As we enter our third season on the ranch these words spring forth. If Square Mile Ranch was a tree in bloom, the 300+ families we feed (you) are the silver and green shifting leaves, glimmering around us. What we are working to achieve on this land does not grow into the important and beautiful thing we intend it to be without you. Sure, we need someone to buy our products, but that is the barest version of this story. The heart of the story is and will always be, connection.
Read MoreJeremiah and I sat knackered and silent at the dinner table the other night until one of us offered up, “I guess we are both just really driven, right?” We wore the truth well as it stitched and settled around us.
Read MoreAt the time you order beef from us your animal is still grazing here on the ranch. Your deposit secures your “share” of the living animal, quite literally transfering ownership of that animal to you. This is how on-farm slaughter works.
Read MoreWhat a rollercoaster this ag life is. I’ve been rocking out in our 40ft freezer all day while packing orders for Walla Walla and Spokane deliveries this weekend, and being plumb tickled when I grabbed an empty box from last year to repack for this year and the timing is just so, so that it fills back up for the same human, or perhaps their parent or friend.
Read MoreSuch a cold, windy, dry spring waiting for the grass to grow. We finally have just enough pasture growing to start our daily cattle moves, and we can’t wait for them to slick off their winter coats and start putting on the lbs.
Read MoreAs a customer you are a link in the chain of positive impacts that managing land with care and conservation catalyzes. Our meat tastes so good because we are respecting the natural cycles of the animals and the land we are all connected to.
Human history. Evolutionary time. Geologic time. Cosmic time. What beauty has been created in these eras? The layers unfold before me when I look outside, when I dig underground, when I feel the weight of the misguided human layers that must be stripped and made right - reintegrated and born into something better.
Read MoreOur Sheep Hides are ready! We learned a lot of new things last year, but they were all abstract from finances and land acquisition to big leaps in trust and vision. We learned very few land management and animal husbandry skills as it was an all out execution of the knowledge we have acquired over the past decade. Expanding our hard skills however, is always the most satisfying. Saving our first bunch of sheep hides at the close of the season was tremendously fulfilling. Jeremiah has had to restrain me from going out and buying a bunch of fancy ewes!
Read MoreWinter hours are the time for tranquilizing thoughts to be born. I need the world's doors to shut some so that my creative power can come out and whirl itself around, but I don’t find myself quite immersed in the murmurings yet. I think that is because a little voice keeps telling me to acknowledge some of the work done this past year. The gentler part of myself (that grows the more I mother our kiddo) says to take a moment and be proud of all we did last year.
The shifting hues and strong blowing winds of fall, the descent of our boydoggy to the ranch’s soil, and the meat raised and delivered to a couple hundred homes needed to permeate with less words.
Read MoreYesterday was for doing, all day just the three of us, releasing water on our pastures for the very first time. No one there to say whether we are doing it right or not, just using our noggins and our muscles as best we’re able. Watching, taking measurements and saying to each other “yeah, I think that looks good” or “oops, I think that was too much”. All materials either found on the ranch, donated by our awesome neighbors, or purchased used.
Read MoreOur aim at Square Mile Ranch isn’t to tell you a story 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 connection, it is to 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 connect - ultimately with you - but starting with the ground under our feet. It is about truth and place and what makes something just and beautiful. It is about imagination, nourishment and reciprocation. It is about the outer and inner landscape, the seen and the unseen, sky and root, culture and soil, mind and heart. It is about abiding in and living in “some chosen and cherished small place.” To know and love that place.
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