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The ranch-to-market tale of the organic beef you just bought from Whole Foods
Cattle graze on the Minnesela Slope at the 595,000 acre Arapaho Ranch in Wyoming. Owned by the Northern Arapaho Tribe, it is the largest certified organic cattle ranch in the country. All the organic beef sold at Whole Foods in the Rocky Mountain region comes form this ranch. Cyrus McCrimmon, The Denver Post
Ever wonder where the organic beef you just bought came from? If you bought it at a Whole Foods store in this area, the beef started its life as a cow wandering the range of an expansive ranch in Wyoming.
Grass hugs much of the 595,000 acres of hills, valleys, and mountains that make up the Arapaho Ranch in north-central Wyoming. This sustains the thousands of cattle that live on the property, the largest organic, grass-fed cattle ranch in North America, a nearly 70-year-old enterprise on the Wind River Indian Reservation and run by the Northern Arapaho tribe.
The cattle that roam this range have it good. They spend their entire lives beneath the huge skies of these high plains, never doing time at feedlots, muddy corrals into which most cattle are squeezed for months to feed on grain and get fat. Cowboys do not strike them with electric prods to move them around, nor are the horns of males removed. When calves are weaned from their mothers, they are not forced into pens. Hormones? Unlike most cattle, the ones on Arapaho Ranch never receive injections of them.
Sometime before they turn 30 months old, though, heifers and steers face a pair of extremely bad days: The morning they are shipped away from the ranch, and the next morning, when they are killed.
More than a week later the slaughtered Angus cattle have been broken down into pieces of a puzzle; they now are beef — rib-eyes and New York strips, hamburger and tenderloins and stew meat — on display at Whole Foods stores throughout the Rocky Mountain region.Every ounce of grass-fed, organic beef for sale at Whole Foods in this area comes from the same Wyoming ranch.
The journey from calf to brisket, for these cattle, captures within it a sweep of issues and notions about the West, about agribusiness, even about philosophy and ethics.
Read the full story at www.DenverPost.com, or learn about local beef from ranches near Boulder below.
Brian Ferris uses solar and wind energy to pump in water for his animals. Brian Ferris owns a cattle ranch outside Ft. Morgan, about 90 minutes from Boulder. Photo by Cliff Grassmick.
Several family farms in northern Colorado sell their beef locally, and a couple offer their products at the Boulder and Longmont farmers’ markets. Some local restaurants also source the beef they serve from local ranches.
Terroir in Longmont, for example, uses Colorado’s Best Beef, which is also available at the Boulder County Farmers’ Market.
“We chose them based on our experience with their product and how they tended to and raised their cattle,” says Tim Payne, Terroir’s chef and owner. The restaurant uses Colorado’s Best Beef’s ground beef, beef tenderloin, rib-eyes, New York strip steaks and short-ribs on its menu that changes seasonally.
On a recent Sunday, Payne’s wife, Melissa Newell, who partners with her husband at the restaurant, toured some of Colorado Best Beef’s ranchland in Morgan County, as did several other customers, including Laurent Mechin, the new executive chef at Jill’s Restaurant in the St. Julien Hotel & Spa.
The tour began at Gina Elliott’s property in North Boulder and continued east on U.S. 52 caravan-style to Morgan County to the ranch of Brian Ferris and his wife, Marti, a large-animal veterinarian. Together, the Ferris and Elliot families raise the cattle that end up as Colorado’s Best Beef. The drive of about 60 miles through pasturelands and fields made green by spring rain ended after a few twists and turns at the ranch, which Ferris describes as “30 miles from everywhere.”
Ferris explained how he rotates the cattle through 13 different fields, called cells, which conserves the grassland. Cattle stimulate the grass by grazing, but are moved to a new pasture before the grass becomes too stressed.
Read the fully story at DailyCamera.com.
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