Notes from the Pasture

Spring is here in the Christensen Valley. The pastures look good after our pretty warm winter--eleven years now and the grass just keeps getting thicker and greener, which is what happens when you let Nature be the senior partner and don't poison anything. The cows are out on the new growth, the calves are fat and shiny, and Tanner and Jack are doing their usual excellent work supervising all of it from the fence line.

We have a lot of news this spring, so settle in.

Feeder Calves — April 18. We have 10 feeder calves available for sale on April 18. These are Spencer Shadow calves, born here, raised here on grass and mama, approximately 7 months old and weighing between 350 and 450 lbs. Price is $1,000 per head.

If you've been thinking about raising your own beef--or if you know someone with a few acres and a fence and an interest in getting started--this is a straightforward way in. These calves have had a calm, unstressed start to life. No trucks, no feedlots, no medications, no drama. They've been on grass since birth and they know how to eat it. Your job from here is pasture, water, minerals, hay in winter, and patience. Grow them out 12 to 14 months and you'll have a finished animal that ate nothing but what the ground provided.

Finished Beef — May 29. Our spring slaughter is scheduled for May 29. Same program you know: grass-fed, grass-finished Aberdeen Angus steers, born and raised right here, dispatched one calm morning by a single shot, processed at Farmer's Helper in Harrisburg. No trucks. No feedlots. No angry or anxious moments. The animal you eat never left the ranch until it was beef.

Pricing is $3.50/lb rail weight to the Ranch ($3.25/lb discount for a whole beef). Add roughly $2/lb for the butcher's cut and wrap, and you're looking at about $6.00 to $6.50 per pound for your finished packages. That's still about half to a third of what the best butcher shops and grocery stores might charge for grass-finished beef--and theirs didn't grow up on a hillside we can see from our kitchen window.

The process hasn't changed: email me with your name and telephone, I put your name on the list for a whole, half, or quarter. On graduation day we'll process the steers, I'll email you the hanging weight, you send the Ranch a check and call Farmer's Helper with your cutting instructions. Two weeks later you drive to Harrisburg, pay the butcher, and bring home your treasure.

New this year: ask me about our older cow retirement program for pet food. If you have dogs, cats, or other carnivores in the family, we can talk about getting you quality, ranch-raised protein at a price that makes sense for the four-legged members of the household.

After eleven years of running this place, we finally have a proper website. You can find us at spencershadowranch.com--the ranch story, the animals, photos of the valley, and everything you need to know about how we do things out here. If you've ever tried to explain to someone what Spencer Shadow is, now you can just send them the link. Spend some time at the gallery, enjoy the astrophotography taken at the Ranch and the rest of the pictures.

The ranch is open for visits--we're about a mile from the Raptor Center, if you need a landmark. Email me and we can set a short visit up for you. Come out when the weather's nice, walk the pastures, meet the herd. Bring the kids. The calves are at their most photogenic right now and won't stay small for long. The donkeys are always at their best.

As always, the process starts with an email. Let me know what you're thinking--feeder calves in April, finished beef in May, or just a question about any of it. I'm here.

I don't like to send a lot of emails to you, clogging your digital arteries, but one of my best friends is a force in the futures market and he sent me the attached cattle futures market chart over the weekend.

Live cattle are now selling at a new high of $227.30 on the contract, which is priced in what cattlemen call "hundred weight." If you want to know what that means for supermarket beef prices, I think you multiply the $2.27 by 4 for the lowest priced product--ground beef--and go from there. So, maybe $225 hundred weight will mean $9-11/lb ground beef, and will mean $27/lb roasts and $36/lb steaks.

If I had to guess, I'd say that $200 is the new support level and $300 might be the new resistance. At $3.00 per pound fed cattle, I think we will see beef selling at the supermarket for $12/lb ground beef, $36/lb for roasts, and $48/lb for steaks. Steaks will be the new lobster . . .

I can sell you grass fed grass finished beef now (and I pretty much mean now) at $3.50/lb on the rail, and most likely $6.00/lb in your freezers--for everything.

