Episode 367: The Truth About Nutrient-Depleted Food: Why Regenerative Farming Matters with Ramstead Ranch
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify
Imagine eating food that not only nourishes your body, but also heals the planet. In this episode, Erin is exploring the transformative power of regenerative farming with Stan and Eileen from Ramstead Ranch.
Together, they break down how regenerative agriculture goes FAR beyond the “organic” label and why it matters for your immune system, gut health, and chronic inflammation. There’s an often-overlooked connection between soil health, animal welfare, and your body’s nutrient absorption!
You’ll learn what makes food truly nutrient-dense, how industrial farming practices have stripped our food of bioavailable minerals, and simple questions you should ask your local farmers if you want to navigate your food choices with curiosity and care.
In this episode:
The differences between “organic,” “pasture-raised,” and truly regenerative food practices
How modern farming depletes soil and why that matters for your nutrient intake
What “grass-fed AND grass-finished” actually means (and why it’s crucial)
The surprising role of soil microbes in your immune system and gut health
How to ask the right questions when sourcing food - even if you’re not a farmer!
Resources mentioned:
Organifi supplement powder (save 20% on your order with code FUNK)
LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing powder (Use code FUNK and get a free sample pack with any purchase!)
Qualia Senolytic (get up to 50% off and an extra 15% off your first purchase with link + code FUNKS)
Bon Charge (Use code FUNK to save 15%)
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A farm, a ranch, is part of an ecosystem, and if any part of that ecosystem is suffering or diminished through the activities of farming and ranching, every part of that ecosystem is diminished. And so we want the animals to be optimally healthy. Likewise, we want the land to be optimally healthy so that the people are optimally healthy, to help facilitate it all as well. And so it is all intrinsically linked, and we want to take care of every aspect of it.
Erin Holt:
Welcome to the Funk'tional Nutrition podcast, spelled with a K, because we do things a little differently around here. I'm your host, Erin Holt, and I've got 15 years of clinical experience as a functional nutritionist and mindset coach, creating a new model that I call intuitive functional medicine, where we combine root cause medicine with the innate intelligence of your body. This is where science meets self trust. Your body already knows how to heal, and this show is going to show you how. If you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health, be sure to follow and share with a friend, because you never know whose life you might change.
Erin:
Speaker A:
Hello my friends.
Speaker B:
I have such an awesome episode for you guys today.
Speaker C:
I'm talking to Stan and Eileen from Ramstead Ranch. They are a regenerative farm based out of Spokane, Washington. I love following them on Instagram. They are a must follow their Ramstead Ranch on Instagram and they just provide such rich education about the importance of farming practices and how we grow our food. But they do it in such a warm and welcoming way. I'm always sending their content to all of my friends just because it's just like such feel good vibes but also extremely educational and that's why they came on the show. I wanted to bring them on for a couple of different reasons. One is that most of us by now know that our food and our soil is mineral depleted, nutrient depleted, but we don't really understand why. Honestly, like that's not really an area of my expertise because I'm not a farmer. And so they just helped to pull the whole picture together for me. So I really understand the whys behind our food source.
This is something that I've been talking about a lot over the past eight years of this podcast and this really helps to connect it and anchor it in for me at least. I also wanted to provide them as a resource because I talk a lot about our local farms here in New Hampshire. I love them, we shop with them, but I recognize that our audience is not just local to New Hampshire Hampshire. So I wanted to provide a resource for you to get access to really intentionally raised animal products. And Ramstead Ranch has a home delivery service, so you can head to their website to check that out. Ramstead ranch.com they're also talking about it at the end of this episode, so I hope that this is informative as it was for me. I really, really enjoyed their presence in talking to them. They're just both such awesome people, and I know that you guys will enjoy the show.
I have Stan and Eileen here. I'm so excited to talk to you. Thank you for taking the time off of the farm to have this conversation with me for our audience. Welcome.
Eileen/Stan:
Yeah, thanks for having us here.
