I describe farming as really just one long extended expedition. It's very much like a mountaineering expedition where you wake up every day, you're working outside. You have problems, often new problems that crop up at least weekly. It's very much like being in a big mountain expedition where you're constantly working with the weather. You're working with the people on your team. You are focused on a goal. That takes all of your effort that you really have to commit to a hundred percent.—Bruce ...

I remember being seven or eight years old and drawing… having construction paper, big rolls of paper all over the living room floor, drawing pictures of where my cows and my sheep and my chickens would go on my future farm.—Melissa You pick and choose your battles for sure…do we want to focus on cleaning up all of our step-in fence for the sheep and do all the outdoor stuff or are we going to focus on a house that we can bring friends into? So unfortunately, our game nights have taken a hi...

We could actually look into the animal, the live animal, see intramuscular fat and tenderness. We also had these tools, linear measurement tools that we could actually physically measure the animals and began to find almost in any group of cattle the right kind of cattle that would make a delicious piece of meat. Ridge Shinn is the Executive Director of the Northeast Grass-fed Beef Initiative (NGBI). He also is the co-founder and CEO of Big Picture Beef, recently launched to produce Northeast gr...

“We did have the sense to look and say, you know, God created ruminant animals to take advantage of grass and low input. You know, if we've got a grass base, and we take care of that, that's as low input as you're gonna get versus hauling in feed.”—Emalee Buttrey “There's a lot of challenges that you just don't come across in the classroom or the textbook.” –Brad Buttrey Raised in McEwen, TN on a small cattle operation, Brad developed a keen interest in reproduction, learning to AI w...

Troy Bishopp web site TroyBishopp Instagram #lingergrazing On Pasture Grazing Chart link Grasstravanganza info: https://grasstravaganza.morrisville.edu/ Drop a review at www.choosingtofarm.com Join our Patreon! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/choosingtofarm/message

"My buddy Rock Langone, he runs my ice cream store up the road here. Him and I were the young farmers of the county, we were the chosen ones. We had high herd averages, you know, just got out of college. We were making milk, we were doing what we're taught, you know. I went to college, I made a lot of milk. I had good cows. I had good husbandry skills, but it wasn't enough, because the price…the price wasn't enough. So then you start saying, “Well, how am I going to survive as a dairy farmer?” S...

“We cleared eight acres and piled the trees by hand. Not the trees but the brush. We had 96 brush piles in one field. And we had no friends left, because we would say to them, ‘Come on over for the weekend. And we'll give you beer and pizza and you can help us pile the brush.’ Nobody would even answer the phone.” Hank and Heather LeTarte of White Gates Farm in New Hampshire started clearining their land in 1982 out of largely pine woods and a prospective view. They built a home, a family, and...

"I get a lot of people saying, you're living my dream life. I'm so jealous. I know it's a compliment. But I'm not living your dream life. I'm living my dream life. And I know what it comes with. I know all the s-h-i-t it comes with. And it's still my dream. But for most people it's not. It's not their dream." Former vegan and marketing communications professional Katie Steere was 2,000 miles and ten years away from her family's longtime-shuttered farm in Rhode Island. A TED talk convinced her to...

“Go and work for a bad boss. Go and spend some time breaking somebody else's machines, losing tens of thousands of dollars on their payroll, before you're doing it on your own payroll. That timing is probably somewhere between, two years at a minimum, and maybe ten years at a maximum. If you do it for much longer than ten years, you're probably going to be so dependent on that salary, it's gonna be really hard to step away from that and make some bold moves.” Dallas Mount is the CEO of Ranch Man...

“I would say the overarching of all of this is actually understanding that this is a business. Right? It’s great, it’s farming, it’s pastoral. It’s all these things., but at the end of the day, this is a business and a business needs certain things to exist and function.”—Cheryl Cesario Thanks for joining our inaugural episode, featuring Marc and Cheryl Cesario of Meetingplace Pastures in Cornwall, Vermont. Marc and Cheryl have been farming at their current location since 2009, joining their ...