Heritage Livestock

At Agarita Creek Farms, we are committed to open-pollinated and heirloom plants and heritage breeds of livestock. When we decided to raise livestock, we immediately decided to raise heritage breeds. Why? It is quite simple really. We are what are called contrary farmers. As we began to learn about agriculture, the overwhelming and obvious lesson was that modern agriculture, and its mechanistic approach, had created the problems that family farmers have been living through now for over half a century. We are convinced that many problems with modern livestock, from parasites, to disease, to problems in birthing offspring, can be traced to the "breeding up" of animals in the past century for more "economic" meat and milk production. While not widely held, our view had been adopted by others before us. We quickly discovered the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, which not only shares our view as to the source of many problems in livestock breeding, but is dedicated to preserving American heritage breeds of livestock.

We are initially raising three breeds of heritage livestock, in an effort to preserve these breeds in Texas -- Jacob and Navajo-Churro Sheep, and Dexter cattle. We chose these breeds because of their adaptability to our Texas Hill Country conditions, the lack of "breeding up" and the resulting retention of natural insticts and survivability, and the histories of each of these breeds.

In the future, we will add heritage chickens, ducks, turkeys, donkeys, and perhaps other animals to our domain. Our principles in selecting breeds for these species will be the same -- animals adaptable to our environment, who exist in their more or less natural state, and who share noble characteristics. We invite you to read further about each of our breeds, and to learn with us as we evolve in the future.