Erin:
All right, so I'd love to start things off by connecting the conversation we're about to have with overall health, because I talk a lot about our physical health, our microbiomes, our bodies, and our bodies and our microbiomes are all ecosystems in and of themselves. But we're also part of a much larger ecosystem. And when that ecosystem breaks down, so do we, so does our body, so does our health. We're seeing rates of autoimmune conditions, skyrocket, chronic illness, gut dysfunction, digestive problems in both children and adults. There's more eczema, there's more asthma, there's more food sensitivity. This is all immune reactivity. And by the time somebody gets tough, us in our practice, it's kind of like, okay, how do I fix this? How do I heal this? How do I resolve this? And we can do that. That's literally what we do.
But part of the reason I started this show eight years ago was to swim upstream and address the issues from the root before it gets to the point of total breakdown. And I think a huge and often overlooked part of the health conversation is the health of our soil. It is the nutrient density of our food. It is farm practices, and that's why you guys are here. So I am hoping that you can shed Some light for our listeners.
Eileen:
Yeah, we would love to. It's really funny that you use the analogy of getting to the root, because that's exactly what we focus on too.
Erin Holt:
Yeah, isn't that funny? I mean, you guys are literally digging things up from the roots.
Stan:
Yeah. We got started in a lot of along the blueprint of what you just described, where my wife was in the medical community and was watching people get heavier and sicker and, and diseases at younger ages year in and year out. We were noticing all this and decided that nutrition and food value was really at the base of a lot of that. So we started pretty simply with some big garden boxes, started producing vegetables, and we thought we can do some proteins. This is actually very rewarding. So we added in 50 chickens and it wasn't long, we had five sheep. Anyway, so fast forward, I feel like everybody, whatever our genetics are, we want them to express at the highest possible level, physically and mentally, for as long as possible. And nutrition is at the base of that. And at the base of that is our soil health. So at the end of the day, we're. We're microbial farmers. We're totally about the microbial health of the soil, which puts the nutrition into bioavailable forms for us.
Eileen:
Yeah. And we also recognize that a farm, a ranch, is part of an ecosystem. And if any part of that ecosystem is suffering or diminished through the activities of farming and ranching, every part of that ecosystem is diminished. And so we want the animals to be optimally healthy. Likewise, we want the land to be optimally healthy so that the people are optimally healthy to help facilitate it all as well. And so it is all intrinsically linked and we want to take care of every aspect of it.
Stan:
It is an alive, healthy cycle. There's more microbes in a handful of soil than there are people on the earth. It's a live, intelligent life force that's working all the time. The microbial activity in the soil, mines, vitamins, minerals, nutrients, micronutrients from the soil, trades it to the plants for sugars, for their community, among other things. At that point, it's all that nutrition is in a bioavailable form for the animals, then onto us.
Erin:
When you're talking about the health of your soil, how does that different from, like, more conventional farming practices? Is it the same? Is it different? If so, how so?
Eileen:
Sure. So in conventional farming, there's typically the same or similar activities are happening on a piece of ground over and over and over again, and the same nutrients are essentially getting extracted and to be put into the same plants year in and year out, and those get harvested and essentially taken away from the land. And so what we focus on is a practice called regenerative agriculture, where instead of extracting over time, we're actually creating health, more and more health and abundance over time. So it's a notch above, in our minds, it's a notch above sustainable agriculture, because that kind of description means, oh, we can keep doing the same thing forever and nothing's going to suffer. But with regenerative agriculture, we can actually heal land that has been mistreated or has had a lot of the nutrients and minerals extracted out of it. Through the natural activities of the animals. And so instead of doing the same thing on a particular piece of land over and over again, we're going to rotate animals through, have them harvest the grass for their food, right? They cows, are grazing, have them fertilize the land with manure, and then move on and allow that ground to rest adequately so that it can regenerate. And those roots of the plants can help feed the microbes in that cycle that Stan was describing.
So that the soil is healthy and vibrant with actual life, not just kind of a cocktail of the nitrogens and the potassiums and the fertilizers and things that were. A conventional agricultural system is typically having to add in order to make plants grow. So we're facilitating abundant life that helps mine the soil of the nutrients that the plants needs, as opposed to applying it with chemistry.
