Home Sweet Homestead

Lebanon, Oregon

To contact us:

Phone: (541) 258 7045

Cell: (503) 689 7889

Email: Farm@YankeeAcres.com

WELCOME to Yankee Acres where Shelties and English Shepherds are raised along with chickens for eggs, rabbits for meat, and soon goats for milk and bees for honey. There are 3 major areas of interest….Yankee Acres (YankeeAcres.com) about the homestead in general and the various livestock, Yankee Shelties (YankeeShelties.com) and finally, Yankee English Shepherds YankeeEnglishShepherds.com). Links are to the left.

Yankee Acres Mission Statement:

To create a humane environment for the animals that provide us food. To allow them to express their natural instincts within as minimally restrictive environment as can be envisioned. To provide as natural a feed for livestock as possible to provide maximum health. To allow for NATURAL growth and production patterns, so that there is minimal stress until an animal’s last days (which may not be the same as maximum productivity, for the longest duration, at the lowest cost) .

Not because I know better, but because Nature knows better.

“To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood

of creation. When we do it knowingly, lovingly, skillfully,

reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly,

greedily, destructively, it is a desecration.”

Wendell Berry

The Gift of Good Land

All chickens are pastured once old enough to have feathered out and no longer in need of a brooder environment. They are placed in pens that are moved daily to provide clean pasture until they grow to mature size. Once they are of mature size they are allowed to free range over several acres of pasture, and fed a home mixed SOY FREE diet in addition to all the grass, greens and bugs they can forage. Egg yolks from these Yankee Acres hens are a deep, rich orange and a taste that can’t compare. I’ve been told that some folks allergic to soy and who are unable to eat store bought eggs, are able to eat these eggs.

After several years of experimenting with different prototypes for raising rabbits, I’ve had to admit defeat at this point in time. While the rabbits are now off commercial feed, consuming only grasses and hay and greens, I’ve had to resort to raising them in rabbit cages. Perhaps I can figure out a system where they are out on pasture just during the summer when there is enough growing to keep them happy enough to stay in their pens… time will tell….. But for now, it’s traditional housing….

Goats are given access to yummy (to them) browse, such as blackberry bushes, grass and some supplemental organic minerals, Celtic sea salt, grass hay or alfalfa hay.