Brythstone Ranch

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This is a picture of two of our garden beds with a mowed path between. It is a prime example of how our growing system ...
07/04/2026

This is a picture of two of our garden beds with a mowed path between. It is a prime example of how our growing system differs from others.

Conventional Row Cropping

Our system contains two 4’ beds and a 32” mowed pathway. In less than 11’ we contain an equivalent amount of plants that can be grown on almost 20’ of conventional row cropping. We use no pesticides or herbicides, but we do apply well aged compost and mineral fertilizers at strategic times throughout the season. We feed while row cropping spends an ungodly amount of time killing more than it grows.

We do pull w**ds, but only once or twice in a lifecycle, and we treat those w**ds as a crop, being fed directly to chickens or calves or cattle. They are high in protein and other digestible nutrients. These two beds replaced the nutrition of about 30-40 lbs of grain BEFORE we even started harvesting the main crop.

We use a fraction of the water, and after a growing season our beds and the pathways contain more organic carbon than they did before we planted. It takes a small fraction of the total energy to grow food this way as with the tilling and chemical applications of conventional row cropping.

Conventional Organic

Modern certified organic farming relies on three components: Certified organic fertilizer applied only before planting, drip irrigation, and copious amounts of black plastic applied to the beds to sequester w**ds.

We use drip irrigation for many crops. We do not use it in these beds however because we do multiple plantings within a season and the drip lines would simply be in the way. We will plant 3-4 successive waves of companion produce in these beds before the end of the growing season.

I do not use “plastic mulch” anywhere for any crop. I understand it. I don’t fault others for using it. But for me using acres of industrial petrochemical plastic products to cover the majority of my food growing area and then finding some way to dispose of it afterward is not congruent with the idea of “organic”. I’m not terrified of microplastics, but they do concern me, and if I was terrified having black plastic this intimately connected to growing my food would give me pause. We do use clear “greenhouse plastic”, but the applications and the shear volume and contact is an entirely different prospect.

Because our beds are NOT covered in plastic we have the option to strategically apply multiple waves of fertilization throughout the season as weather and plant needs change. We can apply chicken compost at the right time, then follow up with composted calf stall manure, then focus on high lignin carbon forward mulch when appropriate. We can apply lime, wood ashes, bio char, bone meal, kelp, boron, humates etc. at relevant times when the plants need them and maximize plant uptake while minimizing soil leeching.

We have the option to plant multiple companion plants with different growing season needs. I planted radishes at 25 days, turnips at 50, beets at 65, carrots at 75, cauliflower at 80, and broccoli at 65. When one crop is done, it comes out and is followed by another companion perfect for the time of year and ideal for the crops that preceded and follow it.

The Paths

Mowed paths are counter intuitive to row cropping and a pain for black plastic farmers. But they have many benefits:

They moderate soil temps.

They fertilize every time you mow.

They collect and retain soil moisture and reduce irrigation needs.

They capture and sequester carbon.

They provide year-round habitat for earthworms, soil biology, healthy soil fungus, etc.

They are WAY more pleasant to walk, work and be around than bare dirt and a sea of black plastic.

They produce a silage crop / green chop in addition to the cultivated crop without additional cultivation, planting or fertilization or herbicide application.

That is a lot of information in a single pic. Thanks for reading.

Homestead Dual-Purpose cows are built form the beginning to thrive on a varied diet and produce high-quality milk and me...
06/30/2026

Homestead Dual-Purpose cows are built form the beginning to thrive on a varied diet and produce high-quality milk and meat.

Years ago I read a detailed farm plan of a dairy in the UK from decades ago that though it had only what we Americans would call a postage stamp of land, produced high quality beef, milk and breeding stock. Two thirds of their land was dedicated to what they called “crofting” and what we might call “market-scale gardening”. Reject cows from much larger dairies were purchased at discount rates and rehabilitated by being fed mostly the stalks, leaves and stems from the garden crops that were considered “refuse”. Then they found that feeding some of the crops themselves produced healthier and more productive beef and dairy so they expanded and discontinued most of their “truck gardening” to be sold as vegetables in town, and sold only the premium veggies for human consumption and the rest went to feed cows and calves.

We don’t follow this identical practice, but I have found it intriguing and “guiding” for decades. A great example is why I grow turnips. Before potatoes were brought to Europe from the Americas, turnips and a wide variety of beets were the most significant root crop throughout Europe. They survived the harsh weather that destroyed grain and other staples are were often considered the “famine insurance” of most communities.

