We like a beef animal that begins to physiologically mature at 12 to 13 months.  This ensures that most of the animal's second grass season (first one off of mom) goes directly into building muscle and fat in the steers, and reproductive capability in the females.  Since time and grass is money, then putting either into growing "air under the belly" is a bad investment for a grass farmer.

We select for smaller frame cows (three to five frame score) that raise their first calf as a two year old and don't miss a beat, continuing to go strong into their teens. Their heifer calves should do the same, while their male calves should consistently reach a live weight of 1,000+ pounds on lignified orchard grass on or before a 95 degree day in July (without any fly control or chemical worming), and yield at least 500 lbs of retail product, with tender steaks and a nice, round rib eye (like the fifteen month old below!).

Management System  Cows are bred to calve in April and May.  First calf heifers are run with stocker/finishing cattle and the ewe/lamb flock. Mature cows are used as gleaners.  Calves are left on cows most of their first winter, weaned onto high quality hay in time for cows to dry off prior to next year's calving.  Yearling steers are butchered anywhere from 900-1,200 pounds depending on orders.  We practice management intensive rotational co-grazing with sheep, and are moving towards high density, pulsed grazing of the mature cow-calf mob and the ewes once the lambs are weaned.  Most heifer calves are given a chance to join the breeding herd, but are culled heavily based on mothering ability, disposition, and fertility in their first and second year of production. We always have several well proven four and five year old commercial cows available for sale in the fall that are too good to turn into beef, but too replicated by retained daughters to keep in our herd.  We will begin posting these offerings on a "Cattle for Sale" page this fall.

Pedigrees Used Herd sires have been from heavily line-bred Rito 707 descendants.  Our past herd sire, Octoraro Addison 901 was close to a perfect replica of Rito 707.  We were fortunate to have all three of our registered females produce heifer calves out of him before we had to salvage him due to a leg injury as an seven-year-old.  Sam's Octoraro Addison bull, an OCC Anchor son from his recently deceased Gammer 203 foundation cow, also figures heavily in our herd.  Our first two registered cows were Addison daughters, and our current herd sire, Octoraro Addison 001 is the result of a half-sib mating between Octoraro Addison and an Anchor daughter from Sam's Gammer cow line.   We will continue using this bull on our existing registered herd, line-breeding daughters back to Rito 707 through Sam'sgood AI bull, Octoraro Rito 503 and to two other old pillar bulls, Emulation 31 and Shoshone Viking GD60 through his Octoraro Emulation 310 bull.  We will also be utilizing semen from Sam's Octoraro Ballot STO 6 bull (recently sold to Monte Howry in North Dakota) as well as the New Zealand sire from Sustainable Genetics, Glanworth Waigroup 130. Both of these bulls exhibit extreme calving ease and the smooth, well packed "Scottish" Angus phenotype we're after without sacrificing udder quality, maternal function, or environmental fitness.  We feel they will provide an excellent complement to the Rito base of our herd by improving topline, scrotal size, and calving ease.  It will likely take nearly a decade to transition our herd to all registered females, but we hope that a disciplined, line-breeding approach within our vertically integrated grass-finishing and direct marketing operation will allow us to develop a uniquely valuable strain of angus genetics.  Our goal is to hold our first sale of registered, foundation quality seedstock in time to use the proceeds to pay for our daughter's first year of college.  So much is at stake in our breeding decisions!

We work quite closely with Village Acres organic fruit and vegetable farm in Mifflintown, PA.  Not only is Village Acres a well-known and respected organic farm in central Pennsylvania, it is also the home of Roy's parents and the farm he grew up on.  Roy L and Hope Brubaker and their four children moved to the farm in 1982.  All four of the now-grown children put in long hours and creative energy to the ever-transforming farm.   Now that the Brubaker children have moved on to pursue other interests, Village Acres has become a place for other young farmers to learn about running a diversified organic farm as well as managing a farm-share program (CSA).   We at Blue Rooster Farm make our grassfed lamb and beef available to the subscribers of the Village Acres CSA.  

Joshua Farm CSA 

This season, summer 2008, we will be making monthly deliveries to members of the Joshua Farm CSA in Harrisburg, PA.  Joshua Farm is an urban farm CSA farmed and managed by Kirsten Reinford.  To become a member of Joshua Farm CSA or to have meat delivered this drop site in Harrisburg, email Kirsten at joshuafarm@pa.net . 

