Have you ever thought about where your meat comes from?
Most of us walk into a grocery store, fill our baskets full of produce and meat without a second thought of where this might come from.
Who planted the seeds?
Who cared for and nurtured the plants?
Who raised the meat?
These are thoughts that have been swirling in my head for a while and finally my husband’s too. After 2020 we felt like it was the time to really find ways to eat more locally and support local farmers. We wanted to know where our produce was coming from. We wanted to know where our meat was raised.
So we started to make these changes…
1. Making homemade bone broth
2. Buying raw milk from a local farm
3. Baking sourdough bread
4. Planting organic, no-GMO seeds
5. Starting a compost
6. Building planter boxes for our seedlings
7. Bringing baby chicks home
8. Receiving a deep freezer for Christmas (yay!)
9. Buying produce from a local farm stand (and inquiring about a CSA program)
The next on our list was meat.
Through the local farm stand, Isle Acre Farms, we learned of a farm who raised chickens, beef and pigs. We called and the local farmer invited us out to check it out.
We drove to Liberty Hill on a misty Sunday afternoon and had the best experience at Bountiful Acres Farm.
Our girls ran all over the farm exploring the egg laying chickens and chickens raised for meat. We talked all about how the animals were raised. We met the rabbits he kept on the farm for meat, we even were shown a brand new baby rabbit.
The farmer asked us if we wanted to meet the cow that we would hopefully be taking home in our freezer in a month. We eagerly said yes.
We walked down a path sprinkled with cacti and dewberry plants to discover a beautiful black cow with a white face. She ate from my daughters’ hands.
We were able to teach our daughters about where their food comes from and how God blesses us with this food. We were able to thank the cow for being a blessing for our family, that would nourish our bodies this year.
How cool is it that we were able to meet our meat?
With the world turning upside down around us, it feels empowering to be able to move forward making changes in our family to become more self-reliant and community-reliant than government-reliant.
We walked back and filled our cooler with a plethora of meat from ribeye steaks, to pork chops, to whole chickens, to beef liver, to beef heart, to beef bones. All of these things we know exactly where they came from and in a month we’ll be able to fully stock our deep freezer for the year.
Have you thought about how you can buy locally?
What famers live around you?
I think there is a revolution brewing with families who are ready to live outside the box, to support our neighbor versus the giant conglomerate down the road who clearly don’t need our money.
The election may be over, but friends we vote every single day with our dollars.
Wherever you feel passionate about, you can support with your dollar. We choose to support small businesses. And the more families that do that, the more the giant corporations will have to change and those changes can change the world.