If we are honest, potatoes are more appetizing and nutritionally diverse and dense than turnips, but they lack a few key benefits. Turnips are hearty with deep taproots that can break up hard pan soils, thrive in poor soil conditions and improve growing conditions for almost every crop that follows. Like legumes there is a notable improvement to the crops grown around them even though they do not fix nitrogen.

Turnips also produce a massive amount of “greens”. In these pics we thinned around 10’ of garden bed space and got @ 10 lbs of turnip roots and a wheelbarrow of tops. And we will probably get that again in another week or two when we harvest the rest. As a comparison that is 4 times more volume than corn in @ 60 days from planting. In the same season I can get almost 10 times more volume from turnips than I can get from corn with successive plantings.

The Total Digestible Nutrients are higher in turnips than corn for a cow. They have a decent carb content, but the cellulose to lignin ratio in the biomass is higher meaning a ruminant gets more sugar out of the biomass than it would from corn. And I’ve found calves and weanlings particularly take to the leaves. It seems to encourage satiation and digestion when paired with about 1/3 total volume with straw or lower quality grass hay or even straw. And the youngstock spend most of the day laying around content instead of complaining about being separate from momma. It takes about one wheelbarrow of tops to feed one 6 month old calf for the day. That means I converted those “waste” tops into beef (or in this case beef and another replacement heifer). And some high-quality compost to go back and fertilize other crops.

Maximizing efficiency and diversity on a small farm is a part of the “secret formula” of successful homesteading. The lowly turnip is a part of our farm plan, because it produces more than many other crops. In our unpredictable climate. More importantly dual purpose dairy cows are producing more milk and meat on a fraction of the ground and increasing fertility instead of creating unhealthy concentrations of nitrates, phosphates and other imbalances.

Homesteading is not building your own petting zoo, it is creating a living system that builds healthy soil, healthy crops, healthy animals and healthy families.

06/24/2026

Indeed!

We have a 2 year old halter trained Homestead Milk cow looking for a new homestead.She is 1/2 Jersey, 1/4 Charolais, 1/8...
06/22/2026

We have a 2 year old halter trained Homestead Milk cow looking for a new homestead.

She is 1/2 Jersey, 1/4 Charolais, 1/8 Red Angus, 1/8 Pinzgauer. We are specifically breeding dairy / beef crosses for Homestead milk cows. They are heartier than Jerseys, they do well on grass fed rotational grazing, they are easy unassisted calvers and good mothers. We milk-share with the calves for the first few months then wean the calves and milk the mommas.

These cows do not produce the standard 48 lbs + milk a day like a commercial dairy cow. They are for a family to reasonably use so we see @ 2-3 gal a day from these crosses, but calves (steers) gain fast and are delivering 5-600 lb carcasses in 18 -20 months. They thrive on grass and forage and are naturally hearty and healthy.

This cow was one of 4 in active lactation in 2026 for us. With first-timers nearing freshening we needed to make a choice about who to keep. She took to milking well, delivered and cared for a healthy calf unassisted and after a couple of weeks memorized the milking schedule and routine, so barely needed the halter to be led from the pasture to the barn. She is a first-time mom, calving in Dec. 2025. Compared with the other first-timers she was a smaller producer, never exceeding 2 gals (16 lbs) a day. But her udder is well hung, and never had mastitis. She could provide for her calf and a descent sized family.

We dried her off early, partly because we have others and partly because as a first-timer we wanted her to have plenty of time to recover before her next freshening. I saw her take a breeding from our proven Highland Bull January 15 2026.

We will keep her calf from 2025, but she would calve by fall again and the highland cross calves are beefy, fly resistant, easy grazers and want to live. It is reasonable to expect the same from her 2026 calf.

Serious inquiries only. We want to see her go to a Homestead and become the kind of treasured fixture she was bred to be.

More details via PM.

“God made it so this place was beautiful in the rain, because if it wasn’t it wouldn’t be beautiful.” — One of the old ...
06/10/2026

“God made it so this place was beautiful in the rain, because if it wasn’t it wouldn’t be beautiful.” — One of the old local farmers I used to work for.

Sustainable, non chemical w**d control.For the past couple of generations “w**d control” has equaled chemical sprays, sp...
06/07/2026

Sustainable, non chemical w**d control.