There's a certain amount of fogginess to running a cattle business, especially if you are doing it the way I am. I want a sustainable ranch which will be good to the cattle, good to the land, and good to me and my family. It won't do me any good to run myself ragged for three years on a Ranch if the end result is that it drives me out of the business.

I think beef ought to taste like it has walked around a specific pastureland for 3 years, and achieved maturity slowly (36 months for us versus 15 months for commercial beef).

Because I don't know anyone around here who does what I do, I don't have regular feedback. I don't have a mentor, or anything like a local model.

I did, however, get three separate responses within the last few days which made me feel good. Very very good. In fact, I'm smiling all the time. It is your collective interest and kindness which helps me continue. Seriously, thank you all.

One customer wrote: "The order I got last year was honestly the best beef I've ever had." Another: "We are out of roasts, just finishing the last 3 packages of steaks, and have maybe ten pounds of ground beef left from last year. We are so grateful to have yummy beef for our family."

2025 is shaping up to be one of my favorite years.

I may be wrong, but I suspect some of you enjoy hearing about the inner workings of our ranch, sort of like "inside baseball" only with cattle.

2025 marks the first year we have sold live cattle. Our cattle stock is a bit smaller (homestead sized) Aberdeen (Lowline) Angus cattle, raised without medications of any kind, on grass and browse, from birth to sale. The only supplements to their diet are winter feeding of valley grass hay, and year-round access to clean water, mineral blocks, and fallen apples from the orchard.

Ranch cattle are from a closed herd, and have not been medicated or pampered; they learn from an early age to stay near mom and to become self-starters in the grazing & browsing arena. Ten years into this project, I think our herd is already "pasture-hardened" by experience and natural selection. None have ever spent a night in a barn, and most have made it through ice storms and snow.

Let's assume a neighbor purchases two steers weighing 400 lbs each at $2.00/lb. The Ranch receives $1,600. If the same two steers went to auction, the sale price might be $2.90/lb--the Ranch would receive $2,140 minus fees. The Ranch takes a financial hit of $540 by selling directly. But there's a lot of uncertainty in auction transactions, so I'm willing to forego $540 in "theoretical" gain for the certainty of sale.

Technically the Buyer's return on investment is 162.5% for 10 months, or close to 220% annualized.

A customer asked me if I could find an older cow suitable for slaughter to use for her dog who has food allergy issues.

Dogs can chew on bones, and so getting all possible bones from the butcher is a good idea. There's really no absolute reason to get ground beef for raw dog food. If you get roasts cut into somewhat smaller sizes (say 1-2 pounds), the dog can quite easily do the final processing for you. And one day, you can give Fido a juicy pair of trimmed ribs--he will get exercise gnawing on the bones and extracting the marrow along with protein, fats and calcium. Win-win, as they say.

Economics: If a 146 lb carcass produces 120 pounds of packaged meat, then the Butcher fee would be $197 and the Ranch fee would be $365. That's a total of $562, or $4.70 per pound.

Eukanuba charges about $93 per 30 lb bag, or $3.10/lb. I'm pretty sure that the actual "meat" content of their kibbles is not 50%. Not even close. I suspect that if you feed your dog a quarter pound of real beef, it will equate to 2 pounds of whatever comes in a bag.

I have learned many amazing things in the ten years we have operated Spencer Shadow Ranch. Perhaps the most amazing thing is, like a hamster on a wheel, no matter how fast I run and how many of my To-Do items I check off, the Ranch is always ready to surprise me with more. I cannot outrun the Ranch.

We spent most of August dismantling, re-buttressing and then building anew our small but extremely important Bridge Over Nameless Creek. It spans 24 feet and is 20 feet wide but it is the only way for us to work on the eastern side of the Ranch and the only exit to the south.

Upon investigation, years of driving heavy (> 40,000 lbs) equipment off the concrete and onto the decking had taken its toll. To buttress the bridge trusses, we bought used 24' long treated bridge timbers, 8" x 16", which we lifted into place with a tractor on one end and a skidsteer on the other, and then bolted them sideways into the existing and partially failing timbers. We bought about one hundred 4" x 8" x 13' boards, treated them all in a jury-rigged cattle feeder (our "dunker"), and they became our deck.