Stan:
So we have no chemical additives, no synthetic fertilizers, no pesticides, herbicides, et cetera. It's all done naturally with the animals, and a big part of it is the rest. So, for instance, we have. And we do a lot of science and soil science, but also just observation. We have pastures that. And I'm not talking big pastures, maybe 30 acres that five years ago would really finish 50 cows. Well, today that same pasture will do 100 cows. So through our carbon sequestration, we hold more water.
Our ground temperatures are cooler in the heat of the summer. We focus on planning very diversified pastures with 10 or 12 species of grasses and maybe 15% legumes, clovers, and so forth that help fix the nitrogen in the soil. But the idea is that we have early, really early weather stuff, rainy stuff, hot weather, species of grass is what I'm saying stuff, late fall. So at any time that the animal takes a bite, there's two or three things in their prime. So we're really focused on diverse pastures.
Eileen:
That allow the animals to Graze naturally, which is what they're happiest doing. And it's. It's what helps feed them optimally.
Stan:
Our cows move every day, so they either eat it or trumpet or fertilize. Fertilize it, and then they move. And then that ground rests for at least 90 days, if we even come back to it at all that year. And that rest period is critical for the soil health.
Erin:
And that rest period. I mean, like, rest is not something that we do here in America. Hard stop. Right? So it's like you guys are talking about farming, but I'm like, this is a metaphor also. So when you're resting land, I'm assuming that that's not happening as much in a conventional farming practice. I feel like it's more. You said the word extraction. Like it's more just extracting from land, taking and taking and taking. And then the inputs that it's giving back in are more from chemical fertilizers than from anything else. That's what I'm hearing. I am not a farmer, and I just want to say that most of our audience is not a farmer, but you guys are talking about it in a way that I think I'm understanding.
Eileen:
Another way to picture it is in a conventional setting. We humans roll in and say, hey, what do we need? We need if it's corn, if it's grains, if it's cattle, to produce meat. Okay, what do we need to add to this land to make it produce more? And what can we do to make the cows gain weight faster or the corn grow bigger or faster, shorter seasons and that sort of thing. And it's, you know, we're doing things as humans. We've got to manipulate the system to get more out of it. Versus, our approach with regenerative agriculture is to ask, how does nature do this? Because nature does this on its own. And how can we plug in something so that we can ride the natural cycles and act synergistically with what nature is already doing? We can plug in. How do we plug into nature? And so for us, where we're raising proteins, you know, we're raising animals, the best example of this is mimicking the bison across the plains as they were naturally evolved to do.
And so the description that Stan was giving of rotationally grazing, where we're coming in, we're were allowing the cows to eat and tromp and fertilize the grass is similar to the way the bison would move into an area they would eat to their heart's content. And Then before man was here and sort of disrupted everything, a predator would come through and they, a predator would push the herd on and cause it to move to a new, a new place and that the ground behind that herd would then have a chance to rest and regrow. And so that's what we're doing in a sense on our acreage here at Ramstead.
Erin:
So just kind of like mimicking nature.
Eileen:
Exactly. Mimicking nature.
Stan:
We believe that nature loves to give free rides. We have to learn how to plug in and not interfere with that. And it is incredible how nature will respond to the slightest sincere effort to cooperate with it and not do things that break its cycle. It's really magical when left to itself. If you see like root cross sections of the old prairie, before we started doing anything, those old prairies had roots that were five, six, seven feet long. Root systems now root systems today are a few inches. You know, they're, they're not much.
Eileen:
And those roots are really what do the heavy lifting of pulling the minerals up from the soil, making them bioavailable for us animals. Anybody that's going to harvest in, eat, whether it's a vegetable or whether it's grass. For a ruminant animal like a cow or a sheep
Stan:
Sequestering rich amounts of carbon, the ground for the microbes to eat so that it's their part of their food supply.
