Mission Statement

Fact: At the tender age of two years old my mother asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. “A cow” I replied. My grandfather owned a traditional farm (read chickens, cows, hogs, dogs and tomatoes) near Murfreesboro, TN that I grew up with, learning husbandry, fencing, haying and sometimes cursing the weather. I was quite chagrined to learn the transformation from human to bovine was quite impossible and so decided being a farmer would have to suffice. The years I had working with granddad, learning the art of agriculture, were the most important, influential times of my youth. My grandfather had a stroke when I was nineteen that forced him to sell the farm and move closer to town. He advised me to educate myself and leave the farming life for a time. I went to college, moved to the city and found myself depressed and unfulfilled. A stroke of genius luck found me in Montana in my 29th year, fishing. It was there I met Sarah, a city girl from the Great White North who wanted to leave the city, start a farm and live the good life. We fell in love quite quickly, married, moved to Virginia and started Leaping Waters Farm on 110 acres in the hamlet of Alleghany Spring. The idea was to feed our children the best food we could raise and perhaps sell a little to help with the mortgage.

Today we farm about 600 acres of (mostly leased) pasture, our children eat quite well, as do the customers of the many restaurants we supply up and down the east coast, as well as the local subscribers to our CSA. We work a lot, all the time, but we have found the good life, and it’s one we like to share.

LB Hogs…..

The Large Black Hogs are remarkably well named even if it’s not the most romantic sounding title on the farm. The breeding sows can grow to nearly six hundred pounds and the boars even larger. We try to keep the breeding stock on the trim side, around 400 pounds. They are well suited to outdoor operations like we have here. The black skin soaks in the sun in the winter and prevents sunburn in the summer. They are excellent mothers who protect and feed litters of up to fourteen with extraordinary devotion. Their relaxed nature gives them an advantage in the meat they produce. Although quite playful they tend to like to lie around in the mud and shade in the warmer months, this builds layers of fat and a micro marbling that is wonderfully tender and flavorful. Although they were originally bred to the baconer type, these are fantastic meat hogs whose loins, shoulders, ribs and bellies are palpably superior to their commercial cousins.

Grass Fed Beef ............

Our animals are grass fed and grass finished. Often, we find that consumers are put off by this claim and so it is not one of our major marketing points. People often hear “grass fed” and equate it with tough beef with no marbling and sometimes a liver-like flavor. That’s an unfortunate result of many farms taking breeds that have been accustomed to grain finishing and then placing them on grass and hoping for the best. Over the past sixty or so years cattle in the US have moved from growing and finishing on pasture to the feedlot system. This system relies heavily on fattening ‘feeder cattle’ on cheaply produced corn/grain mixtures for the last several months of their lives. The result has been that commercial cattle are now quite incapable of getting good weight gains on forage alone. When these animals are placed back into a grass fed system they do not perform well and produce a lower quality beef. We have very special animals that are able to convert forage into well-marbled meats because of centuries of living in a wild state where their survival depended on them gaining weight on whatever forage they could find.

The animals are given free access to ample pasture. They are finished on a mixture of grasses suited to the season, be it spring oats (the grass), winter rye, clover in the summer or autumn’s varied blends. The advantages of grass fed beef are numerous. Keeping animals on natural feed benefits the environment by cutting down on fossil fuel consumption and replenishing the soil the cattle rely upon. The animals themselves are healthier, they are able to pick and choose the diet they desire throughout the year. The consumer, of course, is the ultimate beneficiary. The health benefits of eating grass fed beef are substantial. High Omega-3 fats found in grass fed beef are excellent for bringing down and controlling cholesterol. No pesticides, herbicides, hormones or antibiotics assure you the meat is as natural as the spring waters they drink from.