We put a 5 mph speed limit (honor system) on the bridge and a 5-ton vehicle limit. It was quite the task, done all by hand except for some material movement via skidsteer. Prospectively speaking, it's a 40 year bridge, I believe. So, I will have to do it all over again when I hit 110 years old.

The Ranch throws out all kinds of chaotic events. If you are comfortable with Chaos, with something going "wrong" just about every week, then ranching is right for you. Here we run a complex water utility system (two wells, two pump houses, PVC piping running at least 2 miles underground), a sewage treatment system, an emergency power system, livestock fencing, predator deterrence systems, road maintenance for ~3 miles of gravel roads, a forest management system, an equipment and vehicle maintenance operation, along with a livestock health management and sales operation.

We lost our trusty but very idiosyncratic Great Pyrenees, Ruby, some time in August. Ruby stayed away from people and bonded with the sheep--which is a great thing for a guardian dog. We have tried out two new pups but it's not going well. Almost nightly losses, so we are considering whether and how to remain in the sheep business.

I try to keep the ranch work at the lowest stress level possible--it's part of my big plan. But if there are stress days, it's always the process leading up to corralling and sorting out the livestock in anticipation of a kill day.

However, by some miscalculation I had committed to babysit my granddaughter on Tuesday morning when I was supposed to be moving cattle into the pens. Because of my late start, the mercury was already rising by 10 am when I started to move the cattle, and they were not buying it.

Wednesday morning, a couple of hours to get the job done. At 6:30 a.m. I started with the help of a neighbor. The air was cool, the grass was dewy and by 7:15 we had 60 head in the pen and ready to be sorted. By 8:30 am we had all the graduates ready and the rest of the herd released. Farmer's Helper drove in at about 9:15. Whew, as they say in Wordle.

Long story short, we had very nice looking beeves, ranging in hanging weight from 480 lbs to 588 lbs.

Ah, the grass is high and wet, the cattle are sleek (that term refers to their summer coats which are clean and shiny) and fattening up nicely, cows are dropping calves, and the world is good.

People who raise cattle in this part of the country have a grazing concept they call "100 Degree Days." These are the best days for growing grass and forbs and they are determined simply by adding the high and the low of the day. If the result is 100 degrees or more (say 64 and 44, so 108) then it's a top grass growing day. Of course the grass also needs moist soil.

We watch the temperatures closely, doing our simple addition on each day's predicted temperatures: 54/48 zzzz 55/41 zzzz 58/38 zzzz 60/40 -- Bingo! 65/48 -- Bingo!

During the last ten years or so the great grass growing days were always April and May, and sometimes June. But last year--2023--the rain stopped at the end of April and did not return until sometime in October. So this year, so far, is a banner year and we will enjoy it.

Right now it's time to begin buying hay and alfalfa for next winter. Our beef are not commercial beef in age, taste or size. We raise Aberdeen Angus beef and crosses for 30-36 months. They end up about 900 lbs and they are naturally a lot more lean than what you have eaten. Commercial beef grows for about 15 months. A front quarter of one of our beeves might hang at 115 lbs, while a front quarter from a commercial animal might weigh 240 lbs.

We had our first annual ranch tour in a few years yesterday. It was remarkable for 3 things:

The Ranch goes international. We had attendees from China, Tibet, Mongolia and Japan (and Korea, of course) and sold beef to all of them. If this sounds like a surprise for a business model that is relentlessly local, all of these international clients live in Eugene.

Doug the Cook. I did my simple preparation of three somewhat pedestrian steaks (sirloin and flank) with a simple rub, a pre-cooking olive oil massage, and an air fry finish (6-6-6) and I think the results were pretty good, proving that cooking lean grass fed beef can be done simply with simple equipment.

Is May the best month each and every year? I certainly think so. May brings everything that is good in life--blue skies, puffy white clouds, frequent warmish rains, lush grasses and clover, a beautiful, seemingly never-ending series of flowering trees (hawthorn, cherry, apple, plum, pear), and flowering flowers.

This May we will have our first ranch tour in a while. Saturday, May 11th, from 10 to noon, we will take a short walk around the ranch, peek in the barns and sheds, explain what we are about and try to answer any questions you may have. Many of the ranch tourists will be repeat visitors, which is great because we always like to see our beloved clientele again and observe how their children have grown.

