Our Farm Practices
Our farm practices are built on respect and care for animals, plants, and the environment. Using nature as our guide, we raise our animals outdoors, rotationally graze our sheep year round, and grow shiitake in the woods on logs. Our goal is to grow the things we love and feel are best for our community, the land, the planet and the animals that we rely on to sustain us.
Our Katahdin hair sheep are rotationally grazed on pasture/silvopasture and are one hundred percent grass fed. They are moved daily to fresh grass in order to enhance both the health of the animals and the land. Through management intensive rotational grazing we are able to improve pasture, build organic matter, increase biodiversity/wildlife habitat and draw down carbon from the atmosphere. While our sheep are not certified organic they are raised on certified organic pasture and our practices are inline with organic values.
Our shiitake logs are sustainably harvested in a process called thinning. It’s an act that is essential to keep our forest healthy. Think of weeding your garden so that the healthier more dominant plants may thrive and grow. After removing smaller suppressed trees we buck them up and inoculate them with shiitake spawn, turning “waste wood” into nutrient dense edible wonders.
Our Start
After five years of working and apprenticing on various farms, we started Outryder Farm in 2021. As first generation farmers, we spent that time learning as much as we could about the different fields of agriculture that interested us most: grass based livestock production, woodland mushroom cultivation, silvopasture, agroforestry and orcharding.
<3 Lawrence, Livi, Waylon, and our two border collies Rune and Rye
Rune
Waylon
Rye