For six years, Nick Chambers, aka Chef Funghi, has managed Valley Roots Food Hub, a distributor of locally grown produce located in Mosca, Colorado. Besides supplying truly local produce to consumers across Southern Colorado, Nick’s operation supplies the majority of produce featured on Chef Chase Kelly’s menu at Ranchlands’ Zapata Ranch.
I was first introduced to the term “self-selection” in a barefoot trimming clinic in Australia about a year ago. The couple that were hosting the clinic, a trimmer and a vet, were starting a holistic rehab center in New South Wales in which one of the main focus points would be a Paddock-Paradise-style track system with a wide variety of planted herbs to provide the natural process of self-selection to their rehab horses. The thought behind this being that in the wild, horses (and other grazing animals) will seek out and choose to eat specific plants with medicinal properties to benefit their unique health, a process that most domestic horses don’t have access to, and which most horse owners compensate for by feeding an excess of supplements that blanket a wide variety of needs as a “cover all the bases” strategy.
Lessons from a small-scale prescriptive grazing project.
The dining room at the Zapata Lodge is a place to learn about how to eat intentionally, responsibly, and ethically.
What do we mean when we use the term “regenerative agriculture”? In our view, it is a coalescing of people who care and are actively doing something about the ecological problems we face.
There is more than one way to know a place. There is more than one way to see a landscape. There is more than one way to understand land health. And there is more than one way to sense if a landscape is healthy.
Of all the diverse classes of cattle we have on the Chico, our mother cows work the hardest.
The Beefmaster bull is a symbol of strength and resilience in a herd that is built for production, endurance, and efficiency.
A Beefmaster cow is more that an animal; she is a management philosophy embodied – a flesh-and-blood way of living with the land that represents how humans and their animals might do better to live in harmony with the indigenous patterns of the natural world than to try to fight them.
I was thinking today about how different spring times can be from one year to the next.