If they can squeeze in an hour or so on the tour, then Spencer Butte or the Cascade Raptor Center offer more diversion on a nice day--practically on the spot, as most of you know.

I always feel that when potential customers can actually see the ranch in progress, then they immediately "get" it, and can decide if a quarter beef or lamb would be a good decision.

The livestock, blessed with warm jackets and 4-wheel drive, are responsible for finding their graze and distributing their manure, while we provide and maintain fences, gates, water and minerals. The grass-fed and grass-finished product is simple: ten cattle born on this ranch, raised about 36 months here on grass and nothing but, who never step into a truck or cattle trailer, who never have an angry or angst-filled moment, gather together in a pen early one morning and are dispatched by one anesthetic flash (30.06) at the end. Three times each year.

I am always looking into simple, economic and sustainable health hacks for myself and have found quite a few over the decades.

At 6 a.m. every morning I have a large cup of hot tea and put off breakfast until later. I was fortunate enough, courtesy of the Peace Corps in 1976, to begin to eat probiotic kimchi (the dietary fountain of youth and health) and will, God willing and the creek don't rise, hit 50 years of this practice in 2026.

My latest: I have replaced coffee, entirely, with beef broth. In the morning, I spoon out about 4 oz. of beef broth concentrate, add pepper and salt and 12 oz of water. It has a soothing taste and energizes me for the morning.

Kettle & Fire out of Austin, Texas charges $9 for a 16 oz carton. If you drink one a day for 4 months you'll run up a ~$1,100 bone broth tab. $3,300 for a year. For chicken carcass soup.

On the other hand, if you just order our beef and get the soup bones, you can, with just one big soup bone, boil up 4 gallons of grass-fed, grass-finished beef bone broth. An entire beef can provide at least 60 gallons of beef broth. At trendy supermarket prices ($50 per gallon) that's about $3,000 worth of beef broth per whole beef. Cost to you? Maybe $12 worth of bones, and your time in the kitchen.

The US cattle herd is now the smallest it's been since 1951. 1951 was a time when the US population was a mere 150 million people. Today our population is 342 million, and we have only the domestic beef supply of 75 years ago? As the younger generation liberally sprays their communications: WTF? (I think that acronym stands for "What's That For!")

The second data point is that the price of beef is at an all time high and, for anyone used to looking at commodity charts in an inflationary environment, ready to go higher. Beef is just catching up to "inflation quick starters" like housing and transportation, but its rise will be turbo-charged by the shrinking herd.

Just as most people have been shocked to see a house which sold for $250K in 2012 now selling for $750K, get ready for the real supermarket shock in beef. The concept of a steak entree in the $25 range will be as quaint as a 4-bedroom house in South Eugene offered at $250K.

So, invest in a chest freezer, join with friends and family to make buying groups, and buy a steer so you can laugh at the $35/lb ribeye costs coming to your grocery and butcher shop.

I was in a high end grocery store after church today and wandered by the Beef Aisle. Left to right: Ribeye Steak for $28.99/lb, New York Steak for $24.99/lb and Tri-Tip for $18.99/lb. The ground beef (not shown) was $8.99/lb.

When you buy these items you have no idea of how many cows contributed the steaks and where they were from, how old (or young) they were, how they were treated. For the ground beef, you don't even know how many animals "contributed" to the product. In a word, it's all Mystery Meat of one variety or another.

If you buy from the Ranch, you get your Beef from one single animal, and you interact with your Butcher who cuts it to order. Not many people these days have clothing made to order by a tailor or dress-maker, or hire an architect to build a house just so; this might be your last chance to get something "to order." (And you can do it every year!) Bespoke Beef.

Let's say you buy a quarter beef and get 100 lbs of packages. You will pay, all-in, about $500. Call it $5.00/lb. You will get 30 lbs of steaks, 20 lbs of roasts, and about 50 lbs of ground beef, stew meat and well-fleshed soup bones. Enough for a family of four for 6 months to a year.

