We are John and Marie Wiley. We live on an eighty acre cattle farm in Licking County, half an hour Northeast of Columbus. We have been farming in earnest since 1998, and have been full-time vendors at the Olde Worthington Farmers Market since 2006. We enjoy the complicated challenges of farming, and are happy to be part of the current movement back to small family farms.
Come visit with us at market some Saturday morning. We enjoy talking with folks and answering questions. Come to market early if you want to buy some meat because we sell out nearly every Saturday. Contact us and ask to get on our e-mail list. We send out three or four newsletters a year.
We love offering such delicious and healthful beef to the public, and we like sharing our farm too.
Our Mission is to produce the best possible beef, using natural methods as humane as possible to the animals in our care, while improving the ground we farm. We aim to be a responsible and effective direct marketer. We strive for profit that we may continue. And we look to educate (and learn from) customers and other farmers, so that we can continue to grow and evolve even as we give ourselves up to this arduous task.
We are Mob Grazing. We are putting as many as 45 animals into paddocks as small as a third of an acre, moving them only when they have eaten or trampled all plants completely. Paddocks are formed with single line electric twine using fiberglass rods for posts and carrying an electric charge that would make you holler out loud if you hit it. We aim to use any given paddock no more than three times a year, and are building to a year round grazing program so that our animals are not stuck in the barnyard eating hay. Moving animals this way, typically daily, concentrates across all of our pasture the manure and urine that enriches the land. This pattern of occasional exhaustive grazing replicates the beneficial impact of large herds in Africa and the buffalo in North America, encouraging the native seed bank and protecting against vagaries of weather.
We do not breed. We buy beef calves, typically at 6 months of age, newly weaned and about 500 pounds. Most of them are Angus or Hereford, with plenty of mixes including Limousin, Shorthorn, and Simmental influences. We expect to have them in our herd for about 24 months, when they are 1100-1200 pounds (600+ hanging weight). Then we have them processed at a state inspected facility (we use Olde Village Meats, in Frazeysburg, Ohio). We are regularly acquiring a fresh group of new calves, and these, after a brief quarantine, join the herd and get into our daily routine, learning from the older calves. They in turn become our lead animals, showing newcomers how to get along. We are very much focused not only on the growth habits of animals but also on their calm readiness to be good members of the herd. Luckily, most cattle are profoundly good-natured--one of the reasons it is rewarding to live among them as we do.
Other than the green pasture they are living on year round, our cattle are fed hay as needed. We always have organic salt and kelp available free choice, and we provide well water (they are in no river or stream).
We offer no routine (sub therapeutic) antibiotics. We do not implant our animals with hormone treatments to make them grow faster. We use no chemical fertilizers or pesticides. And, last but not least, we are not cloning!
Located in Johnstown,
about twenty miles
NE of Columbus, Ohio
A Premiere Central Ohio
Grass Fed Beef Farm
