LET US EXPLAIN WHAT WE DO

Okay so you may have run across the term grass-fed or grass-finished before, and unfortunately there really aren't any standard meanings for these terms. So let me explain in (probably too much) detail what we do, and what our cows eat. Our cows' diet consists of a mix of grasses, clovers, chicory, alfalfa, brassicas, forbs like dandelions, and yes, even some thistle (though we've been successfully working on reducing the thistle concentrations in our pastures) to give them the mix of proteins, energy, and fibre they need to be healthy and thrive. In the summer they graze these plants off their pastures. In the winter we feed them a dried supply of these plants that we cut, and put into bales (and call it hay) for easy handling, storage, and feeding. But that's not all they eat - because it doesn't meet all their needs. They are also provided a supply of salt (pretty much like the table salt you're used to, though not iodized) and dietary minerals (again similar to a daily multi-vitamin you might take). So why do cows need salt and minerals? Well, cows aren't native to North America and the soils here don't have the right mix of minerals to be brought up into the grasses and other plants that cattle need. We make up the difference with a multi-vitamin supplement. On top of all this, our cattle sometimes get an organic grain ration to give them a boost of energy to help them get through the coldest days in winter. More food energy means cows stay warmer and a grain ration (a mix of oats, barley and other cereals) allows a cow to take in more food energy than normal. Out of the approximately 30lbs of hay an animal will eat in a day, they may get a pound or two of grain ration on a handful of days in the winter. This whole practice is what we refer to when we say "grass-fed". It's hardly a unique approach to raising cattle but another farm can follow a much different practice and still sell their meat using the terms the grass-fed or grass-finished. We encourage you to look past the marketing language and really learn how your food is produced. And by all means, please reach out by email if you want more information about how we farm.

We don't put any hormones into our animals. Hormone releasing elements are often injected or implanted into cattle to force them to grow more muscle faster. Usually it's some sort of testosterone and it's usually pretty cheap so it's an enticing way to make an animal more profitable. I can't explain it any further because I have no experience with it and haven't done any research into it. We're happy with how our cattle grow, not using artificial hormones keeps things simple because it's one less thing to worry about, and we can ask a premium for our hormone-free meat.

Full transparency up front - we are not certified organic. It's too expensive, involves too many hurdles, and there are so many loopholes in most certifications that we feel they are frequently meaningless. But: we don't use pesticides we don't use herbicides we don't use chemical fertilizer If we have to buy supplemental food, we make sure it's certified organic. Sound good to you?

Okay, strap-in, this answer isn't going to be short and may even get ranty. But it's worth the read, I promise. Antibiotics are not bad. If my daughter got a bacterial infection and the doctor prescribed an antibiotic, you're damn right I'll fill that prescription and make sure she takes it. It's no different for our cows. It seems at least one cow every year get's a cut or scrape, etc. that get's infected and we clear it up with antibiotics, usually penicillin or biomycin, and we administer it for the full treatment duration because we do not want to be causing bacteria to develop antibiotic resistance. What is bad is the industrialized farming practice of continually giving antibiotics to cattle before an infection to avoid an infection. It's usually done in feedlots because feedlot conditions are so stressful on animals that their immune systems get weakened to the point that the natural bacteria that lives in their digestive and respiratory tracts can run out of control and make them sick or kill them. (Don't get me started on the use of feed antibiotics to wipe out part of a cows natural rumen bacterial so that higher efficiency bacteria can take over allowing the cows to grow more on the same amount of food.) The antibiotic isn't bad and the bacteria itself isn't bad, it's the whole situation that's bad. We are not a feedlot, our animals aren't stressed and we don't abuse the use of antibiotics. The animals we slaughter for meat usually have never been administered an antibiotic but every once in a while an animal will scratched themselves, or step on a fallen branch and poked a hole into the soft tissue between their hooves (kind of like getting a sliver jammed into the skin between your middle and ring finger), or even poked themselves in the eye, and they need a couple shots of medication to clear up an infection. I'm happy to do that so that they don't get sicker, go lame, lose an eye, or possibly die. But when it comes time to butcher that animal for meat, that meat will not contain antibiotics because we make sure that enough time has passed that the animals kidneys will have broken down and eliminated the antibiotic. You're more likely to get a small dose of penicillin off some mold spores on your hamburger bun than you will from our hamburger meat.

Because the term simplifies the realities of farming animals, obfuscates the stressfulness of feedlots, and makes it seem like antibiotics are bad. So it's a bad term, no matter how you slice it.

One. Bad. Day. That's our guiding philosophy. From birth to death we work to give our animals everything they need and keep them away from anything that will hurt them. We'll patch them up when they get hurt. We'll medicate them when they get sick. But eventually every animal here will die. It's a reality that cannot be avoided. It may be due to old age or it may be due to being slaughtered. What we promise them is that we'll do everything we can so that they'll only have that one bad day.

By regenerative we mean that we try to employ techniques and practices in rearing animals that improve the condition of the land. A really successful strategy for us has been to rotationally graze our pastures. It involves creating daily paddocks for the cattle to graze on where there is enough food that they eat a third of the grasses and other plants, trample a third into the soil, and leave a third of the plants untouched. We move paddocks daily and aim to give grasses 45 days to recover before the cattle come back to graze again. The trampling of plants helps sequester carbon into the soil, restricting the time they have access to any one paddock keeps the cattle from overly damaging the plants, making sure the plants have adequate time to recover helps them be healthier and more productive, and by leaving some plants completely untouched, we allow them to go to seed; increasing the number of plants next year.

Maybe? Honestly, it's a term we struggled with. What we're trying to convey is that we operate in contrast to modern industrialized farming practices. We're not interested in fighting an animal's natural functions, behaviours, and ecology to generate the biggest possible number in an accountant's spreadsheet, but rather want to work with and promote natural behaviours to raise happier, healthier animals and, by extension, better food. For example, everyday we move the cattle onto a fresh pasture. The thinking is that it replicates the migratory behaviour that wild grazers demonstrate on open plains where they slowly cross the plain over the season, one mouthful at a time. After we started the daily moves we immediately noticed a change in the cattle's attitude. They became more docile and less likely to try to break through fencing. They did however become more vocal if we were late in the morning to start their daily move. There's a reason they get called boss-cows. (Before I get angry, pedantic emails, I do know it's actual Bos and that is the name of the scientific genus that includes wild and domestic cattle - spare me some mercy at the terrible pun.)

Right now we are only providing a prearranged delivery service. Shipping frozen meat isn't simple and we have yet to figure out a system that we're happy with.

We can absolutely try. We service those 4 areas regularly due to our location and available time. But if we had a large enough demand we could setup a one off delivery or something we could commit to annually or semi-annually. Email us to see what we can setup up.

Currently our meat is wrapped in butcher paper with the exception of our ground beef. Our ground beef is packaged in convenient one lbs plastic packets called chubs. We are working with our butcher and packer to change our packaging to clear vacuum sealed packaging. We will update you when those changes happen.