In 2001, Tim Haws owned just five acres of land and had no farming experience. He’d just started dating Sarah (now his wife) and decided to gift her six chicks. On a previous date, Sarah had shared that as a child she had attempted to hatch some grocery store eggs in a dresser drawer, and he thought she’d appreciate the chicks.
Sarah was living in an apartment at the time, so after about a week, they moved the chicks to Tim’s land. “I really enjoyed having them,” he said. “And then one thing led to another, and the next year I bought a couple cows. Everything just grew from there.”
Since those humble beginnings, requiring a decade of Tim and Sarah juggling farming with off-farm careers and raising three children, Autumn’s Harvest Farm in Romulus, NY, has grown into a multidimensional livestock enterprise, raising beef cattle, poultry (layers, broilers and turkeys) pigs, sheep and goats. The cattle and sheep are certified grass-fed and animal welfare approved (AWA) by A Greener World. The layers and pigs also have the AWA certification.
Nearly all of their farmland – 145 acres owned and 500 acres rented – overlooks Cayuga Lake in the Finger Lakes. Their two owned properties are across the street from one another: One side of the road is the heart of their grazing program and the other side (a former horse farm) is where their house and barns are located.
Grazing season runs from early May through November with all of the livestock rotationally grazing the 130-acre pasture system enclosed by a single steel strand of perimeter fencing. The 130 acres is further divided into 30 fixed paddocks with either woven wire or five-strand fencing. The fixed paddocks are then further divided using a single strand of polywire.
A rotation through this system begins with cattle, followed by the layers and then the sheep and goats. Tim has three full-time employees who help care for the animals as they move across the landscape. With about 200 head of cattle, they are rotated in separate groups with 60 finishers on their own rotation at a separate location.
It is a closed herd of exclusively Murray Greys, a breed Tim stumbled upon out of necessity. He was looking for a bull in his early years, and the Murray Grey bull was half the price of an Angus. “I just kind of fell in love with the breed and their dispositions,” Tim said.
Once the cattle have grazed, the 1,200 layers and their portable houses are moved into a paddock and surrounded with poultry netting. These paddocks are large enough to accommodate four to five days of daily movement before the netting needs to be moved. The houses have wire flooring so that their manure is deposited onto the pasture.
Diversification is the name of the game at Autumn’s Harvest, and that includes finishing about 500 Berkshire pigs each year. Photo courtesy of Tim & Emily Haws
The layers are followed by about 120 sheep – Katahdins and Lincoln Longwools – and a small number of goats. They also finish about 500 Berkshire pigs each year (they farrow about half of them) and raise 5,000 broilers and about 3,800 turkeys for the Thanksgiving market, but these groups are kept in their own rotations separate from the cattle-layer-sheep and goat system. The growth of the poultry and pigs is supported by locally sourced non-GMO grains.
When the aboveground pasture water system starts freezing up, the livestock are moved across the road to the home farm. The cattle are housed in what was the former riding arena and the sheep and goats in the horse stables. The wire floors of the layer houses are covered with wooden flooring and moved to their concrete compost pad where they spend their winter days scratching in the compost. Pig numbers decrease during the winter months to mostly the farrowers.
Tim spent the first decade of his farming career sans equipment but was able to trade in some of the equipment that came with the horse farm for some tractors (all Kubotas), skid steers and haying equipment. He now puts up all his own winter forage – about 1,500 round bales of haylage and 500 dry bales which are fed in the barns and outdoor access areas. He wraps his dry hay in plastic film because he doesn’t have any indoor hay storage.
The goal is for the cattle, sheep and goats to give birth during April so they have time to put on weight before the beginning of the pasture season. “The month of April is challenging, but I love it. Everybody’s exhausted by the end of it and kind of grouchy,” Tim said.
The home farm is also the site of the Autumn’s Harvest state-inspected custom butcher shop and retail store, with three full-time employees. The cattle, pigs, sheep and goats are first trailered 50 minutes to a slaughterhouse that divides the animals into their primal cuts. Then they’re brought back for hanging and further cutting and processing in the butcher shop. The retail store accounts for about 8% of their sales.
Autumn’s Harvest attends the Ithaca and Trumansburg farmers markets which account for another 12% of their sales. Pre-orders from their website, delivered monthly to drop-off sites in an hour radius from the farm, comprise 50% of their sales. The remainder of sales are wholesale accounts.
Autumn’s Harvest recently started weekly UPS shipments of frozen meat throughout New York State. Their restaurant sales, primarily in New York City, declined during COVID and never recovered, so the hope is to replace some of their wholesale accounts with the UPS home sales and capture greater value for their meats. To that end, Tim recently hired someone to run the online store and to assist with marketing and social media.
“Right now, I am probably spending half my time farming and the other half marketing, having meetings and stuff like that, which I don’t enjoy nearly as much,” Tim said. “I love raising animals, and that’s what I want to do.”
Tim loves the animals, but he also loves how they continually help to improve the land. In his 20-plus years of intensive grazing a diversity of livestock, he has seen their grasslands – most of which was conventional soybean ground prone to erosion – undergo a transformation.
“We’ve been able to raise a lot of different types of animals, and we’ve been able to convert really, really rough ground back into healthy soils. I think that’s one of our proudest achievements,” he said. And he’s proud to provide consumers with a diversity of nourishing proteins.
by Sonja Heyck-Merlin
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