02/03/2024
Groundhog Day greetings to all of our loyal beef customers, and also to those who buy breeding stock from Dogwood Farm!
Groundhog day is halfway between the winter and spring equinoxes, and the big rodents predict that we'll have an early spring this year. (More about that later.)
To our beef customers, this is a good time of year to contact us and send deposits to reserve your 2024 beef from Dogwood Farm, so we can make arrangements with the processor of your choice in advance. This year, our processors are Burnett's in Melber (now also offering USDA beef processing!), and the Family Butcher Shop, our Amish friends in Marion, KY. Both facilities are booking dates right now for the coming year.
The Burnetts will take steers from Dogwood Farm on May 28.
All jokes and legends aside, the groundhogs have predicted early springs more and more often as the years have passed:
With more hot pavement, more cars on the road, more planes in the air, more bare cropland during the winter, fewer trees and perennial plants with year-round roots working to shade and renew the soil, 2023 was by far the warmest year ever on record!
Cover crops, well-managed perennial pastures, woodlands and windbreaks help moderate climate, reduce evaporation, limit extreme winds, reduce the danger of tornadoes, and help hold down our planet's temperature. Having living roots in the soil year 'round also helps prevent erosion from wind and water, and more green leaves create transpiration for more clouds to make reliable rainfall patterns, helping to prevent disastrous droughts and flash floods (like the 11.5-inch rain that fell here on July 19, 2023.)
The photo below, of cows grazing stockpiled cool-season fescue through snow, was made on Toby's home-place farm where he grew up, at about this time of year in 2017. Snow doesn't bother our cows. They'll just work their way through deep snow like this and graze the sweet green fescue grass underneath. They also had a big round bale of dry hay to eat at the same time.
Just ahead of the cows in the photo is a tiny electric hot wire to keep them from trampling the next day's fresh grass. They are trained to it, because it allows them to have plenty of green pasture to last until spring grazing time, when new green plants will grow. This winter feeding technique is called "bale grazing," and it helped keep our herd happy, healthy, and well-fed year-round in 2017.
(Cattlemen, if this interests you, look up Greg Halich, an expert on bale-grazing who does research at the University of Kentucky, while also grazing beef cattle of his own.)
All Natural Beef. No growth hormones, no steroids, no antibiotics, no grain. Regenerative farming met
