Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Dez Brown. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Dez, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?
Our family farm started with the construction of a chicken coop in late 2017, I had raised chickens before and loved the eggs and having backyard chickens to hang out with. Over the next year our flock grew, we purchased a small herd of cows, and we began talking about building the farm to provide healthy eggs and meat to our friends and community. We started reading books by farmers like Joel Salatain and following and learning from other family farms that were providing pasture-raised products and our devotion to being healthy and sustainable took root. We knew we didn’t want to build a typical commercial farm; we are surrounded by overgrazed pastureland and live in chicken country and can see and smell the waste those commercial farms contribute to our environment. We had learned from our research that raising animals on pasture with a buffet of grasses and insects, not crammed into feedlots or enclosed in barns without fresh air and sunshine was the healthiest and most humane way to raise our food. We made it our mission to grow healthy animals and food all the while healing our land and bringing back the native pastures and prairies central Texas is known for. Plans were made and we began purchasing the fencing and supplies needed, scheduling hatching and processing dates, and building portable hoop-houses for our chickens and turkeys. By January of 2019 we had our first egg mobile rolling through our pasture and started selling eggs and raising chickens and turkeys for meat. In the fall of 2019, we were working our first farmers market in Houston. Our farm has expanded since from manually pulling small hoop houses with 30-40 chickens through the pasture to housing up to 400 birds in a mobile range coop that is moved daily with a truck or tractor. We purchased an existing pig farm and business in spring of 2021 and now offer pasture-raised pork in addition to our poultry products. We continue to market in Houston at a farmers market and have partnered with multiple restaurants and a home delivery farmers market in Dallas to bring our farm products directly to the tables of consumers that appreciate knowing their food is grown locally by farmers that take extra care to raise and nurture their animals.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?
Dez is the who and why behind our farm. She grew up in the suburbs of Dallas and dreamed of becoming a veterinarian for small and large breed animals. However, fate intervened and she completed her degree in Agriculture Development at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas and went directly into the real estate lending profession. Dez ended up raising cattle and a few chickens over the next 20 years while raising two children and working. Things change when she met and married Daniel who might not have shared her crazy passion for animals but was willing to support her dreams of having a small family farm to grow and produce food for their families and regenerate the beautiful land they live on. What came next was a surprise to friends and family, they set up a farming enterprise with the goal to provide an alternative and sustainable source of eggs and meat directly from their farm to consumers. 100’s of books, articles, seminars and podcasts later the couple has setup a successful business providing pasture raised eggs, chicken, turkey and pork to farmers market shoppers and restaurants from Dallas to Houston. Working the farm and weekend markets takes a lot of determination and hard work but Dez says it pays off knowing you are the bridge between customers and their food, “I love hearing that our eggs are the best our customers have ever had and how great the pork roast was for dinner and hearing that our food was used to nurture a mom through her pregnancy and see one of our pasture raised turkeys on a local morning talk show at Thanksgiving. We are so proud to hear the animals we loved and cared for are a source of joy and nourishment.”
Where do you think you get most of your clients from?
Our business was word of mouth for the first few months until a friend connected us with a new farmers market in Houston. We signed up immediately and have been a vendor since October of 2019. Our continued presence at the market has provided us the opportunity to work additional markets and build our restaurant clientele.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
The heat of the summer can be difficult on a farmer and a chicken in Texas, we can lose birds due to the heat and a faulty water system, however, we lost more in one day when a dog gained access to our mobile chicken coop and killed over 100 chickens and 40 turkeys. Thousands of dollars and many hours of hard work laid scattered in piles of white feathers in our coop. This loss left our freezers empty of chicken for eight weeks and turkey for over five months. This could have very easily been the end of our pasture poultry business, however, we learned to be better prepared for whatever the environment brought to our pasture, be it a stray dog, coyote or damaging windstorm. We have learned to expect the unexpected and know that each experience teaches us something new about our animals and management practices.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.driftwoodmeadows.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/driftwoodmeadows/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DriftwoodMeadows
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