Erin:
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Erin:
So we hear. I would say 90 to 100% of our audience would be familiar with this, that there's like this mineral depletion of food, this nutrient depletion of modern day food. But I don't think everyone's really connected into the whys of that. So that's just really enlightening and helps us to kind of understand why we're in a situation that we're in. I actually just saw on Instagram this morning there was somebody talking about supplements and a GP at MD came in and was like, you don't need supplements supplements, you just need to eat real food. And then the argument to that is like if only, if only we just needed to eat food and we could get all the minerals and all the nutrients that we needed, but modern day food is devoid in that. So this helps us understand why that's the case.
Eileen:
Right? And in many cases it's also not even necessarily the case that those minerals have been extracted from the soil. The soil could be rich in all of these minerals. But if there's no biological life to do the exchange between plant and inert soils, then it doesn't matter how rich the soil is with the micronutrients that you need. There's not that living engine that's doing the trading to help the minerals become bioavailable in those plants. It is compounded by the fact that most of us in the US Are eating foods that are being grown on ground that has been depleted over time. Not only that, there is less and less living life within those soils because of the chemical treatments, because of the high nitrogen cocktails and things that we're using and fertilizers and whatnot.
Erin Holt:
So can I ask you. So you talk about regenerative farming and ranching, you know, just as, like, a consumer. How is that different than going into a Whole Foods, say, and buying organic produce? If somebody was curious about that.
Eileen:
Yeah. So this is a tough one, because the organic movement started out, you know, with. It's a noble effort, like, hey, let's stop poisoning ourselves with chemistry unnecessarily so that we can eat clean food, quote clean food. And it doesn't take long for marketing and for policy and whatnot to set in and go, hey, yeah, okay, let's do organic, but let's make this thing okay, and let's make that chemical okay. And by now, at this point, fast forward to We've arrived at a place where organic is really about saying, you cannot do this, you cannot do that. You cannot xyz. The list goes on and on. But it doesn't say your animals.
We'll talk about what we know, which is raising animals. It doesn't say that your animals need to be outside where they have access to fresh air or sunshine or grazing on living soils. Likewise, lettuce doesn't have to pass any tests for how much living biology is in the soil. And so there's many farmers that definitely do a lot of work to jump through the hoops to be organic certified. But unless you know how those plants or animals or whatnot are being raised, the quality of life could still be substandard. The quality of the soil could still be substandard. The real way to know is to get to know where your food's coming from and how is it being raised. And that's a big ask for a lot of busy people, right? Because people's lives are full already. And so to try to get closer to your food sources, it takes a lot of effort.
Erin:
And I think just. It's not even just the busy part, but also not knowing the right questions to ask. So what would be your advice to a consumer? Because, I mean, we could say shop from local farms and talk to your farmers and get to know your food. But if people don't know all of this and don't know the questions to ask, that can be like a rate limiting step for a lot of folks. So what would be some questions that you would advise people to ask?
Stan:
Well, like with the beef, bison, lamb, they should be grass fed and grass finished. There's a segment that will advertise grass fed, but they'll finish them the last 60 or 90 days in a feedlot setting with corn products, GMO, that sort of thing. So grass fed, grass finished is important and it is going to be more expensive because a feedlot will finish a cow in 16, 18 months. Grass fed, grass finish takes 28 to 30 months. So you have another year of care and feed and water everything that goes into it into that animal. So it is a little more expensive because you have a lot more expenses that you have to divide into the pounds from that animal to make the ranch run on. The pigs and chickens and turkeys like that, that do require a they free range here they're on fresh pasture all the time. But they do require a supplemental grain.
At that point you want to make sure the grain is no corn, no soy, non GMO type grain. And again, it's twice the cost. It's, you know, 33 cents instead of 16 cents you could spend on grain. But to buy those organically grown, no corn, no soy, not non GMO products that have not been sprayed with Roundup and that sort of thing, it's more expensive. So the food's a little bit more expensive.
Eileen:
And I think a real simple question that anybody could ask is can I come see your farm? Or how can I see what you're doing knowing that hey, maybe we can all make it a farm visit. But certainly with social media it's very easy to share activity and whatnot. And those are those legitimate shares of here's what's going on. Here's a day in the life. You know, it's, it's morning and we're, we're out here in the pasture with the cows when you can see how those animals are raised or how those vegetables are being raised, that just really kind of draws back the curtain. And the fact that farmers are willing and interested and prioritize transparency is a huge indicator that they've got nothing to hide that maybe they're not certified organic, but they want to invite you into here's what we do, here's how we do it and here's why.
