Icelandic Hay While the Sun Shines in New York
If you have used Primal Derma I would venture to guess that there is a strong chance that you are a) are not a vegetarian and b) interested in high quality meat.
I’d love to introduce you to Ingimunder Kjalvar of Spring Lake Farm in Delhi, New York. He is originally from Iceland and brings his deep knowledge of farming there to the Empire State. He is one of the people who I source tallow from for Primal Derma but he is also the source where I get a majority of the meat that I eat because I trust this man and his relationship to the animals and to the land.
Ingi, with his wife Temma, have a deep devotion to growing hay and thinks that the farm starts there. And that devotion means that the soil there is quite fertile. While it may look a little shaggier, allowing grasses to get taller lets the root structures bind the soil better and makes for a richer soil biome and more nutritious grasses and hay. And when the cows walk on it, they don’t tear it up nearly as much. The land likes to be allowed to grow.
The cows eat only hay. His pigs eat a high percentage of hay in their diet making the pork he produces truly unique. The flesh is dark, well fatted and tastes richly of the grass from there. His birds spend most of their time pastured – he does have houses for them for protection from predators and aren’t fed conventional feed.
Ingi has this deep heritage himself but also an earned relationship with the place where he lives and farms. I’m proud to support his farm as much as I can because farmers like these are few and far between. Ones who believe that the health of the land and the animals and humans is linked.
If you live in the New York City area he drives down regularly to a delivery spot to drop off the meat to his customers here.
There are no rich farmers and the ones who are are not really farmers but businesspeople who own industrial farms. Ingi isn’t wealthy – he has done crowd funding for scales with a printer built in so he can put meat weights right on the label. Ingi isn’t rich but his devotion to tradition is indeed a real kind of wealth. The kind that not too long ago would have been looked at with deep admiration and not just as some kind of lucky dinosaur that made it.
If you are in New York City or nearby I’d urge you to try to get some meat from Ingi by following him at Spring Lake Farm. He is funny, sincere, and a walker of a fine old path that we would do well to trod as well.
And if you order some Primal Derma you may well get a bit of tallow from the good cows that have walked Ingi’s land in the dappled sunlight there.
Take a look!
Talk soon enough!
M