This is the Farm Walks podcast brought to you by Tilt Alliance and the Washington State University Food Systems Program. I'm your host, Keith Bacon. I've been tasked with producing this all-new season of Farm Walks. Thanks to Farmer Nicole and everyone on the team who first brought the Farm Walks podcast to life. Speaking of origin stories, Farm Walks the podcast came about when in-person farm walks were put on hold during the pandemic. Those on-site state visits for farmer-to-farmer education are back in action, and you can learn more about them at our website farmwalks.org. For this new season of the podcast, we're also going back to those boots-on-the-ground roots and recording every interview in the field or in the barn or wherever I can get a moment with our very busy, hardworking guests. In this episode, we head up to the Selkirk Mountains area of northeastern Washington to reach Ramstead Ranch, where they're striving to define the highest standard of regenerative agriculture through a pasture-based ecosystem in synergy with nature, honoring its rhythm and abundance.

I'm Stan Hayes. I'm an owner-operator at Ramstead Ranch. I've been here since the inception and enjoyed the journey of the development of this ranch.

And I'm Eileen Napier. I'm also an owner-operator here at Ramstead, also been here since the inception, and my main job is, is marketing, but I've been part of every piece of building the operation from the ground up.

Cool. Let's talk a little bit about the inception. How did Ramstead Ranch come to be?

It started very modestly with raised bed garden boxes. We wanted to eat better. We had a family member in the medical community that was watching patients get fatter, sicker by the year, getting things going wrong at younger ages. We realized that the nutrition was a huge part of that, the food supply. So we started with raised beds, did a lot of canning, had a lot of fun, decided we'd try some proteins. So we started with 50 chickens just for ourselves. Soon after that, we added 5 sheep. This was on a 2-acre piece of ground within the city limits that had animal rights.

Okay.

But it was a pretty modest start. That proceeded on to buying this ranch, which had been clear back to a childhood dream for each of the three of us— my wife, I, and Eileen— which shared a vision each independently from childhood. Ended up looking for a long time, found this ranch. Then we bought a small herd of 10 cows from a guy that wanted to retire, all to process our own food. That at some point we had too much to consume and had other people asking us and interested. So we started doing a few farmers markets and it just one thing led to another till it over the years has developed into a pretty major going concern.

What is Ramstead Ranch today? How many acres and what are you growing and raising?

So we're currently on 240 acres here in the Pend Oreille Valley, about 70 miles north of Spokane. And along the way, we've done it all. We've done cow-calf, we've farrowed pigs. We raised and processed our own chickens, turkeys, etc. And as we've grown and scaled, we've started to partner with producers who do the same— pasture-raised focus, grass-fed focused. And so now what we do here at Ramstead, we focus on grass-finishing beef steers and pasture-finishing pigs. And then we have continued to partner with other pasture-raised poultry producers grass-fed lamb producers like that.

Bison. We outgrew what we could do ourselves and we're getting way too far into the traditional ag model where we hadn't been anywhere for 5, 6 years. Yeah.

Hadn't left the ranch.

Couldn't leave the ranch, especially at the same time.

Yeah.