Tucked in Ozark Hill Country, we are a first-generation ranch raising delicious heritage cattle 100% on pasture. YAH willin’ and the creek don’t rise, we’ll be offering other regional foodie delights in the coming years. Sign-ups for quarter, half and whole beef options will open Winter 2024. Fill out the form below to be added to our reserve list.

We have local, super flavorful heirloom beef for sale. Fill your freezer with the best! Packed with minerals, we harvest deliciously nutrient-dense protein for growing families who value meat raised right. Our heritage Irish Dexter cattle are 100% grass-fed + finished and rotationally-grazed on diverse, healthy forage; resulting in meat that is deeply nourishing and loaded with vitamins A, D, E, and K.Click here for more details on our practices and how we raise our
animals.

Read Our Journal...

Our story is best summed up in a collection of reflections. We write about personal growth and joyfully share some of what's unfolding for our young family.

13 July 2023

First-Generation Farmer

by Ian Heung

When we first closed on the purchase of our acreage, I kept calling it the property. Or, the even more literal: the land. “Hey! We’re gonna up to the land to play in the creek!” or “Dad’s going up to the property to clean out the barn.” It felt so awkwardly formal to say the property to our then 6, 5, and 2-year-olds. Even our children would wake up on certain summer days and say, “Are we going to get to go up to… the property today?!” It didn’t take much for me to realize that I was just too shy to call it what it really was: a farm.Within the first few months, we enlisted the help of Steve Alarid to help us see the land more clearly. Steve spent 33 years as a forester and firefighter for the US Forest Service working on public lands ecosystem restoration and, after retirement, started Shiloh Native Landscapes to “promote the beauty and benefits of Arkansas native plants.”After spending nearly four hours conversing with Steve, driving with him through all of the pastures, hiking the wooded acres, and climbing the farthest reaches of the property, he looked at us plainly and declared:

“Well, you’ve bought a ranch!”

Oomph, gut check. My brain went on a tailspin: Call it what it is, Ian. A ranch! Wait, does that make me a rancher?! Noooo… (Alexa ran with it right away, and will still at random times stare intently into my eyes, calling me “Ranchero!” with definitive glee.)Before long, however, as is our way, Alexa and I both dove headfirst into our research. For her that meant voraciously finding books on permaculture systems, forest gardening, owning donkeys, and even reintegrating beavers. For me, it meant videos on homestead infrastructure, the virtues of heavy equipment, and how to restore a chainsaw.But, one particular book did grab my attention in an unexpected way. In The Independent Farmstead by Shawn and Beth Dougherty, not only did the Doughertys thoroughly expound on the themes of their subtitle: Growing Soil, Biodiversity, and Nutrient-Dense Food with Grassfed Animals and Intensive Pasture Management, but their no-nonsense, practicality-laden words left me inspired that my thing would be to graze animals on our pastures.I was convinced that I would be able to strategically and systematically develop our (ahem) ranch infrastructure to support the very type of intensive rotational grazing of animals that the Doughertys wrote about. I aspired to build a farmstead that would be self-sufficient and independent by minimizing off-farm inputs (another one of the Doughertys’ core tenets).And so, as Spring quickly came and went and Summer soon took over, I set to work cutting down Eastern red cedars that impeded our fencing, brush mowing numerous pastures that had begun to be taken over by seedlings, and pitching a canvas wall tent on our future homesite so we could spend more hours working while our children work-played. Though as one might expect of a novice farmer, as the summer months locked into their rhythm of thick humidity and heat rashes, my body told me that I had overdone it.While my neighbors worked smart in the relative coolness of the mornings and early evenings, we were commuting from our home 45 minutes away to arrive at the ranch just in time for the hottest hours of the day. Once, I even decided it was too hot, and I just had to brush mow in shorts and t-shirt (chiggers anyone?). By July, I had to tap out and take several weeks off to recover.For some additional context, the previous family that owned this property had not lived on it in over 15 years and, after entrusting the management and baling of the pasture grasses to two kind neighbors, the recent passing of the family’s matriarch led to the five siblings finally selling the family farm. Aside from a formerly domesticated horse that now lived wild on the property, the pastures had not seen grazing in over a decade, and the densely overgrown woods and fast encroaching thorny briars meant there would be much work to do. Not impossible; just work.In August, my irritated skin finally calmed down in time for my parents to fly out from California to visit us for the first time in over a year. They wanted to see the grandchildren, but they also wanted to see this farm that they had been hearing about for months.

Truth be told, I was nervous.

I was nervous about what they would think about this new family endeavor. When my family immigrated to the United States from Hong Kong in the late-80s, I imagine that they never figured their youngest son would leave California at some point and end up in Arkansas with his family.Moreover, I imagine that they never figured that this same son would decide that farm life was for him. And so, as I drove them around the property wishing that it was Fall or early-Winter when the weather was more pleasant and the fallen leaves revealed more beauty and visibility, Alexa and I shared with them some of our plans: a home on a hilltop of mature oaks, cultivating medicinals like elderberries and ginseng, and intensive rotational grazing cattle on our re-emerging pastures. As I continued to show them what we had discovered about our ranch, I felt my nervousness dissolve into steadiness in my voice and confidence in what was laying ahead for us. I told them about the work that we had already done. They saw our children run around creek beds and hillsides with confidence and delight.As I pulled the truck back around to where we had started, I looked intently into their faces, with a Well, what do you think? look on my face. And my dad, a retired engineer that I have learned to trust to always lean towards the side of practicality and prudence, looked at my mom and said:

“Cows, huh? That makes a lot of sense.” And, never missing an opportunity to crack a joke, followed up with, “You can hire me to be your farmhand.”

With a reminiscent smile, my mother shared that while I was driving us around it reminded her vividly of when her father would drive her little-girl-self around their family palm plantation in Malaysia, pointing out details to his daughter about his certain fruitful acres with tender pride. And with that comment, any remaining nervousness disappeared completely. My parents, in their own uneffusive way, had given me all the encouragement and affirmation I could ever want from them. In doing so, they also reminded me that my mother’s father was a farmer and that my father’s family had generations of farmers as well.And, while we may have skipped my parent's generation, I am curiously and faithfully taking up stewarding our family’s farmstead as a first-generation (in a while) farmer.