About the farm
A small piece of till plains, worked in the open.
Nispel Family Farm sits in western Lancaster County, between Denton and Crete. Glacial till, cobbles at the surface, and hills steep enough that you feel them in your knees. We bought the place in 2016. Stewardship here is observational: try something, watch the stand, try again.
The ground
About 20 acres are deeded. Roughly 11.25 acres sit inside fence; after trees and gullies, about 10.5 acres are usable pasture. Slopes run 7–30 percent across dissected till plains and loess uplands.
Dominant soils are Burchard and Shelby clay loam on the slopes, with Kennebec silt loam in the drainageway. Cottonwoods hold the gullies. Cedar removal is ongoing. Neighbors: row crop to the north, cattle pasture to the south.
How we work it
This is a regenerative pasture, not a row-crop outfit. The long job is moving a smooth-brome stand toward native warm-season grasses: big bluestem, indiangrass, little bluestem, and sideoats grama.
Methods stay low-input. We mow and leave the cut on the ground. We seed where a gap or a scar asks for it. Pigs and chicken tractors supply disturbance. After pig paddocks, the work is compaction repair — cover crops, trefoil, and time for organic matter and moisture to come back.
On about one acre we are trialing silvopasture: trees set wide, watching the trade between shade and forage.
Livestock, 2026
Pigs rotate on a 7–10 day move. Each paddock gets repaired when they leave. Chickens stay in tractors; we are still reading the lag between manure, rain, and a grass response, and getting the birds used to pasture.
Hair sheep are a maybe for buckbrush on the mid-slopes. Nothing is stocked on that front yet, and we do not list head counts or animals for sale here.