If you spend $500 on the grocery store's mystery meat, by the time you get 20 lbs of steaks at $25/lb, you will have spent the entire $500. Just 10 steak dinners. So: spend $500 for 10 mystery steaks, or spend $500 and get 30 steaks, 10 roasts and 50 packages of ground beef. As someone once said in a movie, "Help me help you."

Some things you just can't un-see, and we all have our lists. How about a Tomahawk Steak?

A "tomahawk" steak is a comic monstrosity, where the butcher carves a beef rib with a 1.5 to 2 inch steak but leaves the entire 12 to 14 inch long bone in place. Here is an ad for a Tomahawk Steak from Snake River Farms, weighing in at 2.5 lbs, $158 per steak. 158 dollars for a ribeye steak and a silly handle.

That 2.5 lb hunk of caveman glory is at least 1/2 bone by weight, so the "meat" part weighs only 1.25 lbs. And since wagyu steak is bathing in fat--about 40% fat and 60% beef--there's only 3/4 lb of actual beef protein in that Tomahawk Steak. $210.67 per pound of Tomahawk beef.

Through the magic of mathematics, they are selling you that Tomahawk thing at 30X--thirty times--what you'd pay for a ribeye steak from the Ranch. That one Tomahawk purchase runs about 40% of your total cost of a rear quarter of one of our steers, cut, wrapped and frozen, ready for your freezer.

Well, that's probably more than you thought you'd read about tomahawk steaks, but it's possible you found something interesting in there somewhere. Merry Christmas and Happy 2024 to all.

I don't usually send out an email when there is no beef or lamb processing on the horizon, but I thought a short report on the November 8 processing (Graduation Day, as we like to call it at the Ranch) might be informative.

We ourselves are getting a whole beef and a lamb. I find the process of giving instructions to the butcher and then the pick-up of the enormous prize (our version of Christmas--so many wrapped packages!) one of my favorite, anticipatory events of the year. Right now as the checks roll in I feel especially grateful to you once again.

The average carcass weight of our fall steers was 452 lbs, which means a 1/2 would be 226 lbs, and the average front/rear quarter combination would be 109/118 lbs. At the estimated 80% yield (bone-in, soup bones, osso buco etc.) the half yields about 180 lbs of packaged beef. The family with the 1/2, assuming they prepare 3 lbs of beef twice a week, has 30 weeks of beef in their freezer.

One last thought: in the new diet world of Keto and Carnivore dieting, the prospect of buying that much beef at current grocery and butcher shop prices must be daunting. I'm going to see if there's some way I can organize a "buyer's club" for our beef products.

Breaking News: All beef we sell you this fall is selling for $3.00/lb on the rail. We simply have too much inventory on the pastures going into winter feeding. Say hello to ~$5.00/lb grass fed grass finished beef.

We are finally through the 5-month long drought of spring & summer and enjoying cooler, wetter times. We are currently in the middle of a new 4-5 year project, and the goal is to "transform" 50+ acres of dense, brushy mixed forest into a nice habitat-rich oak woodland.

To accomplish this, we basically have two goals: remove most of the softwoods where the fir and cedar act aggressively to monopolize the water and sunlight, then remove the spindly, crooked oaks, and create enough canopy opening for the remaining 100-foot tall oaks to crown out and thrive. The second goal is to create enough connected "meadowlands" so the livestock can graze them regularly.

In the end we hope to have converted about 50 acres of overgrown and out of control mixed woods into "meadow + oak woodland." The beauty of this is we can "employ" the livestock (they work for graze) to maintain with minimal rancher input.

Please go in with a neighbor to get a whole beef--ours are smaller framed as you know, maybe 500 lbs or so on the rail--and share the savings.

It's sometimes hard to make sense of a crazy & complicated world. But my heuristic, my rule of thumb, says: whatever prices were in 2015, they are double that now. The Consumer Price Index might not say that, but anyone who shops at Costco knows it's true.

Things haven't really gone up in price or value, our currency has been cut in half.

Despite inflation, pricing remains delightfully 2016-ish. $3.50/lb on the rail for quarters and halves, and only $3.25/lb for a whole beef.

