Harnessing the instincts of animals to revitalize the land through holistic management

Welcome to Holistic Stewardship Farm! We are a startup small family farm, having just launched our website in late fall of 2024. We are located about 7 miles northeast of Santa Anna, Texas, and look forward to supplying those in the nearby area and perhaps beyond with fresh, healthy food. For a number of years now, we have been raising eggs, chicken, beef, and pork for our family’s consumption. We began this practice because of the dearth of healthy, wholesome eggs and meat in the commercial food industry, and we are now interested in filling that void for you as well.

Our animal husbandry philosophy is very simple, but it has profound consequences for every aspect of how we raise our animals: We believe that every animal should be raised in a context and environment which allows it to express to the furthest extent possible its natural characteristics and habits. When we look at nature, we see that these habits and characteristics are numerous and varied, but one axiom is found to govern them all, and that is, frequent movement. The wild animals are constantly moving, looking for food, allowing the places where they have just been to rest and rejuvenate. We believe that this mutually beneficial symbiosis between land and animal should be the basic premise upon which all our farming practices are based.

Sadly, this philosophy of farming has been abandoned in many ways by the vast majority of large producers today, and the results are appalling. Out in Central Texas where we live, we see the tell-tale signs of improper management on every hand: Pastures which have little or no succulent, nutritious forage, the grasses having long since been replaced by a sea of weeds, stretches of barren, desert-like ground, and places where erosion has set in for lack of ground cover, to name a few. All of these characteristics are the result of improper management/stewardship of both the animals and the land, as well as a lack of knowledge of how properly managed livestock are a great asset to the land, rather than a liability. However, the good news is that we are not doomed to this bleak reality; it can and will change if we return to a proper understanding of the relationship between healthy animals, healthy soil, and healthy people.

At Holistic Stewardship Farm, we are dedicated to using proper stewardship techniques to breathe life back into our dying soils and restore equilibrium to our wildly imbalanced ecosystems. For many years, we also contributed to this degradation of the land through improper management practices, and so we can appreciate the importance of proper management as we look on our own impoverished pastures and soils. However, note that the key term here with regards to animals on the land is not “elimination,” but “management.” Improperly managed animals are the problem, and properly managed animals are the solution to that problem.

So how are these ideas incorporated into day-to-day operations? As was mentioned earlier, the animal existing in its natural environment and frequent movement with substantial rest periods are extremely important. This means that our cows are not fed any grain (they’re herbivores!), they are only out grazing when there is well-established grass, and they are moved frequently (one or more times daily) using temporary electric fencing to both prevent them from overgrazing and concentrate the fertility which they excrete. At all other times they are fed hay, and the pastures are allowed to rest. Chickens are housed in chicken tractors (as opposed to confinement houses where they never get fresh air and sunshine) and moved once or twice daily. Hogs are also moved frequently, though not daily, through the use of electric fencing. They too are outdoors, and there are no confinement houses or manure lagoons!

Thank you for visiting our website and showing enough interest in our endeavors to read this far. We hope you’ll support our enterprise as we look forward to producing healthy food, cultivating healthy relationships, and ultimately, contributing to a better world.