About Us
Who are we
Marvin and Holly have lived on a family farm for most of our married life. Marvin is a network engineer who works from home for NTS and presently manages our farm full time. I am a Registered Respiratory Therapist that works at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. We have been married 37 years this September 2021 and are definitely living our dream with raising Dexter Cattle. We are both close to retirement age and wanted to do something to keep us “busy” after we retired. Little did we know how much work it was going to take to get started and how much we would learn as we went along. It has been an amazing journey so far!
Our Farm
Our farm name is Apafia Farm which is an acrostic for A Place Apart From It All, (see what we did there) simply because we feel it is! God has truly blessed us with the desires of our heart. There is such a peace here on our farm. Almost always there is a breeze blowing…birds singing and yes cows mooing about something! We enjoy visitors so please feel free to contact us to make arrangements for you to come visit us.
We are not fancy but just a basic small family farm.
The family farm is divided up between 3 brothers. We have lived out here for almost the entire time we have been married. Our part of the farm is about 22 acres. The fenced in pastures are about 12 acres. We did pasture boarding for horses for years before we closed that down in 2016 after we purchased our first Dexter Herd. I thought I would miss our horses but to be honest I have not missed them. I enjoyed the time we had horses but also realized that we needed to change.
The next three years was a roller coaster ride of learning so many new things! I cannot believe it has been 3 years already coming up this August! Cows are very different from horses in ALL aspects! I have found I really enjoy working with them. All have such different personalities that come out when you walk through the herd to see how they are doing! Also love the babies!
Certifications
AGW Certifications
Apafia Farm is currently not certified. However we still follow the same practices and policies we did when we did maintain our certification. We asked our loyal customers if the certification held any significance in their determination to purchase from us but all of them said that their true was in us not some outside organization. So if you have any questions regarding how we run our farm or how we raise 100% grass Fed, grass finished Irish Dexter Beef, just ask us We do not give any antibiotics unless it is required for a serious medical condition and to date that has not come up. We do immunize our young cattle against some pretty serious known diseases, this has been a practice for a very long time, We use fish oil to fertilize our pastures and we do not use any type of jherbicide. We burn those weeds with a weed burner, (think small flame thrower). we are now using flytraps and coconut oil for fly control and it is working great.
Our Herd
Dillon of Kirkhaven Farm
Dillon of Kirkhaven Farm
Dillon of Kirkhaven Farm
We met Lesa and Hayden Reid who are from Rutledge, TN who God decided that we needed to meet and learn a bunch of things from Lesa who loves teaching anyone about Dexter cows in any area! They own a beautiful farm called Kirkhaven Farm that if you ever get the opportunity to visit, we would recommend you do so! We never dreamed we would be purchasing a young bull from this couple later on the next year. We met Cabernet who was Lesa’s prized Red Polled bull who was the PERFECT bull in ALL aspects! Cabernet has won every award a bull can win in showing. We told Lesa that we would one day love to purchase a bull calf from them related to Cabernet. We fell in love with her bull. He was respectful, kind, took care of his herd and just absolutely the prettiest bull we had ever seen. The stories that she told us about him were amazing. That next year Lesa called us to say she had a bull calf that was EXACTLY built like Cabernet. We were so excited we didn’t even ask how much! His name is Dillon and he has been the best thing since sliced bread! This bull calf has been amazing to say the least! EXACTLY the carbon copy of his daddy!
Ellie
Dillon of Kirkhaven Farm
Dillon of Kirkhaven Farm
Ellie is a black registered Polled Heifer who just got old enough to be placed in the herd with the bull. She has been extremely sweet but misses her buddies in the teenager field. We hope to have a nice calf out of this sweet girl next year.