Erin:
And what I'm hearing you say too, it's like Perhaps the organic certification can showcase what farmers are not doing, but it's not showcasing what farmers are doing. So we might be able to reduce our pesticide risk by shopping organic, for example. And now we can have this conversation, particularly with the studies coming out with golf courses and proximity to golf courses and Parkinson's rates skyrocketing. Like, we can't ignore this anymore. Like, this conversation is not going back in the box. It's not being silenced. We're not the weirdos, we're not the freaks, we're not the outliers, we're not the conspiracy theorists. It's like, it's real, it's happening.
So trying to source organic food is good in that it could reduce our exposure to that. But what I'm hearing you say is that there's more to nutrient and farming practices and nutrient dense food that goes beyond just what we're avoiding in our farming practices.
Eileen:
Yeah, absolutely.
Stan:
There's more goodness available. And it doesn't take a lot of education to really start picking up on the few key things to really watch for. But with our practices, the ground is healthier by the year. It's producing more biomass, retaining more water, sequestering more carbon. We're dedicated to no animal having a bad day while they're here. We move 50, 80 cows every day. And we call them and they come, they come better than most people's dogs. I mean, they're treated well and they know that when we call, it means they're moving to a new pasture that morning, every morning. And the water that leaves here is as clean as when it gets here. So transparency is a big thing.
Erin:
Yeah, it's one of my core values. So I appreciate that from you guys. And you do such a great job. I haven't shouted out your Instagram. I probably will in the intro. But you do such a great job on your social media showcasing not just what you're doing, but why you're doing it. It is a very educational forum, your Instagram. And I never feel judged when I'm consuming your content.
I always feel like this is a movement I want to be part of. This excites me. It's very welcoming and I think we need more of that. Eileen, when we were talking before we started recording, you said it's not elitist. And I think sometimes people look at good food as elitist. And the more we can invite people into this conversation and make them feel like they have a place here, they can ask the questions. We're not going to make them feel wrong. Or bad for just doing the best that they can.
I think that's such a huge overlooked part of this whole food conversation too.
Stan:
I think that's an entry hurdle for a lot of us. We think we have to do all or nothing. If it's just one meal a week that we put down highly nutritious food and that's where we start, that's totally fine. That is a contribution to ourselves, our family, the animals that were raised under a system that's lets them live free and be what they were bred to be and the ecosystem. I mean, if it's just one meal a week, where you start, that's everybody's. Everybody's welcome.
Eileen:
Yep. Foreign.
Erin
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Erin:
You also will talk about the health benefits. So you're talking about the health of the soil, the health of the land. The health of the animals. But how does that translate into the health of our bodies when we're eating what you call truly pasture raised meat?
Eileen:
Yeah, I'm glad you emphasized that word. And it's hard to stay in front of all the slick marketing that's out there. Like Stan pointed out, every package of ground beef out there now is grass fed. Well, we try to emphasize it's truly pasture raised. So pigs and chickens have actually grazed living growing grass and they've gotten a grub and eat bugs and things like that. The cattle are grass fed and grass finished right up until the time that they're butchered. And so what that does for the nutritional profile is in particular is, is in the fats where animals that are grass fed, grass finished or pasture raised are getting those, they're getting the nutrition from living growing grass, have a more balanced ratio of omega 3s and to omega sixes versus animals that are strictly grain fed, grain finished, and they're not getting that green, they're not eating their vegetables. They have much higher omega sixes.
Eileen:
And so those omega 6s are the inflammatory fats. And so those are what are contributing to so many of these chronic illnesses when it comes to the American diet, the standard American diet. And so when we turn back to what we've evolved to eat, which is animals that are naturally grazing as they are designed by nature to do, we're getting a more balanced ratio that our bodies are happier to digest and don't cause problems for our, you know, our immune systems and our inflammatory responses.
