Protecting consumer confidence in beef. That is the the main goal of the Beef Quality Assurance (BQA) program and I had the opportunity to become BQA Certified last week. BQA is an educational training for producers to build awareness of industry standards based on recommended national guidelines and research from USDA and the beef industry. […]
On our family ranch, we use antibiotics as one tool to keep our beef cattle healthy and well-cared for in order to produce great, quality meat. And we don’t just use antibiotics to use them. We have a herd health program where our cattle get regular medical care, including checkups, that starts with vaccinations to […]
I get this question a lot. “Are your cattle fed grass or grain?” The question that usually accompanies this is, “Isn’t grass-fed beef healthier?” One common misperception with meat-buying is that organic, natural or grass-fed beef are healthier for me. No matter what type of beef food-eaters choose, they can be confident all types of […]
As a rancher and a mom, it’s just as important to have a health plan for our cattle as it is our kids. Animal welfare is a way of life for farmers and ranchers just like my family and me. On our ranch, we use a herd health program, much like a well-child check with […]
Most of our snow has melted and things are looking more and more like spring around the ranch. Even though we started with about 30 purchased bred heifers having their baby calves in February/March, we are now officially into “calving season” on the ranch. Since we Artificially Inseminate (AI) all of our heifers and cows, […]
My mom and I had the awesome opportunity to “appear” together in a video about how we care for our cattle. In being a CommonGround volunteer and speaking about farming and food, the national coordinators of CommonGround brought a camera crew out to the ranch on a snowy, COLD December day to get a glimpse […]
Subway heard from agriculture. And I was one of them. I went to my local Subway restaurant on Thursday and spoke to the two managers on duty. I think I shocked them a little bit as neither one of them had heard about Subway’s announcement last Tuesday of sourcing meat never given an antibiotic starting in […]
With raising cattle, my Uncle Mark would say, “We are grass farmers.” When it comes to raising cattle, the health of our grass is imperative to the health of our cattle. On our ranch, we practice “holistic grazing” or rotational grazing, which means we mimic the natural herd grazing where cattle graze and keep moving. […]
