Graze Against the Machine is how we live and breathe

"Every decision we make on the farm takes the entire ecosystem into account" - Farmer Sue

Ozark Akerz (pronounced acres) is a sustainable farm founded in 2014 with a focus on growing healthy, flavorful, authentic food. Founding farmers Sue and Mike left their corporate jobs and followed their passion for growing heirloom vegetables and raising heritage livestock. Sue and Mike currently grow  heirloom tomatoes and sweet and hot peppers. They are also raise rare, heritage breeds including Pineywoods Cattle and Dominique, Columbian Wyandottes, Brown Leghorns and a few other heritage chicken breeds..The farm is located near the North Carolina Zoo.

Graze Against the Machine

The practices farmers choose to manage their farm are very personal choices. Graze Against the Machine  describes the thoughts and actions we take when making decisions about how we farm. We look at our farm as a ecosystem that includes crops, livestock and nature. All three are interrelated and the decisions we make about one affects the other 2. Here are a few examples:

• When we choose to buy organic straw from Cohen Farm to put in the chicken coop, we do so with the knowledge that the when the straw is cleaned out of the coop, we will compost it for use as a natural fertilizer in our garden. If we purchase straw that has not been grown under organic practices, we don't know what kind of chemicals are found in the straw, chemicals that could end up in our garden, affecting or preventing the growth of our plants. That, along with supplementing our birds diet with non-soy, organic feed means we get the best fertilizer around!
• We decided to raise Heritage Pineywoods Cattle because they are much more heat tolerant to conditions in North Carolina, they are disease and pest resistant and will eat and thrive on forages that many commercial breeds such as Angus, do not. They eat wild herbs, shrubs, vines and trees as well as grass, a varied diet that they have been used to eating for centuries. The Pineywoods keep the under-story of our woods cleaned out and allow the trees to grow stronger. They also help control kudzu which is an invasive vine that can choke out native plants. In fact they love kudzu so much that they will eat it before they browse other forages.
• Our soil is filled with a living array of diverse microbes that we call the soil microbiome. When you spray herbicides or pesticides on plants,  it leaches into the soil and disrupts and can kill these microbes. We think of the soil as a living-being that needs to be nurtured, not poisoned. Just like when humans have a healthy microbiome, soil thrives when it is healthy too. As part of feeding our soil, we amend it with our own concoction of probiotics - that we ferment ourselves - and add to the compost that we spread in the garden.

Farmer Sue

"I have always been interested in how nutrition affects health, doubly so since my fight with cancer. I'm very disheartened by the lack of flavor and nutrition in today's food. and have struggled to find flavorful food like I ate as a kid on the farm in Missouri. That is what drove me to start Ozark Akerz. The positive feedback we're getting about the amazing flavor of our wild-foraged Pineywoods Heritage Beef and  is so encouraging! I want to make it less of a struggle for people to find flavor and it looks like we're making that happen!"

Farmer Mike

"I could never have imagined how much our personal concept of sustainable farming would evolve. It's all about establishing an understanding of 'local', and that includes the soil, the animals (wild and domestic), the plants (native or sowed), the insects, the weather and their relationship to each other. Our practice of sustainable farming is based on the understanding of these relationships, they comprise our local ecosystem."

Find out more
Learn more about our sustainable farming practices on our blog or YouTube channel, view beautiful photographs of the farm or visit our Facebook or Instagram pages to follow our journey. Have fun and enjoy Grazing Against the Machine with us!

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