Our goal at LionPaw Organics is to create a diverse healthy ecosystem that promotes more life. We have the ability to tend to beautiful livestock and land. We always approach our slice of heaven with a beginners mind. Always learning and giving back to the land that cares for us.
The 150 acre homestead we live on provides. Our perennial gardens, trees and flowers give food for the animals, our stomach and our soil. Over 30 apple, pear, plum, cherry, elderberry, nectarine, peach, walnut, and acorn producing trees line our property giving endless bounty to feed, forage and ferment.
With the trees and the flowers come endless life. Beautiful bees and butterflies are what you see first but the beauty is in the balance. Many of the bees are consuming smaller insects and many birds are feeding on the bees. With all the insects we have the fortune to give home to a colony of bats. Another part of our IPM is our chickens, allowed to scratch and peck at our perimeters. Hogs are regularly moved throughout the land to eat ground scores in the warmer months. Goats will be goats and eat whatever comes in front of them. Angus, Texas Short Horn and recently added Hereford cattle graze our pasture year round. Each of these animals provide different and unique gut flora to our compost/soil.
Besides being living composters the delicious and nutritious food our animals provide is invaluable. Knowing the lives they live and the food they eat is something to feel good about.
Our animals and compost/soils eat an alfalfa/native grass mix grown on 40 acres of our land. These grasses are never sprayed and full of life. Mob grazing is our next step in land/animal management.
From our flock to our flowers, diversity brings balance and/or supports it and we try to encourage that.
We are blessed with Sun. Solar array capable of producing 32kWh at peak.
We are blessed with Water. Gravity brings us the water we love from a variety of natural springs off our north facing slope. We also have two riparian water rights for pasture watering.
We are blessed with Woods. This give us the ability to manage these woods, giving multiple bi-products. Hugel/swale material. Board ft, firewood and poles. Small batch bio-char. Wood chips when needed.
We are blessed with worms. They are a big part of the decomposition/aeration that happens in our soils, compost piles and vermi-compost bins.
We are blessed with bio-mass. Leaf mold, perennial fruit/flower/prunings, cannabis bi-product fresh cut alfalfa, cow/pig/goat/chicken/bat poop and as many ‘weeds’ as the fingers can pull.
We are blessed with knowledge. We try and use a quiver of natural farming approaches. Rodale’s Institute, living soil food web, permaculture, biodynamics, KNF, Jadam, Terra Preta and just good ol’ Blood, Sweat and Tears.
We are always adding different skills in order use resources or create new resources from the land/animals for the land/animals.
Land and Animals always go hand in hand on our homestead. In our system the animals are a primary loop.
-Each One Teach One
