Some of the best opportunities to enjoy naturally, grass fed, organically raised protein is to order from a small farmer or rancher in the U.S. You pay a premium over feed lot raised meat you purchase in the market but there are several advantages.

The meat does not contain hormones or anti-biotics, the animals are humanely raised, and the land is treated with sustainable farming.

The one area that discourages many consumers is the shipping costs. There are economies of scale. Generally ordering under 10 pounds is not worthwhile. Many producers give incentives for certain dollar volume. And then there are often specials. It makes sense that ordering close to your residence costs less to ship. Most orders are at least two day ground.

Find the meat you like, the producer close to you, the economical size order and enjoy, enjoy.

Thanks to KJ’n ranch

Healthy Lamb From Our Family to Yours

We raise our lamb out on pasture rather than in factory feed lots. Pasture-raising lamb with managed intensive grazing preserves the soil, protects ground water, and recycles nutrients back into the earth. Studies prove pasture-raised livestock have less stress, less e.coli bacteria, and less saturated fats and more nutrients than their conventional counterparts. Supporting pasture-raised lamb production is a sure way to improve the environment, protect your health, and conserve the natural landscape.

Grass fed animal fat has higher levels of essential omega-3 fatty acids than animals fed high grain diets thereby leading us to believe that grass fed animals are nutritionally superior to those raised on high grain diets. Livestock raised on pasture have significantly higher levels of the antioxidant beta-carotene than animals finished in a feedlot and research found that the Beta-carotene content was twice as high as conventionally raised animals.

We now know that lambs raised on pasture are high in CLA, a naturally occurring fatty acid that may help the body prevent cancer. So pasture-raised meat is not just leaner than conventionally raised meat, its fat is actually much healthier. According to research, pasture-raised meat has a third less saturated fat than conventional meat. In addition, pasture-raised meat is also lower in calories. Lamb grazed on rich green pasture is rich in easily absorbed minerals and B vitamins – particularly B6 and B12.

Flavor: Dorper lamb meat is tasty and lean. At KJ’n Ranch we raise our sheep on natural grasses and the
lambs grow with no antibiotics or hormone supplements. Our herd is fenced out of creeks and reservoirs to
protect both local wildlife habitat and the quality of the sheep’s’ drinking water. Our principal protections
against native predators are our Great Pyrenees guardian dogs.

A Safe Product: Our sheep and lambs eat no grain products which virtually makes them unable to develop
the dangerous levels of e-coli in their systems that grain-fed animals experience.  The threat of contracting
disease is reduced because we do not feed them animal by-products.

A Healthy Product: Is grass fed naturally better for you?  Studies have shown that grass fed animals are 2-
6 times higher in Omega-3s, and have 3-5 times more CLA (conjugated linoleic acid) than conventional
lamb.  The average American diet is very low in Omega-3s, which leads to a higher risk of obesity, diabetes,
cancer, asthma, and arthritis.  Heart patients who follow an Omega-3 diet have a 70% reduction in heart
attacks and a 61% reduction in cancer deaths (source: Southwest Lamb Producers, AZ).

A Better Product: Our lamb is tender, delicately flavored, delicious, healthy, and safe.

Thank you to Buffalohillmeats.com

We know them as Buffalo!
The American Buffalo is not a true buffalo. Their closest relatives are the European Bison and the Canadian Woods Bison, not the buffalo of Asia or Africa such as the Water Buffalo. Scientifically they are named Bison bison and they are the largest mammal in North America.

In the early 1900’s there were few buffalo left in North America due to extensive hunting by the settling of the west. Today it is estimated that there are more than 350,000 and can be found in every state in the US. The buffalo’s unique personality is what attracts us to the animal. Each one has a different behavior but all have the common denominator that they are WILD animals. While some will eat from your hand, in seconds that behavior can change dramatically if it feels threatened.

While they may appear slow and awkward, they can easily outrun a horse and breakthrough any corral or fence they choose to.

They mature around 7 years old and often live past 30 years old. A mature bull typically weighs between 1800 to 2400 pounds while a mature cow will average around 1100 pounds.

Generally, a heifer will breed when she is two years old and pregnancy is almost 9 months in duration.

If your landing page does not have a strong representation of keywords people use to find what they want, the search engines will have more difficulty matching you with new prospects. These words have to be in several key locations to let the search engines know that your site specializes in your selection.

You obviously can’t have them all. There is a narrower scope of words you can use effectively. There are also only so many words that you can promote in your content. BUT if you draw people to your site, they will see everything you do or sell, so you don’t lose out on the other products.

