, starting a cycle that increases the worm load on the animal with every iteration. All sheep have intestinal worms; it is the excessive number of worms that causes problems. We did not want to medicate our animals heavily to solve the parasite issue, so intensive management became our best weapon to fight the dreaded barber pole worm. It turns out that our good grazing practices work. The predation problem was solved through our introduction to livestock guardian dogs, specifically the Great Pyrenees breed. Our Great Pyrenees are Gandalf and Marshall, two huge males that we cannot praise enough. They work