I’m glad to share that Nadig Farms has joined the Elizabeth Area Chamber of Commerce.
Of all the towns our family’s ground sits near, Elizabeth is one of the closest to home, and joining its Chamber feels less like business and more like introducing ourselves properly to neighbors we’ve farmed alongside for six generations.
A town with a fort in its backyard
Elizabeth is a small town with a surprisingly big story, and you don’t have to dig far to find it. Right there on the edge of town sits the Apple River Fort, and the reason it’s there is the Black Hawk War of 1832.
That summer, the conflict swept through this part of Illinois, and the settlers around the Apple River threw together a stockade fort to protect themselves.
In June of 1832, a band of Sauk warriors led by Black Hawk himself attacked it. The people inside, including the women who reportedly reloaded rifles and kept the defense going, held the fort through the fight. It’s one of the few times a settler fort in Illinois was directly attacked and held. The reconstructed fort still stands today, and if you’ve never walked through it, it’s worth the trip.
I think about that story more than I probably should. A handful of ordinary families, dug in on a patch of ground they’d decided was worth defending, getting the job done because nobody else was going to do it for them. That’s about the most accurate description of small-scale farming I’ve ever come across.
Cattle then, beef in your freezer now
Long after the war moved on, the thing that kept Elizabeth alive was the same thing that keeps it alive now: people working the land around it.
This is farm country, and it has been since my family first put down roots here in 1870. The railroad came through and gave the town its shape, but the ground around it stayed what it always was, good country for raising cattle.
We’re still doing exactly that. Nadig Farms raises grain-finished Angus cattle here in Jo Daviess County, has them processed at USDA-inspected local butcher shops, and sells the beef directly to the families who cook it. You get our cattle, processed the way we’d want our own family’s beef processed, with our name standing behind every cut.
No distributor in the middle, no mystery about where it came from.
Close to home, and close to Chicago too
Elizabeth sits right on US-20, the same corridor that carries Chicagoland families west toward Galena and the Driftless country every weekend. So while Elizabeth is genuinely our neighbor, it’s also a stone’s throw from the route thousands of Chicago-area folks take on their way to a weekend up here.
That’s part of why direct-to-consumer beef works so well for us. We can raise cattle in one of the quietest corners of Illinois and still get a freezer’s worth of it delivered to a family in the Chicago suburbs who wants beef they can actually trace back to a real farm and a real family.
A surprising number of our customers found us on a drive through exactly this stretch of US-20.
Getting some of it into your freezer
We sell our beef in bulk shares, which is honestly the best way to buy really good beef. You’re getting the full range of cuts from a single animal rather than whatever happens to be left in a store case. You can see the current shares and figure out what fits your household on our bulk beef page.
Stock Your Freezer with Beef
Quarter, half, and whole shares — raised one mile north of Stockton, easy to grab on your way to Galena.
Reserve Your Share →Proud to be a Chamber member
Joining the Elizabeth Area Chamber of Commerce is our way of showing up for a town our family has lived next to for more than 150 years.
Elizabeth is the kind of place that’s endured because the people in it decided it was worth the effort, going all the way back to a few families in a fort on the edge of town. We’re proud to be a small, six-generation part of that story, and glad to stand with the folks working to keep this community strong.