I have used the natural meat industry as an example. The problem with most protein sites for search engines is that they open with either the e-commerce menu of items on display to add to a cart or they open with an “About Us”. Neither makes it easy for search engines to find the site competitive.

The following is an excel graph of how the many keywords can be combined by users to find what they want. If your site is strong in a few of the combinations, the search engines will have an easier time of finding you.

Some of the combinations from the chart below might be:

Natural Goat Recipes or Grass Fed Bison Steaks or Organic Lamb Shank

Being a farmer and bringing you natural and organic products can make you want to keep your day job.

From Stoneybrook Farm.wordpress.com/category/chickens

This batch of Red Broiler meat chickens that I am raising is flighty as hell. Ordinarily when you touch a meat bird it squawks a bit and a tremor shoots through its body, and that’s about it. When you touch a good percentage of this batch of Red Broilers, they go off screeching and flapping like they were shot out of a cannon.

None of the batches of meat chickens that I have raised have had a terribly good homing instinct, so they get close to the shelter at night, but not all of them get in it. This means that it is always necessary to round up a few of them and get them into the shelter. When I get out there well into dusk but before dark the round up is pretty easy. I just herd them with my feet. However, after dark, a chicken is pretty blind, so they don’t like to move. After dark, I need to pick the birds up and walk them to the shelter. As I mentioned above, this is usually pretty simple, just reach down and pick the bird up. With this group, however, you have to snatch them with two hands around both wings and hope you get a good grip before the cannon fires.

Last night my neighbor came over to buy some pork and another neighbor came to pick up a few pigs I piggy sat for him for a week, so we didn’t have dinner until about 8:30, which meant that I didn’t get out to the coop until well after dark.  One bird had squirmed its way in between two of the hay bales that I placed up against the shelter for added warmth because the nights have been so cool. Its head was “inside” but its butt was sticking out into the paddock, so I wanted to pick it up and bring it around to the front of the shelter and place it inside. Because there were still other birds to round up, I hadn’t closed the front of the shelter yet. When I touched that bird to try to grab it, it exploded forward, screeching and squawking, and slammed right into the back of the shelter. There was a huge boom inside the shelter as all seventy-five or so birds that had been inside frantically flapped their wings and came rocketing out, dashing in all directions once they cleared the door, screaming their heads off.

“Son of a bitch!” I thought to myself and shook my head as the commotion died down.  I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them peeping to each other and from the sound of it they were all over the place. I could hear that at least a few of them had gone through the fence. What should have been a simple little job had become a real chore.

The following comments by Doug Levy are more evidence of the coming age of social media and sellers moving outside their advertisements to touch and mingle with their followers.

By Doug Levy from Imedia

“The new model of marketing — fostering sustainable relationships — represents a meaningful change in the role of marketing. In the Consumer Era, the starting point was typically the consumer. Marketers worked to understand the buyer and become what consumers wanted them to be. The problem is, what consumers want the brand to be may not be what the brand authentically is. This causes a gap between the brand’s true intentions and how the brand presents itself — a gap that can cause mistrust with customers.

In the Relationship Era, the starting point is the brand. The brand must know its authentic self before it can engage in sustainable relationships with people. (This is similar to other relationships in our lives — at least the good ones — where it’s pretty much a prerequisite to know yourself and what’s important to you before finding a good match.)

The winners in the Relationship Era will be those that build trust and transactions, creating sustainable relationships with people.

At imc², we define “trust” as having three progressively complex components. The level of trust in a consumer-brand relationship stems from the consumer’s perspective on the following topics:

• Credibility: Does the brand deliver on its promises?
• Care: Does the brand understand my needs?
• Congruency: Does the brand resonate with my values?

Here’s how everything connects back to the three eras of marketing:

• Product Era: The focus is solely on transactions.
• Consumer Era: The focus is still on transactions, but the idea of trust enters the dialogue as a way to persuade people to transact more.
• Relationship Era: Trust between a brand and consumer is mutual. Trust and transactions are seen as distinct, and both are important.

The distinction between the role of trust in the Consumer and Relationship Eras is important. In the Consumer Era, trust was seen as a means to achieve an end, namely a consumer buying more. It’s a manipulation.

The shift from the Consumer Era to the Relationship Era is a fundamental one — beyond a shift in communication, advertising CPM models, or measurement tools. It’s an entirely new way to think about and practice marketing.”

Many have not gotten the idea that interaction with their consumer is important or that the brand does have to deliver trust. Some brands like Amazon create trust by always delivering on its promise of selection and prompt service with close follow up after the order. More firms are moving to Social Media or Face Book just to expose another face and convey a wilingness to be open and accountable. I am seeing fewer sites with out face book and twitter buttons.