Erin:
You know, talking about omega 6s and seed oils is a very inflammatory conversation these days, no pun intended. And it's like, you know, some people have been out here, myself included, 15 plus years, like talking about this stuff and now all of a sudden it's so highly polarized and politicized. And inflammatory. So I just want to say in case you're searching for the truth, like, first of all, good luck when it comes to one truth, when it comes to health in the human body, like you're not going to find it. This is the place that paradox always exists. But with those omega 6 oils, it's really looking at what you're doing the vast majority of the time. So having sunflower seed oil once a blue moon is probably not going to give you an inflammatory chronic condition. But if the vast majority of your food and now the animals that you're eating also consuming that and having a higher Omega 6 profile when it really should have a higher Omega 3 profile, like now we're consuming a diet that's completely out of balance with what we should be eating.
So I just want to float that out there in case anybody had a little internal freak out at what you just said, because they sure will these days. I really also super appreciate the grass finish because like you said, marketing is so big. So people are hip enough to know that we should be looking for grass fed, but not necessarily understanding that distinction. Even my husband, he'll go to Whole Foods. We generally buy all of our meats from farms. Once in a blue moon, we'll pick something up from Whole Foods. And he was like, oh, it's grass fed. And I said, is it grass finished? And he's like, what's the difference? And I'm like, oh boy, we have to do some education right under our own roof here in this house.
So people just don't understand the difference. So I appreciate you explaining that. I just. As a businesswoman, I always love a good origin story. And I'm so curious how you know so much, how you got into this. I know, Stan, that you had said your wife is in healthcare, but you know, like, how did you guys really make this your life?
Eileen:
Yeah, well, kind of keying off of what Stan started with was it was to feed ourselves foods that we knew had been raised without the use of unnecessary chemicals. When it comes to animals that they'd been treated kindly, that the land wasn't being detrimentally affected, and basically the animals hadn't been fed subtherapeutic amounts of antibiotics just to grow faster. You know, there's. That's a common thing in the commercial world where in order to gain weight faster, animals are fed enormous amounts, not enormous, but a sub therapeutic level of antibiotics to cause weight gain. That is the side effect routinely.
Stan:
So if you look at the science, the superbugs that are antibiotic resistant that the hospitals have trouble with. The antibiotics in our food supply, like particularly chickens and beef from the commercial system are more responsible for that than physicians being liberal in their application of antibiotics, writing script on antibiotics. The food supply is more responsible for the. The superbugs, for our resistance. If we're eating commercial foods, we're eating antibiotics. And we're also inducing the Roundup and the glyphosate.
Eileen:
Yeah. So it was basically.
Stan:
It's hard to talk about without speaking harshly of a whole segment of America. And to its credit, that system does its job. Its job is to feed a lot of people cheap. And it does that very well. Very well. The consequences, unintended consequences, the human health care cost, the environmental cost, and the humane treatment of animals is. There's a lot of unintended consequences that I'm sure everybody would like to go away. But.
Eileen:
Yeah, so it was our desire to not support that system any longer that really caused us to, like, look for other options. And. And the other options were kind of to bootstrap and do it ourselves. And all of our learning was through reading, through documentaries, finding mentor farmers who had already kind of paved the way and going, okay, you've done it. How do we do it? What can we learn from you? And then just hands on grit to do it ourselves. You know, we're inquisitive, we ask lots of questions, so any way we could, we would learn along the way.
Stan:
And a proclivity to jump in big with projects like we're all in. When we go, we're all in. So we. So we start with, wonder if we can do this. Oh, let's get 50 chickens. You know, I mean, it's like, yeah.
Eileen:
We figured if it was total failure, it's pretty easy to get out of the chicken business.
Erin:
So, yeah, I mean, I can just relate to that. So hard. And I was interviewed for another podcast last week, and we were talking about the medical industry, and the question that he asked me was like, okay, well, like, how do you change that? And I'm like, oh, I don't. I have no idea. I don't work at the system level. I work at the individual level. I have so much appreciation for people who are willing to do that. But that is slow, that is monotonous.
And you work really hard to make very little change. I want to make big, explosive change that I can see in my own life, in my family's life and my community's life. Like, that's the ripple effect that I'm here for. And so I can just appreciate that type of hustle out of you guys.
