About Us

We're Neil, Justina, Lars, and Ebba. We raise healthy meat animals naturally and humanely on pasture and in the mixed forest of our family farm near Scio, Oregon. 

To find out more about our farm and what we do, check out Pasture Raised. 

To find out about the pasture-raised products we have available and how to place an order, check out How to Buy. 

For tips on cooking pasture-raised meat, check under Cooking. 

To find out more about life on the farm and other topics, visit our Farm Blog.

If you would like us to let you know when we have additional farm products for sale, or to give us feedback, send us a note and please sign up for our newsletter.

About the Name

Anchor Ranch was previously part of a multi-generational family ranch and farm dating back to before Oregon was even a state!  A previous owner named it "Anchor Ranch" in homage to the United States Coast Guard.  When we bought it from his children, we liked the name so much that we kept it.  When an anchor is fulfilling its purpose, we don't see it.  It lies underwater, beneath the ship which it keeps safe.  Like the roots of the quintessential oak tree in the middle of our farm, it's the things underneath, which we don't always see, that make healthy soil and a healthy community, and thus a good farm and good food.

About Our Regenerative Agriculture Practices and Plans

Crop farming is almost unbelievably extractive. It takes a lot of resources to grow tomatoes from dirt, and when the tomatoes are picked and trucked off somewhere else, very few of those resources make it back into the local soil, even with the best composting program. Conventional farming might be reasonably compared to strip-mining the soil. Some methods of organic farming can be less extractive, but others are not. We don’t have anything against conventional farmers or miners: these are choices they make with the information and resources they have, and we are in solidarity with American working families regardless of their livelihood, so long as it’s legal and ethical. But we don’t have any interest in strip-mining the soil on our family farm.

Large agribusiness corporations run by secretive financial investors like to talk as if livestock farming is an inefficient use of resources. They point to feed conversion ratios or land use to claim that “plant based protein” is better. Of course, these people are liars. What they are doing is burning un-Godly amounts of petroleum products, putting disgusting amounts of harmful chemicals into ecosystems and watersheds, and destroying topsoil and soil fertility so that their extremely wealthy secret investors can make a profit by selling unhealthy, chemically-processed garbage to unsuspecting rubes. Of course, as every human culture in recorded or prehistoric history has always known, animals are a vital part of a sustainable holistic food system.

In nature, animal manure returns many soil resources to the local soil. In addition, grazing and foraging prompt plants to make better use of the available resources to regrow even stronger before animals return to graze again. And, in nature, animals almost never stay in one place for long. They graze some, and then move on to “greener pastures”, allowing the places they have been to rest and recover. Mirroring this natural animal behavior as much as possible helps farmers and ranchers regenerate soil fertility.

Regenerative Agriculture is a holistic process of managing a farm in a way that adds rather than extracts. Plant two trees for every one you harvest. Add natural nutrients to the soil, not poisonous chemicals. In place of a tractor, use animals, doing what they want to do anyways, to combat weeds and pests and deposit fertilizer. Support and invest in the local community, rather than paying the lowest wages possible to ship a product to consumers who will never even know where it comes from.

What We Are Doing to Regenerate Our Land

The land of Anchor Ranch Farm had previously been farmed in conventional cereal grains for over thirty years. The people who farmed it took good care of it but nevertheless the soils were much depleted of organic matter. Field edges were rife with invasive blackberry thicket, ox-eye daisy, and other invasive plants. Thomas Creek flows past the farm, so there is a real risk that any agricultural chemicals used could run off into the local watershed. We choose to use natural animal behavior to help us revitalize the soil and combat invasive weeds. With no chemical spraying, we don’t risk endangering the local watershed. With no mechanical tilling, we don’t lose any more precious topsoil to runoff in the rainy season. Over time, animal manure helps build soil fertility as we convert conventional cropland to no-spray grazing pasture. Perhaps future generations at Anchor Ranch Farm will choose to go back to plowing and planting crops and thus make use of our investment in building healthy, natural soil today. We’re investing for the future; our investment is in healthy, natural soil and a healthy, natural farm ecology.

Our animals live outdoors all day every day, except for poultry chicks which live in a heated brooder for a few weeks until their feathers grow out enough to spend the night outdoors. We do not use a barn for the livestock. Our sows and piglets have 3-sided shelters but normally choose to sleep in the woods; our lambs are born outdoors on the spring grass. We don’t confine the pigs or sheep other than temporarily (such as to load them onto a livestock trailer for travel), and our pastured poultry flocks all free range every day. (By “confine” we mean “keep in an unnaturally small, restricted space”, obviously we have fences to keep the animals from wandering off and causing a car crash on the highway.) Our rams are kept in a separate enclosure out of breeding season; during this time they have plenty of space to move around but they are not rotationally grazed. All the ewes and lambs are rotationally grazed year round.

Many people mistakenly believe that regenerative agriculture is a “newfangled” and unproven concept. This is the opposite of the truth. In fact, agribusiness agriculture was forced on farmers starting in the mid-20th century, has never been tried before, and has no proven track record. Every bit of “progress” made by modern agribusiness methods has been an unmitigated disaster, from the wanton waste of resources needed to bring in a crop, to the poisoning of soil and water, to the soul-destroying jobs and dependence on welfare which have replaced honest farm labor. Nothing about regenerative agriculture is at all new; it is simply a return to the traditional methods of farming used by different peoples all over the world for millennia. These traditional practices, formed from knowledge gained by generations of people successfully improving land over centuries, continue to work just as well today as they did in the past.

We Sell Directly to the Community of People and Families who Directly Support our Farm and Eat our Food

We have nothing against restaurants, but we do not sell to restaurants. We sell only to individual bulk order customers who purchase meat for their own use, to CSA members, and to individuals whom we meet at farmers markets or at our farm stand.