Home Grown Alabama: DSR Farms

Meet a young family in northern Alabama who became “accidental farmers.”

It all started with a few chickens.

You know the sayings about “chicken math” or how “chickens are the gateway animal” to getting started with the homesteading or farming life?

Well that is exactly what happened for Jesse and Jessica Murphy. They started with a few chickens for the fresh eggs, and then one day a friend hooked them up with a whole bunch of broiler chickens from a commercial hatchery. They built some simple Salatin style chicken tractors and raised their first batch of meat chickens. After friends and family raved about the taste of the meat from those pastured chickens…meat that tasted like chicken used to taste like, DSR Farms was born.

Named after their daughters, Dallas, Shelby and Raven, DSR Farms now raises not only pastured chicken and eggs, but has grown into pastured pork, dairy, rabbits and more.

Here’s what really drew me to this family. These happy little piglets here? They are pastured pigs. They get to run around, root and forage. The way pigs ought to live. The feed they are given is non-GMO feed from the same feed mill where I get the feed for my animals.

Just because an animal is livestock and will eventually feed our family, is no reason for that animal to not have the best life possible while it is here.

In fact, I think it is even more of a reason for that animal to live the best life it can possibly be given. That’s how we feel about our animals, and why we named our own farm, “Cosmopolitan Cornbread.”

From birth to butcher, an animal should live as naturally and stress-free as possible. As Jesse said, these animals should only have one bad moment. Not one bad day, one bad moment.

Needless to say, Jesse and Jessica are people after my own heart.

Jesse and Jessica used to get fresh milk from a local source, but then one day that source decided to get out of the dairy business. Disappointed in the idea of having to buy milk from the grocery store again, they looked at each other and said, “Why don’t we just get cows, too?”

And they did.

The Murphy family may have gotten into farming by accident, but from everything you can see…it’s more of a surprise. They discovered something that reached into their souls and became a driving passion. And that’s a pretty awesome thing.