Even if the efforts have not been monitized, it is an opportunity to get in step with what it feels like to set up a communication channel. This is just the beginning. If sellers are not willing to take the elementary steps, how far behind will they be in the next phase.

Healthy Lamb From Our Family to Yours

From Locust Grove Farm

We raise our lamb out on pasture rather than in factory feed lots. Pasture-raising lamb with managed intensive grazing preserves the soil, protects ground water, and recycles nutrients back into the earth. Studies prove pasture-raised livestock have less stress, less e.coli bacteria, and less saturated fats and more nutrients than their conventional counterparts. Supporting pasture-raised lamb production is a sure way to improve the environment, protect your health, and conserve the natural landscape.

Grass fed animal fat has higher levels of essential omega-3 fatty acids than animals fed high grain diets thereby leading us to believe that grass fed animals are nutritionally superior to those raised on high grain diets. Livestock raised on pasture have significantly higher levels of the antioxidant beta-carotene than animals finished in a feedlot and research found that the Beta-carotene content was twice as high as conventionally raised animals.

We now know that lambs raised on pasture are high in CLA, a naturally occurring fatty acid that may help the body prevent cancer. So pasture-raised meat is not just leaner than conventionally raised meat, its fat is actually much healthier. According to research, pasture-raised meat has a third less saturated fat than conventional meat. In addition, pasture-raised meat is also lower in calories. Lamb grazed on rich green pasture is rich in easily absorbed minerals and B vitamins – particularly B6 and B12.

Multiple minds

By Seth Godin

“Most people grow up with one and only one voice in our heads. It’s the one that talks when we talk to ourselves. (If you have more than one voice, time to check in with a doctor). It’s easy, then, to assume that this is the mind, that we have just one, one brain, one voice, one thing going on at a time.

We can demonstrate that this isn’t actually true. There’s the mind that gets nostalgic or excited at a photo or a smell or a sound. There’s the mind that keeps us breathing. There’s the mind that suddenly announces, “I’m hungry” after seeing a TV commercial. And most important to marketers and those that would change the status quo, there’s the lizard brain, the mind that worries, particularly about survival, reproduction and rage.

When the plane lurches in turbulence, it’s not your constantly running verbal mind that freaks out. It’s the amygdala, the prehistoric brain stem (and the surrounding parts of the brain) that kick in. That kick leads the verbal mind to start a frightening monologue, but it was your brain stem that started it.

Marketing to just the rational mind makes no sense, because the rational mind almost never decides anything by itself. And managing your career or your day based on your irrational fears makes even less sense. Which part of your mind makes decisions about credit cards, personal security, relationships, job prospects and creativity?”

So your marketing approach should not be one dimensional. You should reach prospects through several avenues to get their attention and perhaps register with the mind that would be interested in your message. People remember better when their is an emotional connection to your message; like joy, pain, fear, sex, or hunger to name a few. Do you want instant action or want to be remembered?

Having a multipronged approach like a web site, email, newsletters, facebook/twitter, or phone calls increases the odds of hitting on someone’s hot button. Let’s face it we are also oriented toward visible, auditory, or kinetic influences.

It is very frustrating for people with talent to be good at something and not have enough people appreciate them.

That’s often the result of their business going to other people on the internet. This is especially true if your service can be provided by anyone nationally.

Schools need to be teaching two things:

• How to develop a skill

• How to get the skill communicated to the right audience

There are five things necessary for your website:

• Create keywords that best describe your service

• Match the words to the most popular words people use to Google your business

• Compare with how the competition uses the words

• Install the words in the several locations Search Engines expect to find them

• Make the presentation stronger than your competition

Then you will have a better chance of people finding you and appreciating your talent.

Hardly a single weight loss program does not mention the need for exercise. Even the most  impressive gurus stress exercise as the key to losing weight. But my experience as a true exercise buff, is that if people have not been strenuously exercising, they are not about to start and if they are seriously over weight, they cannot begin the strenuous exercise necessary to burn a lot of calories.

Now, I say this and I exercise everyday and I lost weight by running 60 miles a week for years as a citizen track club member.

I have also learned that very few people can exercise enough to lose weight. Mathematically an hour of exercise generally burns about 700 calories. A pound of weight is about 3300 calories. The average body burns about 2,000 calories a day. A lot of exercise would burn pounds, but in this over scheduled world we live in, college may be the last time you have that kind of time.

You may not have time to exercise enough to burn serious pounds, but everyone can reduce their caloric intake.

