Today we’d like to introduce you to Matt & Jerica Cadman
Hi Matt & Jerica, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
(As written from Jerica’s perspective)
Matt and I met while studying engineering at LeTourneau University in Longview, TX. We fell in love, but Matt soon fell ill with a chronic autoimmune disease called Ulcerative Colitis. After being hospitalized twice and given little information as to why his disease was occurring after 20 years of normal health and no family history, we decided to find our own answers. We were told that diet didn’t matter, but that didn’t make sense to us. It’s a gut disease–of course diet matters! Turns out that diet matters for all diseases… So I began doing lots of research–that’s what I was good at! And we learned all about traditional, diets: those foods that our great, great, great grandparents prized for their nourishing qualities. There are tremendous benefits to eating foods like pasture-raised eggs and meats, but not just boneless skinless chicken breast–the whole animal, including the skin, fat, organs, and bone. These foods offer the fat-soluble vitamins and trace minerals that Matt’s body was so desperately lacking. We began drinking raw milk and taking cod liver oil. We began fermenting yogurt and vegetables. We learned to make bone broth and bread from scratch. We made sure to eat plenty of animal fats like butter, lard, and tallow. We changed to a salt containing real minerals that has color–gray, pink, or reddish–instead of the plain white stuff that has been refined and had its minerals removed. We stopped eating seed oils, preservatives, artificial coloring and flavor, high fructose corn syrup, synthetic vitamins, and other modern additives so commonly found in “food” today. We began taking probiotics and paying attention to signs that our bodies needed certain nutrients after a lifetime of processed foods.
And Matt got better! Lots better. After about 4 years of intensive diet therapy, he was able to wean himself off all his pharmaceutical medications. And yet he continued to get even better. Today, more than 14 years later, he is healthier than ever, and we have been able to grow our family full of healthy children.
Along the way, we realized that we wanted to help people like Matt who were seeking healing foods and a freedom from a medical industry focused on damaging solutions like surgery and life-long drug use. That’s when the idea of starting a farm came to us. Matt left his engineering job, and I decided not to continue to grad school in engineering. Instead, we partnered with Matt’s parents to start a farm here in East Texas. We’ve met dozens of folks like Matt and have been able to encourage them to look at their diets and try to break free from the vicious cycle of empty, processed foods full of harmful chemicals.
We grow the meats and eggs that we so desperately needed, using regenerative agriculture practices like frequent rotation, which helps us prevent disease and parasite issues naturally and without drugs and vaccines so often used in the livestock world.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Farming is never a smooth road! We had no farming or business management experience starting out, so that in itself was a big challenge. But one of our biggest early challenges was a drought and then a wildfire that burned 90% of our property during our first full year of production! Two of our neighbors lost their homes. Many of our brand-new fences burned down. And we had to evacuate all our cattle for a week while the fires spread to our farm from multiple directions. Thankfully and amazingly, we did not lose our home or any animals. God protected us and provided for us through that terrifying experience.
There have been many other challenges along the way. We share many stories through our blog, Facebook page, and email newsletter. Our customers are very supportive and love to hear all about what’s happening at our farm. Many have become dear friends over the years and it is such a pleasure to work for such fabulous people who care about what they eat and about who produces their food.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We have been ranching for over 15 years. We offer a variety of local purchase options including monthly local meet-ups in surrounding cities. We also work with a number of local mom-and-pop grocery stores to carry our beef, pork, chicken, and eggs. Our newest and most exciting is our on-farm store that we opened 4 years ago. It’s a beautiful timber construction building that Matt designed and built himself with lumber that we milled on-site. It’s a fun old-fashioned shopping experience with something for everyone!
There we offer our meats and eggs, plus a full line of natural groceries featuring clean ingredients, no seed oils, no artificial stuff, and organic as much as possible. We have everything from fresh fruit and vegetables, baking supplies, jams, local honey, homemade bread, granola, and yogurt, fermented veggies, dried fruits, nuts, locally roasted coffee, gourmet chocolate, grains, rice, and lots more.
We offer seasonal farm tours when Texas weather is behaving itself (March-May and Sept-Oct). We love what we do and we really believe food can be a wonderful healing tool when produced and processed conscientiously. We have lots of folks that drive out from Dallas on a regular basis. It’s a fun little country road trip well worth the time!
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
There are so many lessons we have learned… First and foremost, farms are unique in that they are almost always a family business. Our faith in Christ is very important to our family. God is the one who directed our steps from the beginning and ultimately healed Matt’s guts and provided us with a farm. God is the reason we are compelled to have integrity in the way we raise our animals. So my first advice is… make peace with God. He will help you. Even if you fail, if you are walking with him, nothing can really go wrong in the grand scheme of things.
My second advice is: husband and wife need to be on the same team. Love and serve one another. Your farm is your love story. It’s a beautiful adventure filled with joys and heartaches that you can share together.
Third… don’t push for super fast growth. Slow and steady wins the race. This applies to landing big wholesale accounts as well as infrastructure investments. You don’t want to bite off something so big that it sinks you if things don’t work out.
Fourth… be frugal. I mean really frugal. Farming is very costly and you need every penny to be spent wisely. Control needless spending. In the beginning you have more time than money, so it’s good to use your time to save money. Begin working to build your labor costs into your prices or else as your business grows, you will have less time but still not much money, and so no way to hire help or invest in better infrastructure.
Fifth and last for now… Run numbers before you decide pricing. Picking prices out of the air is never a good idea. And copying your neighbor’s prices is also bad because you don’t know anything about their financial situation. Do the work to crunch the numbers so you know you’re really paying for the things your farm needs–not just the daily operational costs, but also the capital investments like land, tractor, fences, etc. It’s vital to a successful business!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.shadygroveranch.net
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shadygroveranch/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shadygroveranch
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/shadygroveranchtx
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/show/3Fk40ZL5Kn8B8Cndj9p7p9
