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My Home. My Grass. My Beef.
Located on the South Dakota/Minnesota border, our beef is grown on fields that are transitioning from corn and bean fields to rangelands. Here the plains stretch as far as the eye can see and our cattle is raised the way it was raised for hundreds of years prior to the advent of big agriculture. There is native prairie on the west end of the farm, and cropland is being converted to a high quality, high energy, grass alfalfa mix over the remainder of 330 acres. The scale of the operation is small enough to allow for the attention to detail required to produce quality healthy organic beef. While the costs of this kind of natural production are high relative to confinement raised animals that are representative of what is available in your average supermarket. We think that the health benefits and pleasure we get from raising cattle the old fashioned way are well worth it. As a country we've gotten used to cheap eats from tax subsidized corn to factory produced, sprayed down, and preserved "quick foods." But do you really want to have your food produced in the same way you get a mass produced calculator? For 50 years the business driven approach to providing more product on ever growing agi-business farms has created foods that are as much chemical as natural. It's one thing to buy a cheap calculator from a factory half way around the globe, don't take the same a pproach to what you put in your body. |
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Better Soil Equals Better Beef |
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The SOILS here in South Dakota are geologically young, being from the most recent Wisconsin glacial advance. They are still rich in many of the trace minerals that today have been leached out of older more weathered soils. The cattle get supplemental salt and minerals, but much is provided to the plants by the soil and of course from the plants to the animals. This method worked for several thousand years before commercial feedlots and we feel that this is still the best this way. |
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Good Fat vs. Bad Fat |
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OMEGA-3 is a group of fatty acids. Man was designed to maintain healthy with a diet that had a near balance of Omega-3’s, with another group of fatty acids, the Omega-6’s. Modern grain based, highly processed diets, high in cooking oils and fast foods, often have about 20 times more Omega-6, then Omega–3 in them. The Omega-3 that historically was especially well balanced in meat, and milk, which is now out of whack, because milk and beef cattle are all raised on grain. The ruminant animal if fed almost totally grass and forage is especially good at keeping Omega-3 production even with Omega-6, as are many marine critters feeding within a few links of plankton in the food chain. Grass and forage is what ruminant animals were designed to eat, and what they did eat until cheap subsidized corn grain and confinement livestock came in. In addition, scientists have found that all Omega-3s are not equal. For example: one type of Omega-3; DHA, which is available from animal sources, is not available from flax seed. DHA in unison with the Omega-3, EPA are essential in nerve, eye, and brain development. This is just one of many facts that makes a diet that is closer to that of our ancestors look better every day. |
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