Meet Your Farmers
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.
Farmer Shane
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 hormone into their ear, administer antibiotics and Ivermectin. Then he drove me around and explained how I would need to spend so much on fertilizer, so much on pre-emergent, etcetera.
I was grateful for his hospitality, but what had I been feeding my kids? I found research from Johns Hopkins on the arsenic, antibiotic resistant bacteria, hormones and other drugs found in our super market food. There are class action law suites from families who have lost loved ones to mutant bacteria.
I then discovered farmers like Joel Salatin and Greg Judy, raising chickens, pigs and cattle with no hormones, no antibiotics and not using any petroleum based fertilizer. The animals are happy, vibrant, and the local economy near these farms benefit.
I knew this was the answer. And so here we are, Taste & See Farm in Tyler, Texas.
Farmer Stephanie
Hi my name is Stephanie. I’m a city girl through and through. When Shane brought the idea of moving out of the city to farm. I have to admit at first, I wasn’t very excited. I like the idea of being able to get to where I want to go in 5 minutes. However, as I began to ponder God’s providence in our life, I realized how He had lined things up perfectly for this move and way of life. In the fall of 2019 the Lord put on my heart to homeschool our children. It’s really not something I wanted to do for selfish reason really and also the thought of failing them overwhelmed me, but God wouldn’t let up, it was an insistent prodding by the spirit saying “you need to do this.”
I found comfort in the promises found in his word in that if He was calling me to homeschool, He would equip me to do it. By February 2020 I received the last of the homeschool curriculum I had ordered in preparation to start in the fall. Then, due to Covid the schools closed in mid March. By Gods grace, when the schools didn’t have anything prepared for us to do, I decided we would try our homeschool curriculum we had waiting for us. I fell in love with discipling my children. Eventually the school figured out a curriculum for them to do from home which involved zoom daily and assigned work for them to do. I really did not enjoy that, and it was much more cumbersome than what I had been doing.
Once it was clear they were not going back for the remainder of the school year we decided to withdraw them. I have enjoyed every moment, more than I ever thought I would. I think back to how resistant I was to God leading and shake my head at my stubbornness. Romans 8:28 comes to mind when I ponder everything that has gone on in the world “God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.”God is so good all of the time.
God used homeschooling in our lives to remove a hurdle I would have had when considering a move and a new way of life. The right school district and proximity to it is something we have always considered when finding a new place to live, but GOD, like the good shepherd that He is, made a way for my stubborn self to follow Him more easily. God has crafted every single curve and bend in the road that has led us to steward the earth and the animals he has gifted us at Taste & See Farm.
One of my absolute favorite things to do is work in the garden. At our home in the city we had pretty much outgrown our shoebox backyard. I dug up flower beds all around the fence and then when I was out of room we added several raised beds for vegetables and more flowers. I can’t get enough of flowers. They are just so beautiful and an image of Gods creativity. Gardening helps me grow in patience as I wait every year for a tiny seed to turn into something beautiful. It helps me ponder about the things of God and the world and how sometimes circumstances will make a plant wither or struggle under the heat but a gardener can provide shade and help.
There are so many illustrations God uses in His word about gardening and how he uses it to help us see how He tends to us. One of my hopes for this farm is to have an abundance of flowers to share with our community so you can Taste & See that the Lord is Good! We promise to aim at doing it all for His glory. It will be imperfect, it will be hard but it will be rewarding because I trust our lives are in His hands and He will do it perfectly, no matter how it looks to us.
