A note from Conor
The farm came with the marriage.
When my wife and I married in 1999, her parents handed us their farm. It was a
very little operation then — enough to feed a family, not much more — and it
came with a way of doing things they had held to for years.
We started with four head and learned the rest the slow way. Most of what we know
came from getting it wrong first. The farm grew at about the same rate our family
did; our kids did not watch us build it, they were handed buckets as soon as they
could carry them.
What we did not change was the part that mattered. Cattle grow at their own pace
here. Ours are grass-fed and grass-finished on West Texas pasture, with no added
hormones, no routine antibiotics and no grain to hurry them along — the same
practices her parents kept when this was a few animals and a lot of work.
I will be straight about what that costs us. Grain would put an animal at weight
months sooner and we would sell more beef in a year. We have run that math more
than once. We have never been able to talk ourselves into it.
We scaled the place up. We did not scale down the standards — and our kids will
get it the way we got it.
Twenty-some years on, we sell other families what her parents worked out long
before we came along. You are buying an animal we raised, from people whose names
are on the gate. Most of it leaves here frozen and boxed, headed for kitchens we
will never stand in — which still surprises me.
— Conor
