Taste & See Farm

"Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him! " Taste & See Farm was started out of a desire to raise healthy food for our family. Then the pandemic happened and it evolved into wanting to provide healthy food to our community too! The shelves were empty and we saw a problem. We wanted to secure food for ourselves but our community too! Thank you for supporting us in times of prosperity so that in times of famine we can feed you too! Our offerings currently include: Pasture Raised Poultry, Grass Raised/Finished Lamb, Healthy Dog Treats made from our animals & creatively designed Farm T-Shirts. All of our animals are raised Non-Gmo, vaccine free, hormone free & our land is never treated with pesticides. I’ve wanted to live on a farm since I can remember. As a kid growing up in an age when we would look out the window of a car instead of down at a screen, we would drive past pastures full of horses and cows and I would tell my Dad, “Dad, I want to live on a farm!” He would reply back with “Yeah, maybe someday.” I just wanted to be in nature and live wild. When I was around 10,  my Dad and I were getting ready to go camping and he started packing an ice chest with hotdogs and Gatorade. I said, “No! If we don’t catch it we don’t eat it!” I was naive to hunting laws and logistics of actually catching our food in a state park. I just had this innate sense that there was more to life than supermarkets. Fast-forward a decade and I am in the U.S. Army, Infantry, 101st airborne. And oh man, we were running around in the woods and swamps of Kentucky for days, training for our upcoming deployment to Afghanistan. Most would find a reason to complain about something, it’s hot, these MRE’s are horrible, I want to sleep in a bed, but I was in heaven! In fact, I didn’t think we were training hard enough, so I signed up to try out for Special Forces. There is an old National Geographic documentary on Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS) called, ‘Two Weeks in Hell’. When I went through, it had been extended to three weeks and I called it the best three weeks of my life. My unit at the 101st ended up deploying soon after I got back from selection and I never pursued SF again, despite getting selected. I went on to have a very kinetic deployment. Stephanie and I married and had two kids during my time in the Army. I was ready to get out and focus on being a Dad, so I got a cubicle job in Dallas, TX. Fast-forward another decade. Ive spent a lot of time sitting at a computer, making a good living, but it never felt real. I was spending all year, day-dreaming about one or two weeks of vacation that would get me back outdoors. I struggled with weight gain, depression, I was getting sick several times a year and so were my kids. Then, the pandemic hit. We couldn’t get meat at the grocery store! I watched neighbors fight over the few packs of ground beef put out at the butcher counter. Companies selling emergency food kits (Freeze dried food) were sold out! America got a glimpse into how fragile our food system is. I started trying to figure out how to be more food independent. My first thought was, hey I know how to hunt and fish, but I knew that if everyone in America started hunting and fishing we would wipe out everything in a matter of months. It was a silly, naive idea and I knew it. So I started looking at the root problem of food shortages. What I found to be the problem is the way we are raising our food. It is completely unsustainable. Even worse, I discovered how dangerous our food is, due to the drugs, antibiotics, hormones and other chemicals like arsenic that are in our meat. I knew I wanted to start farming, and doing it better but I needed experience. A very kind cattle farmer invited me out to his farm to show me the ropes. He had about four or five-hundred acres and about 100 or so head of cattle. The first thing he taught me was how to move them into a pen and inject a growth