Wilson College CSA

We will also be making monthly deliveries to Wilson College CSA in Chambersburg, PA during the 2008 CSA season.  If you would like to join the Wilson College CSA or pick up a meat order at their distribution site, email Christine Mayer at cmayer@wilson.edu . 

Prestige Meats

Prestige Meats is a family owned and operated butcher shop in Three Springs, PA.   We've worked with them for nearly ten years and have come to trust their excellent craftsmanship as well as their feedback on our meat.   Recently they have opted to not extend their USDA inspection to the packing part of their operation, although they do have an inspector on the floor on kill days  to ensure their business maintains a high standard for cleanliness and animal care.  Nils and Bob, the brothers who own the  Prestige Meats chose to focus their business on custom butchering  since that is the vast majority of their local business and this way they can keep their costs down.  We go to Prestige for our orders of wholes, halves, and quarter.  They offer a full range of fresh, cured, and value-added products.  They dry-age our beef in  climate-controlled coolers for ten days before it is cut to your specifications, vaccuum-packed, and frozen. The lambs are cut, vaccuum-packed, and frozen with-in 48 hours of slaughter.

Benners Beef

Benner's Beef is a family ownd and operated, USDA inspected butcher shop in Thompsontown, PA.  They have a retail butcher shoppe on the premises and so are required by law to have an inspector on hand for processing and packaging of meat.   This is the first year we've used Benner's for our retail cuts and so far are very pleased with their work.  Because of the added cost of a fulltime inspector, they have to charge more than custom butchers.  For now we use Benner's only for our retail cuts and continue to use Prestige Meats for our bulk, custom orders.  This allows us to keep our prices for bulk orders a little lower and we get to support two local businesses.  Benner's also dry-ages the beef for up to ten days, cuts to our specifications, and vaccuum packs our cuts. 

Octoraro Angus is Sam and Sherrill Wylie's seedstock angus farm in Bedford County, and have been our mentors in the fine art of cattle breeding.  Read more about them on our angus cattle page

Monsour Sheep Farm is Jack and Kathy Monsour's place in Bedford County.  We purchased our initial North Country Cheviot commercial ewes from Jack, as well as our border collie Mac. (Read about these ventures on our sheep and border collie pages.)  On top of running a 900+ commercial sheep operation, Jack and Kathy provide lovely vacation homes in a pastoral farm setting.

• Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture - aka PASA - is an energizing group of farmers, foodies, and concerned consumers.  We've gained so much from networking within this organization.  Whether your a farmer, gardener, or looking for health-full food, this is a great place to begin.  Pennsylvania is so fortunate to have this organization looking out for it's farmers

• EatWild.com  is a comprehensive website that both provides up-to-date research on the benefits of grassfed meat, eggs, and dairy products as well as promotes local farms and markets where one can find these products. 
  

• Heifer International is an inspiration to us and every year we make an effort to donate some of the money we earn from our sheep and beef to Heifer so that someone else on this beautiful, but desperate planet, can begin to raise some of their own chickens, sheep, or cows.  

•  Roy and I are both decendents of Swiss-German Mennonites who immigrated to Pennsylvania in the 1700's. There is much about our Christian and Mennonite upbringing we value and MCC is an organization that we support in its attempt to "demonstrate God's love by working among people suffering from poverty, conflict, oppression and natural disaster."

• One of our customers created Cuizoo, an awsome website for anyone who wants to cook using whole foods, but I think mom's will find this website especially refreshing and fun, not to mention beautiful to browse through.  Thanks Kristin!

• Octoraro Angus is Sam and Sherrill Wylie's seedstock angus farm in Bedford County, and have been our mentors in the fine art of cattle breeding.  Read more about them on our angus cattle page
  

• Monsour Sheep Farm is Jack and Kathy Monsour's place in Bedford County.  We purchased our initial North Country Cheviot commercial ewes from Jack, as well as our border collie Mac. (Read about these ventures on our sheep and border collie pages.)  On top of running a 900+ commercial sheep operation, Jack and Kathy provide lovely vacation homes in a pastoral farm setting.
  

