Stewardship is a word that is tossed around quite a bit these days, and not just in the farming and food worlds. For those of us at Marksbury, stewardship is a way of life, a way of thinking about each and everything we do on the farm and in our business. It’s all about using just enough resources to ensure that we’re not stealing resources from future generations. In our business, it’s all about our approach to farming.
At Marksbury, we practice and promote the idea of grass farming. This commitment is reflected in our logo. We are a grass company, not a meat company. While we obviously provide meat products, our primary focus is the condition of the land entrusted to us, and more specifically the health of our soils. We use our animals as tools in our farming practices by mimicking the rotational grazing patterns of ancient grazing species.
We believe that Kentucky is ideally suited for grassbased meat production because of its rich pastures and ample water. There is no place in the world better suited for our way of farming. Our methods enable us to reap the full value of Kentucky’s most abundant, renewable natural resource (our grass!), while actually improving it as we go.
We rely on natural systems that have been perfected over thousands of years without human interference. These systems are simple: animals eat the grass and plant species they prefer, and they trample the plants that aren’t delicious to them, adding organic matter to the soil. Their manure and urine help to fertilize the soil, and then the animals move to another place to repeat the cycle. They do not return to a place until it has had adequate time to “rest,” or for the trampled plant material, manure and urine to be absorbed into the soil, creating a healthier stand of grass for when the animals come back to that place.
In addition to improving the soil health and pastures on our farms, our animals provide us cash from the sales of our products. They also provide us great pleasure when we interact with them each day on the farm, and of course when we eat the meat we harvest from them. That’s why, at our core, Marksbury Farm Market is a grass company rather than a meat company.
The welfare of our animals is a central value for all of us. Our methods of farming are designed to promote animal health and the highest quality of life for them by relying on natural systems, rather than competing with those systems like our industrialscale competitors attempt to do. Our commitment to animal welfare is based on two simple ideas: first, it’s the right (and only) way to raise livestock; secondly, fear and anxiety just don’t taste very good. There’s a growing body of scientific data that validates this statement. The way animals are produced has a direct effect on the flavor, tenderness, and color of the meat they produce.
In our farming practices, we cooperate with nature, we don’t compete with it. We allow animals to live the lives they are made to live by their Creator, rather than cramming them into confined spaces and forcing them to live on diets they are not naturally designed to consume. We raise animals as part of the natural pasturebased systems for which they were designed and enjoy every minute of it.