Running a small family business isn’t easy, especially when it’s a farm. In this age of mass produced food, there aren’t many operations like ours left in the U.S. Farming requires more skill than you think. You need to have a good grasp of biology, math, economics, mechanics, environmental studies, writing, interpersonal skills and negotiation tactics. You need to be able to work incredibly long hours on incredibly little sleep and you need to learn how to find peace amidst a profession of constant risk.

I owe everything I know about farming and most of what I know about business savvy to my dad. He taught me how to rotate crops so one replenishes the soil for the crop you intend to plant next year, how to build personal relationships with local restaurants and brew pubs who may want to buy our beef and how to price our product at the right tier so we could carve out a niche in the market for our family brand.

When I was a kid it was not atypical for my dad to fit in two hours of feeding before the sun came up, balance the books for this month’s salary pay outs to the farm hands before breakfast, bale two fields of hay by lunch, fix a broken tractor axle by mid-afternoon, squeeze in a trip to the bank to negotiate a loan for the summer silage delivery and then head back to take a load to the butcher. Evenings were spent reviewing books, on the phone with other business partners and just general planning around cash flow to keep us in business for another month. Some months were easy. Some months were not. When he finally did go to bed it was not uncommon to receive a call from the Sherriff’s station in the middle of the night because part of the herd broke through the fence and was wondering around the highway. On those nights, my dad would spend the rest of the night chasing down and bringing back wayward cattle and repairing fence line. Before dawn, he’d start all over again. Never has there been a profession that blends physical and mental capabilities and demands so much just to stay afloat. But stay afloat he has and to this day we still raise the best beef East of the Mississippi.

My dad taught me about the link between our land and our food, our family history and food, our culture and food and our future and food. Our family heritage is most expressed through our food. Many of the recipes you’ll see here are interpretations of family secrets, passed down from generations of southern cooks. They feature ingredients that can be found in the South, and that represent local pride. More than that they are all grown locally. Southern cooking culture is intimately tied the ground upon which we live. In the South this means vegetables like corn, black eyed peas, carrots and sweet potatoes, leafy greens like collards and kale, local favorites like spoon bread, three bean salad and ambrosia cake and meat dishes featuring fried chicken, pork and, of course, family raised beef.  We were eating local before eating local was cool. It’s more sustainable for the environment and our business, and let’s be honest, it tastes better!