I bring you tidings of great joy. I previously reported how we conquered Grass Fed & Grass Finished lean steaks with the Sign of the Beast method (6-6-6). Method: using a common tablefork pierce the steak as many times as you like, then massage soy sauce and pepper into it, and finally massage it with olive oil.

Now for the latest epiphany: Chuck Roast done Korean-style. Slice the 3 pound roast into 3 pieces, create a version of Korean beef marinade with soy sauce, crushed fresh garlic and ginger, sugar, pepper, a tablespoon of sesame oil, and plaster it with bacon fat. Air fry for 886--8 minutes, turn, 8 minutes, rest for 6 minutes, slice and serve. As tender as the filet, very moist and tasty.

I don't believe I will ever eat roast beef any other way.

I'd like to spend this email going over whole beef basics. When I think of beef, to be honest, I think about steaks. I enjoy the rest, immensely, but I'd be lying if I said I love all the cuts the same--in the beef family, I have a favorite child: steaks.

Our 900 lb animal will produce a 475 lb carcass. The finished cuts--without soup bones--should be 68% of the hanging weight, so your packages will total out to 323 lbs. The steak part of it is supposed to be 27%, with roasts totalling 23%, and the ground beef, stew etc. about 50%.

A whole beef of this size, professionally done, would yield $4,089 worth of products at retail prices. The butcher and Ranch fee total $2,052--that's $2,036 in savings. Or, looked at another way, you just bought 87 lbs of steaks for $10.14/lb, 75 lbs of roasts for $6.01/lb and 161 lbs of ground beef for $4.46/lb.

Ribeye Steak Just Because It's Tuesday! Let's say a family of four buys 1/2 beef. 22 packages of steaks means 22 dinners for two or 11 dinners for four. 80 lbs of burger serves 160 individual portions. Depending on how you do it, 1/2 beef could provide the protein part of ~80 family meals, about 22% of your dinners for a year.

With your chest freezer and bulk purchases, you can reduce your grocery trips, maybe by half or more. I call this shopping the chest freezer. Maybe Sunday evening, 5 minutes total, pick 2 or 3 packages to thaw: steaks on Tuesday, slow cook a roast for Friday, something with burgers on the weekend.

So many topics to run through now that Autumn is officially here, the rains have begun again and life on the Ranch is exploding. The incredible ability of our little patch of the Earth to not only support new life (calves, lambs, blackberry, hawthorn, oak and puppies!) but to encourage it and cheer it on. We keep seeing new arrivals of wildlife in numbers we haven't seen before this year. Birds in the thousands, the bear (or bears) which now call Fox Hollow home, coyote, bobcat, snakes, lizards and skinks.

The pictures attached are from the grocery on Wednesday, showing ground beef ($8/lb), some sort of "Beefalo 85% Ground Beef" for $12/lb, some lamb stew chunks for $15/lb and chops for $19/lb, and some chickens for $4.70/lb. Not just food, but food for thought.

As for "Organic Smart Whole Chicken Hatched"--we stopped administering IQ tests to our chickens years ago; the chickens simply got too depressed with the results, moped around and stopped eating.

Tonight is Porterhouse night here, and maybe tomorrow night as well. Steak Recipe: thaw steaks completely, massage a tablespoon of olive oil into each cooking side and pepper. Allow the meat to rest for 4-6 hours in the fridge, removing them to warm up for 20 minutes before cooking. Salt lightly just before cooking. Air Fryer at 375F for 6-6-6. Instead of additional salt, I add a little soy sauce. Over the years with all the steak sauces, rubs, marinades and dips we have forgotten what real beef actually tastes like. It's actually really good.

In the Book of Revelations we learn of the magical (in a bad sense) number: 666. However, we have had an entirely different revelation for you concerning beef and "666".

How do you cook the lean steaks so they are as tender as steaks layered with grain fed fat? We tried just about every method: cold drying, fruit juice marinades, Crockpot, Instant-pot, low temperature pan frying. All ended up with mixed results, never with homerun results. Until last week, when we finally tried out an Air Fryer. What a revelation, what an epiphany!

Set it for 375 F, and cook it for 6 minutes, turn it and cook it for 6 minutes, extract it and let it rest (this is important) for 6 minutes. Our kitchen smelled like delicious steak, and after the 6-minute rest mark our bone-in ribeyes were the best we've ever done. So, technically, it's 375/6/6/6.

