Ledgenear Farm | Marketing Conservation
The 2026 Marketing Conservation Cohort was built around a simple idea: farmers are already doing important conservation work, and those stories deserve to be shared. OCNRCD partnered with Ledgenear Farm to explore how their approach to manure management, rotational grazing, nutrient planning, and sustainable packaging supports both the farm and the surrounding landscape. Through the program, those practices became the foundation for a story about thoughtful land management, healthy pastures, and the connections between a working farm and the waterways around it.
Ledgenear Farm
By James Coe and Nella Cargioli Coe
Building a healthier nutrient cycle
At Ledgenear Farm, conservation is closely connected to understanding what the land needs and making thoughtful decisions about nutrients, grazing, and resources.
Manure Management
Manure from the farm's herds is dry stored and returned to fields according to what the soil needs.
This helps retain nutrients while reducing the risk of polluted runoff entering waterways. The practice also reduces fuel use by lowering the volume and weight of material that needs to be transported.
Rotational Grazing
The beef herd moves regularly to fresh paddocks, giving grazed areas weeks to rest and rebuild before cattle return.
Rest periods help keep pastures productive, improve resilience during dry periods, and keep cattle fenced away from streams and waterways.
Nutrient Managment
Ledgenear follows a nutrient management plan developed with local conservation and agricultural experts, like OCNRCD. Regular soil and manure testing helps determine what fields need, reducing the risk of applying more nutrients than the land can use.
It's conservation built on observation, testing, and knowing the land.
Sustainable Packaging
The farm packages its maple syrup in glass bottles protected by recyclable paper packaging.
Bottles are shipped with prepaid return labels so they can come back to the farm, where they can be cleaned and reused.
A small change, repeated bottle after bottle, becomes part of the farm's larger conservation story.
