We actually don't produce our beef; our cows do.  Our contribution is to make sure that they get the best grass and hay we can grow for them, fresh water, good pasture, and we let them do their job.

Specifically, our cows eat only fresh grass or hay, and we make dried granular kelp available to them as a mineral/salt supplement.  We also make sure that the water they drink is good well water- water that we'd be happy to drink ourselves.

The cows are roaming on pasture from late April until the end of November.  Our pastures have four wire perimeter fences around them which carry a pulsed electric charge in them.  The shock is enough to get a cow's attention, but isn't high enough to hurt the cow (or the farmer who forgets that the fence is on from time to time).  We utilize a system called rotational grazing' which consists of allowing the cows to graze small portions of the pasture at a time and moving them frequently from one area to the next after they have grazed the available grass.  By doing this, we minimize the amount of time that the cows are grazing on any one piece of pasture and maximize the time that the pasture is able to recover. During the winter, our cows are fed hay and stockpiled pasture which is grass that is left ungrazed and uncut in a field.  

The only time our cows are ever confined to a barn is during very severe weather and for the mommy cows, during calving season.  The rest of the time they are free to roam around pastures. 

Our cows do not get hormone injections, prophylactic antibiotics or any of the nasty stuff that you don't want to have in your beef.  We eat the meat we produce; so we are just as finicky as our customers are about what's in our meat.

To learn more about rotational grazing visit: http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/rotategr.html