It is said that your digestive system uses about 65% of your energy. If you keep your digestive system working, you will be using a lot of your energy around the clock. Protein makes the digestive system work harder than any other food because it is not easy to break down like simple carbohydrates (sugar, pasta, bread).

If you stoke your digestive system each few hours and minimize your total caloric intake, aren’t you going to have results? This is something you can do every day without putting on your sweats, tennis shoes or driving to the gym.

I exercise for mental clarity, self esteem, stress release, conditioning, preventing atrophy, enjoying the outdoors, time alone, creative processing, and other reasons. I have been a gym rat all my life and have rarely seen anyone lose weight over a period of time except for some extreme exercisers or those working with a nutritionist.

It’s easier to achieve goals if we focus. Many people exercise and then use it as an excuse to eat what they want. This is why people don’t lose weight exercising. It becomes their rationale for eating what they shouldn’t. If you focus on food intake for weight loss and exercise for stress release, you may get your results quicker and feel better without the guilt that is usually associated with trying to maintain severe dieting.

It says a few things. It says we care about what we put in our bodies because we appreciate the value of a healthy body. It says we care about how produce and meat are created for both humane reasons and land sustainability. It says we care about the health and environment we are providing to future generations including our own children and grand children.

We are willing to pay more to live in this manner. It means most people therefore have to make sacrifices for their beliefs. It requires discipline and often compromise and inconvenience to maintain our commitment.

It’s not religion but it could be spirituality. It could be a statement of character. It could be a statement of faith in how things could be better because of how things may have gone wrong. It could be a solution to which each person could contribute for many issues that seem too large for each individual to control. Like a football team, the ultimate goal is never reached if 22 people are not each pulling their weight.

Natural is often connected in descriptions by protein producers to their organic, grass fed, and pasture raised meats.  It sounds great- Natural Grass Fed Beef.

The public sees Natural associated with the best of processes and they therefore believe they are equal. Other articles deride Natural as having low standards or no standards. The producers who meet a few criteria such as no hormones and no anti-biotics may violate other standards of organic and grass fed meat but can call their products Natural.

Those who deride Natural as having few real standards nor certificates are right.

Those who connect Natural with their high standard processes are giving Natural credibility.

Not only does the word sound like the right thing, when the public sees natural on a food product they think it is a good product. Many consumers when questioned rate it higher than organic. The truth is it could be better, worse, or equal to organic.  Natural may have met minimum criteria or a high standard meat producer may be calling his product Natural. It’s confusing.  It takes work to determine the difference? Whose Fault is it?

There is a misconception that a high protein diet automatically means low carbs.

It is not necessary. The proteins can be 50% of your diet. It should be lean low fat protein. The carbohydrates can be 35%-40% of your diet but it has to be the right carbohydrates. Eliminate bread, pasta, and desserts.  Make the carbohydrates fruits and vegetables. The other important ingredients to eliminate are bad fats and fried food.  This may include fast food.

So you can see if you are eating lean protein and fruits and vegetables you are giving your body ingredients it will use to function with little waste.

A third most important consideration is portion size. You don’t need to starve to lose weight, just eat properly and consume less calories than you take in. Exercise can help your metabolism burn more calories but eating protein every three hours will do almost the same.

The best surprise is that the cleaner you eat, the cleaner you will want to eat. And you don’t need to be 100% perfect. If you start out at 80% and cross the lines a few times a week, you will probably make the transition more sustainable. People that go on extreme diets can’t wait to finish and have a hamburger.

Don’t punish yourself and don’t deprive yourself. Eat cleaner and less and you will gradually lose weight and never suffer. In fact, you will soon feel better than ever, be proud of yourself and start converting others by example.

The online market for natural foods tends to be women in the age category of 34 to 54 with at least some college education.

Websites that want to retain and hold their best demographic should create content and copy writing that appeals to their best targets. No website can get everyone, so the ideal customer is the one you want to develop.

We have created a great template format that is fully optimized for high page ranking on the internet and we will create a key word strategy that will lay the foundation for dominating a niche.

Just as important as understanding how to get traffic that does not already know you is delivering your unique selling proposition and creating trust.

It’s a lot to do on one visit so the design, content, keyword strategy, and copy writing have to be focussed and effective. The best part is we have the most competitive pricing that will make it extremely cost effective for you to increase your traffic and your sales or following.

This site will provide information on “wholesome” and focus on “protein”. It will be extremely informative for an audience that wants to increase their healthy life style and include wholesome protein as an important cornerstone. Join us in building a following for “natural” and carrying the message to a larger audience.