McIntyre Pastures’ Farm Tours Keep Selling Out – Here’s Why
Photo courtesy of Maria McIntyre
Story by Ash Golangco
Photo courtesy of Maria McIntyre
If you were to guess the local events that are selling out right now, would you guess farm tours? For McIntyre Pastures (i.e. McIntyre Family Farms), that’s certainly the case – within a couple weeks, their farm tours sell out and remain in high demand by Idaho locals.
Photo courtesy of Maria McIntyre
To find out why these tours are so beloved, we connected with Maria McIntyre over email. She says that the McIntyre family enjoys meeting the ‘wonderful people’ that take their tours, but also values the opportunity to educate families on farming. “Making that connection from soil to your plate is eye opening for so many! … Especially for kids and families to experience the hard work, care, rotational grazing, and beauty of caring for our animals makes a difference in where they seek their food now and hopefully in the future.”
It’s also a great way to let people see the farm’s ethical and healthy processes, proving that “what we say we’re doing – we’re doing.” With 100% grass-fed and finished beef, corn-free pastured pork, and soy-free mobile pastured poultry and eggs, the farm makes many promises to provide their animals with healthy living conditions and care. Visitors can clearly see that they totally deliver on them, too.
With such amazing offerings, we wondered – how was it affected and threatened during the pandemic? Everyone has been talking about the pandemic’s effect on education, offices, and factories, but what about farms?
Photo courtesy of Maria McIntyre
There was no lack of demand. In fact, McIntyre Pastures, like many farms, experienced a huge spike of customers that wanted to buy meat and eggs, but the farm wasn’t equipped with labor, supply, or distribution to handle the surge initially. To make things worse, there was a huge breakdown in the supply chain and getting supplies was challenging.
Maria explained, “We were in the midst of getting custom egg cartons shipped right when the pandemic hit. We were rolling eggs out in pretty much anything we could find until we could get more to our farm (which, of course, were extremely delayed)... We waited for special chicken feeders in 2021 to be shipped for over 5 months.”
Truthfully, the lengthy waiting time for supplies hasn’t changed much between the start of the pandemic and now, even when using local vendors.
But there’s other priorities that the pandemic elevated, which the farm has benefited from. “People want more connection with what they’re fueling their bodies with. They want to support local.” After the shelves of national grocery stores cleared out, McIntyre Pastures was still here next door.
The farm tours have boomed because people want “to experience the beauty of farm life, and the hard parts too.” Interested in learning in-person about their grazing systems and extensive care towards raising animals? Good news – their next farm tour will be October 9th from 9am to 1pm. All of their goods will be for sale, plus apples and pumpkins, face painting, Boon Farm to Fork food truck featuring McIntyre Pastures’ proteins, and more!
You won’t want to miss it, so stay tuned by signing up for an account to join their email list, or follow their Facebook page. Thanks so much Maria McIntyre for sharing your time with us!
