The ranch-to-market tale of the organic beef you just bought from Whole Foods

September 30, 2009 · Posted in food · 2 Comments 
Start to finish story on grass fed beef from the Arapaho Ranch in Wyoming on Tuesday September 8, 2009. Cattle graze on the Minnesela Slope at the 595,000 acre ranch. Owned by the Northern Arapaho Tribe, it is the largest certified organic cattle ranch in the country. Cyrus McCrimmon, The Denver Post

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.

Today’s Denver post details a steer’s journey from wide-open Wyoming skies to a Colorado slaughterhouse to the Whole Foods store in Boulder.

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. Read more

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