As for the grocery store's "Organic Smart Whole Chicken Hatched"--we stopped administering IQ tests to our chickens years ago; the chickens simply got too depressed with the results, moped around and stopped eating.

When our son visited for the first time in 3 years we ate a lot of Ranch beef, lamb and chicken. At the end of his stay we had a 2.5 day period where we air-fried tenderloin strips, sirloin, T-bone, filets and pork chops for dinner, lunch, dinner, lunch, dinner, respectively. A carnivore carnival of sorts.

We have a wonderful, truly wonderful Akbash (think Great Pyrenees with shorter fur and perhaps more expressive eyes?), Bella, who needs to be rehomed. She's about 3 years old. She is great with children, people, livestock, but she has an inclination to wander and since our fencing & gating system generally keeps the livestock in, it doesn't keep the dogs here unless they want to stay.

Her issue (because of our fencing style) is she decided to adopt the ranch next door's young family with 3 kids, who love her, but in the process decided to displace their two dogs and two cats--so unfair. No harm, just a growl was enough to set up the new social order. Sadly.

This particular kind of dog will keep your general area free of bears, cougars and coyotes--they don't need to engage, simply bark their warning and show their teeth.

We are winding up our 7th full year on Spencer Shadow Ranch, probably not a bad time to go over a few of the things I've learned along the way.

Change is the constant. "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."--Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard. The rancher must be vigilant to see not only what isn't working, but what new opportunities may arise. Pre-ranch, I thought I'd work on it for five years or so and then just coast. Well, that's not the way it happens.

Learned Helplessness and Learned Resilience. If in the course of life you acquire "helplessness" as a response to the daily chaos of the world, you will live in misery. If, on the other hand, you acquire "resilience," you will thrive, no matter what. One thing the Ranch brings is a daily dose of chaos, more than I recall from the urbs or suburbs. Out here you will drown in helplessness, and thrive in resilience. It's just that stark.

Getting things done. It's not what you know that counts, or even who you know that counts. It's who the people you know (and trust) know, the carefully cultivated network of people that your trusted friends connect you to.

Finally, I would like to exercise some gratitude and thank you all for your interest in our place and your patronage in the products.

Lots of things are going on at your ranch: winter feeding our 100 head of Aberdeen Angus cross cattle with valley hay, winter feeding our 200 head of sheep with pasture forage and Christmas Valley alfalfa for protein supplement.

From where I sit and what I see there's an excellent chance of not only rising prices across the board in agriculture, but shortages and scarcity. Maybe it won't hit us here in Oregon, but I heard recently that Oregonians import 75-85% of their food from outside the state, so maybe it will impact us.

Lumber is now incredibly expensive--close to twice as much as 2019. Real estate you know about. Fuel prices are skyrocketing in January & February--not the season of rising gasoline prices normally. But we almost can't use the word "normally" anymore.

Now might not be a bad time to invest in another 7.5 cubic foot freezer, and maybe a fruit & vegetable drier, and begin to think about food security. The old model of just expecting full and inexpensive food in the grocery store may get a few giant bumps in 2021.

In "The Dallas Buyers Club" Matthew McConaughey travels to Mexico to buy AZT for AIDS treatments for a group of people he helps back in Dallas, in order to circumvent the foot-dragging of the FDA.

When people get interested in our beef, the first question they have is how much? Not how much does it cost but how much beef is actually in a quarter or half a beef? How much space am I going to need?

Just "allocate" $7.50/lb to the deluxe cuts and $3.25/lb to the economy cuts. Since a side of beef will basically cut out to a 60/40 division by weight, it will average out to the $5.75/lb we know is the total price. $3.25/lb for the best ground beef, osso buco, soup bones with lots of meat on them, $7.50/lb for ribeye or T-bone steaks.

How to weigh them? Simple: just go shopping for what you want and weigh your bag on a bathroom scale. You can choose a child to be the "tare" weight: "Hey, Johnny, step on the scale. 112 lbs. Now, hold this bag of steaks. 128 lbs (16 lbs of steaks)."