For the past couple of generations “w**d control” has equaled chemical sprays, specifically glyphosate or other targeted applications for most conventional ag. I made the commitment 30 years ago that instead of spraying w**ds with chemicals that I would first understand why that w**d grows and is a problem, and second once I understood the “why” behind the w**d I would address it with fertility and non-chemical management.

Because I try to listen to others, I understand the “whys” behind the use of glyphosate and other chemicals. Because I experienced life-altering chemical poisoning in my 20s, I’m also VERY aware of the damage many things some consider “safe” can do. So this post isn’t about the “whys” of not using chemical w**d management as it is about the “how’s”.

First the soil.

The plants growing in your field are each micro-soil testers. All plants have conditions and chemical requirements that are necessary for growth. Remove or impair the chemistry or condition a plant needs and it will not thrive and will be dominated by plants that prefer the new conditions you created.

When it comes to soil fertility there is an escalating classification of properties that represent the transition from a barren rock to deep, high organic matter soil with balanced chemical cation exchange capacity, texture and biological activity to enable the higher order food plants like small grains, legumes and ultimately you and I. Moss can grow on a rock, but that same moss will likely falter in your well balanced black loamy bottom land that can produce bumper crops of wheat, beans and corn.

The plants that WANT to grown on our soil then tell us more about the nature of our soil, than the invasive nature of the w**d. It’s not that the w**d is hard to kill, it is that the way you are managing your soil is more suitable for the w**d than for the plants being “choked out” by the w**ds. Change your soil and it is possible for crops or pasture to “choke out” the w**ds. The vitality of the plant is directly related to the chemistry and composition of the soil, not the invasive nature of the plant.

This will anger some, but knapw**d and winter wheat do not favor the same soil and conditions. The problem facing many is that they are managing to favor knapw**d, and trying to grow wheat, so they are caught in a constant cycle of using chemicals to kill the knapw**d, and then using more chemicals to attempt to force the wheat to grow somewhere it would prefer not to.

The same is true for pasture. Weeds don’t “invade” we create conditions that favor the w**d, then blame it for the disappearance of the clover, the Timothy or the orchard grass.

The accompanying pic is from my “winter quarters”. It has received abuse as a “sacrificial drylot” repeatedly through bad growing seasons, poor management on my part and it started off as a horribly overgrazed and abused area before I bought it.

Since 2021 I have struggled with thistles here, because in 2021 we had a 50 year drought event that meant I needed it use the area as a drylot for summer hay feeding for the cows. It saved 90% of our pastures, but turned this area into a dry brick. If you dig a post hole out there you can find 15-18” of clay loam above larger gravel and rocks and sand and more silt. It has the potential to be great soil, but the abuse created some problems.

The drylot conditions packed that clay super tight, the over grazing sucked out available calcium and phosphorus and made it next to
Impossible for nitrogen to pe*****te to the root zone of forage crops. It is hard for water to soak into it, it generally wants to run off and flood other areas. It drys out fast and has a lot of residual salts that poison grasses and clover.

The thistles I struggled with loved the excess salts, low calcium and low phosphorus. They loved the high aluminum and compact clay. The thistles were taller that I most years when I went in to cut them down at their blooming stage. Those tall thistles were digging down through that hardpacked clay and were bringing nutrients up from the colloid in that underlying gravel base. Each year as I cut them down, the roots died back when the tops were cut and left organic matter “tunnels” in that hard clay. The tops chopped, grazed by sheep and left to decompose on top deposited the minerals they were drawing up from the subsurface and retained moisture and encouraged biological activity at the soil surface. That biological activity began to neutralize the salt and released gentle carbonic acid which chelated calcium carbonate in the clay and made it available for plants in the topsoil.

As the thistle cycle progressed, and I managed them with rotational sheep grazing and mechanical cutting, the thistles began to poison themselves. As their activity altered the soils environment it moved out of the ideal conditions to grow thistles and other plants started to “choke out” the thistles. Some of the new plants include white clover, fescue, orchard grass: things I love for grazing. Some of the new plants I don’t like (bugloss), but all of them tell me the soil is moving into the right direction and that the forage is better for the animals. The animal unit days are increasing.

This didn’t happen over night, but it is happening, and previous experience has taught me that once it reaches this point, the next improvements come faster and more profoundly.

Patience is essential to sustainable non-chemical methods, but the results are far more long-term satisfying.

Address

3831 Deep Lake Boundary Road, # B
Colville, WA
99114

Telephone

+15097326619

Website

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