Stan:
Yeah, well, you know, and then it just went from there. And pretty soon we're producing more than we can eat and other people are interested. So we start that and then pretty soon it's like that's, you know, it's always you produce more, then you have to do more than you, you know, it's a two rung ladder where you have a foot on each ladder. And pretty soon we're like, well, if to really make this work, we're going to have to scale this to cover these expenses.
Erin:
So now we're going to have to hire some people. So we're going to have to sell some more and you know, yeah, we're. Going to need a bigger boat.
Eileen:
Yeah, just natural growing pains every step of the way.
Stan:
And you know, a lot of it was just learning as we went. We're big on continuing education. We're always up to something several times a year for that.
Erin:
I appreciate that so much. And I also speaking of scaling and growing more than you can eat, I want to connect our audience to a resource that you all provide, which is a delivery service. I talk a lot about local farms, but our audience doesn't just live in New Hampshire. We're all over the place. And you all have a delivery service where people can get pasture raised meats delivered right to their door if they are not local to your area. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Eileen:
That sure thing, yes. We pack orders on a weekly basis and so every week customers can place orders right up to Saturday. Saturday is the cutoff and then those orders will ship out the following week. And FedEx comes to the farm, picks up the boxes and whisks them away and they get delivered to customers doorsteps. Wednesdays, Thursday and Friday of that same week.
Stan:
We ship nationwide, we ship once a week. We also, if anybody's close, they can do farm pickup. We do three farmers markets that really they're lovely. We get to interact with all our folks.
Eileen:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in the farm by the way is in northeastern Washington. We're just north of Spokane, Washington. And so that when we say local, we're here in the Pacific Northwest, but even more closely the inland Northwest. And so we do local delivery route. People can come on farm and pick up and see the ranch. They can meet us at farmers markets or if they're further afield, that home delivery service is the way to go.
Erin:
And what kind of meats?
Eileen:
Grass fed, grass finish beef, lamb and bison. And then Pasture raised pork and chicken. And then we also do turkey seasonally around Thanksgiving.
Erin:
Amazing.
And folks can get on a subscription model as well. So if you know you're going to get the kind of like your get the same thing over and over. I will admit to you guys, I was a vegetarian for 20 years, and 10 years ago, I had my daughter and I'm like, everything's broken. I have to eat meat. But I'm still, like, a little weird about it. Like, I take it because it's like my medicine. Like, I know I need to consume this, but I, like, mentally, I get a little weird. So I've never tried lamb.
I've never had bison. I don't like pork. So I'm kind of like, I'm, like, stuck in my, like, beef and chicken. So for me, knowing that I'm getting the same thing, ordering the same thing, it would make sense for me to get a subscription sent right to my house. Yeah.
Eileen:
So the subscription is completely risk free. You can just try it. And it's not like, oh, you got to sign up for a year or anything like that. And you can also change it. So if you got chicken in your subscription box in July and by August, you were like, you know, I'd really like to try a package of pork. You can absolutely add that. We've made it as flexible as possible because we're not crazy about roping people into something they don't want. We want it to work for our customers, and so we've done everything we can to do that.
Erin:
That's incredible. So we're going to link all of that up in the show notes. We'll also link up your website and definitely your Instagram, because I know everybody listening is going to need to follow you guys.
Eileen:
Yeah, please do. We would love to show you what we do here visually.
Stan:
So, yeah, yeah, we're very available for questions. You can call or we email, answer every email. We address any concerns or questions that come up on social media. We try to respond to everything that comes our way.
Eileen:
Yeah. We're here to connect people to how their food is raised. So. So whatever that looks like on any given day, that's. That's what we strive for.
Erin:
Thank you guys so, so much for your time. I really appreciate it and your wisdom and the resources that you are providing. So thank you so much for being here.
Eileen:
Thanks for talking with us. We appreciate it.
Stan:
Thank you for including us. It's a privilege.
Erin Holt:
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Functional Nutrition Podcast. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. If you got something from today's show, don't forget, subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.