What is Grass-Fed Beef?
Back to Pasture. Since 2000, several thousand ranchers and farmers across the United States and Canada have stopped sending their animals to the feedlots. Instead, they are keeping the animals home on the range and feeding them food that is as close as possible to their native diets. They do not implant the animals with hormones or feed them growth-promoting additives. They are content to let the animals grow at their normal pace. Animals raised on pasture live very low-stress lives. As a result of their superb nutrition and lack of stress, they are superbly healthy. When you choose products from pastured animals, you are eating the food that nature intended. You are also supporting independent farmers, protecting small farms and rural communities, safeguarding the environment, promoting animal welfare, and eating food that is nutritious, wholesome, and delicious.
Good for the livestock . Animals raised on pasture are healthier and enjoy a better quality of life that is immeasurably better than those animals raised in confinement. For example, animals are able to eat when they are hungry, move around as they please, select for their diets, enjoy clean and spacious environments, and find a nice shade tree when it is needed. Our animals never leave the ranch and all processing is done right here (meat is cut up in a shop located off the ranch). This completely eliminates all stress to the animal as they are not loaded into trailers on the final day and hauled to an unfamiliar location. In fact, our animals are handled using innovative stress-reducing techniques. The cows are used to seeing us on a regular basis and when moved to different pastures we are very careful to move them slowly.
Good for the environment. Animals allowed to graze on pasture spread out their waste over the entire pasture area, providing a natural source of fertilizer. This is in contrast with a commercial feedlot or dairy where the manure must be collected, trucked, and then spread onto fields nearby. Large amounts of waste may prompt commercial feedlot managers to spread the manure too heavily or to use scarce water resources to wash it into a smelly storage lagoon. Grazing operations are very environmentally friendly as they are really “grass farms”, which use livestock to process grass into a healthy food product and because they don’t have to use a lot of diesel or gasoline to power the equipment used to farm commercial grains.
Good for our local economy. Buying pasture-raised, locally produced products, helps keep a farmer in your area in business. Selling products directly to you, the consumer, keeps prices down and gives you the opportunity to build a relationship with us. If we aren’t raising products you like, you can tell us directly and we can make changes. As we provide products that locals want, we stay in business because business increases.
As farmers like us stay in business, open spaces are preserved that might otherwise be turned into housing developments.