Roy began raising sheep on his family's vegetable farm when he got out of college in '92, beginning with  five commercial ewes purchased for him by church friends David Hunsberger and Steve and Dan Auker.  By the time we bought our own farm in '98, the flock had grown through attrition to almost thirty ewes.  At the time, we were alternating between Tunis and Dorset rams, lambing in the barn in January and February, and selecting for prolific, attentive, calm mothers.

To quickly populate our own farm and begin getting some return from our investment in fencing and water development on the place, we purchased 200 ewe lambs from Jack Monsour in Bedford County the winter of '98.  Jack uses primarily Nort Country Cheviot (NCC) rams in his 900+ ewe flock.  Since we had been having a lot of foot problems after coming to our place, we liked the fact that Jack never trimmed his sheep's hooves. 

Going from thirty to 200 ewes quickly turned us into hands off shepherds and sold us on North Country Cheviots as an ideal breed for low-input, grass-based retail lamb production.  At six to eight months of age, our Tunis/Dorset cross lambs seemed to still be stuck in some gangly, adolescent frame-growth race, while the NCC lambs began to swagger around like the little pumped up mesomorphs they are.  This early maturation of skeleton and musculature allows us to harvest a small, but high yield retail lamb carcass, often directly off of the ewes at weaning, which is a tremendous advantage to us in terms of both managing our pasture stocking density and spreading our sales season both early and late in the season.

While NCC ewes are neither as productive (milky) nor as prolific as most of the popular commercial sheep today,  they are the perfect fit for our low-input, part-time farming system.  Granted, they are not an easy breed to work with if you're a control freak!  They're rather high strung and flighty, a lot like deer.  And they will absolutely test your fences.  But give them grass and let them go, they will do the rest for you. 

Our ideal ewe is one that raises one healthy lamb as a yearling then two lambs every year after that until she's ten or more.  We very seldom have triplets, and don't really want them as they complicate lambing season tremendously.  But ewe's that don't raise at least seven good lamb by the time they are five are culled to ensure we place as much selection pressure on fertility and prolificacy without going beyond the seemingly logical limit of "two teats, two babies."

In 2001, when we realized we were pregnant with twins and Roy began working full-time with the state, we made the difficult decision to sell our flock down to just the number of ewes we needed to meet our established retail lamb market.  We kept thirty of our best ewes, most of them very typey NCC, and two very good NCC type ram lambs out of a couple of the best mommas.  And that was the last we thought much about the sheep or sheep breeding until 2007, when we finally got out of the hospital routine and realized we were still using the same two rams, now on five years of their own retained daughters! 

By then, we were also very committed to the NCC as a breed, so we located a good seedstock producer near Bloomsburg, Arnold Stackhouse, and purchased two registered ram lambs.  We added five registered ewes from Stackhouses flock in 2008, and will begin gradually transitioning our now seventy+ ewe flock to all registered females over the next number of years.

Handling our livestock on the average day at Blue rooster Farm is a no brainer.  In fact, there's not much handling.  We open a new paddock of grass and the critters willingly go through.  We move their water supply.  We watch them munch.

But there are also the non-average days.  The day we pen up mommas and babies to put in ear tags, dock lamb tails, and pinch bull calves (yes, its a euphemism!).  The days we bring animals in to sort off those whose time has come.  It is on days like this that Mac shines (well, he often gets really dirty, but you get the point!).

Nothing in our farming experience has been more amazing than watching Mac respond to his innate herding "instincts".  We knew little about training a herding dog.  But just as his breeder, Jack Monsour predicted; "Long as you have some basic stock sense yourself,  a well bred border collie should be able to train you.  To get the job done in general work on a farm, there's very little training needed."  He was right.  By eight months old, Mac was penning our flock of ewes into our barn and working corral, a task that always brought out the worst in both of us adult humans!  By a year old, he could pen up the feeder cows and heifers, though we cringed watching him ducking in under their flying heels.

 While anyone steeped in stock dog lore would quickly recognize that both dog and handlers on Blue Rooster farm are still utter novices the fact remains that tasks which previously required careful logistical planning and intense stress to our marriage, are now often reduced to one person observing fifteen or twenty-minutes of intense, canine joy.