Our beef is 100% grass fed.  In addition to complying with Audubon Conservation Ranching protocols (which already require no hormones and no antibiotics), all of our beef comes from animals whose diet is derived solely from forage and a limited list of approved supplements.  

Our cattle may not ever be fed any grain, and must always have continuous access to pasture. Although it’s pretty much that simple, you can find more information here.

Cattle are not healthy eating a diet they were not designed to consume. Whereas we humans are omnivores, cattle are a type of herbivores called ruminants. Cattle are often referred to as ruminants; a ruminant is a walking fermentation tank full of microbes that slowly convert whole plant leaves and stalks (called “forage”) into compounds that the animal’s own metabolism then converts into muscle and fat. When the cow’s rumen and its own metabolism, fueled by forage, are working well together, they produce healthy muscle made up of the naturally perfect balance of diverse proteins, fats and micronutrients that your body recognizes and knows what to do with to make you healthy.  

Many grassfed fans like to point out that the fat content in grassfed beef is different (e.g. more “omega 3’s” and conjugated linoleic acid “CLA”), or that the meats are also more abundant in vitamins like A, D, E and K.  Both are generally true. But we like to emphasize that it’s actually the wholeness of all of those good things together, and many of the other things we don’t even understand, in a real food like 100% grass fed beef that really makes it good for you.

If you want to geek out further on some of the details of the differences in grassfed and grainfed beef, check out this fabulous scientific review article by Dr Cynthia Daley and her colleagues.  If you’re still hungry for more details on the beauties of real, whole meats, jump on over to this great paper by Fred Provenza and colleagues.  If you’re still curious to learn more, you are welcome to explore the science more with help from Google Scholar and decide for yourself.  

It can be, but not necessarily, and frankly, not if we can help it.  Thankfully, we think the science is moving sharply away from our 50-year fear of fat.  Natural fats, in the right balance, are where many of the micronutrients are held - especially the fat soluble vitamins.  Unbeknownst to many grazers, an animal with the right genetics, when grazed on with richly nourishing grasses and forbs that grow in healthy soil, can yield a well-marbled product not unlike a grain-fed animal.  And when it does, that’s where much of the goodness lies. It’s up to you, but we’ll tell you that when we’re eating a real grassfed steak, we eat all of the fat - every bite of it. 

ALL of our beef comes from farms and ranches right here in the USA.  You will NEVER find imported beef in our box. We’ve got absolutely nothing against farmers in South America or Australia - many are our friends.  But buying beef from a farm overseas does nothing for fixing broken landscapes and farms here at home. Our current farm system is killing our birds (or causing them never to be born) and poisoning our waterways.  But we can fix a lot of that by producing beef in a way that leaves the land in better shape than we found it. If all around the world people were to buy food that regenerated the health of their own home-lands, it would mean that we could fix lands and ecosystems everywhere.  Right now, the Audubon program is primarily active in the “central flyway”, but we expect more states and regions to be added in time. 

The National Audubon Society is a highly respected 100+ year old non-profit conservation organization that “protects birds and the places they need, today and tomorrow, throughout the Americas using science, advocacy, education, and on-the-ground conservation.”  Audubon encompasses roughly 1.2 million members, 23 state chapters, 500 local chapters, and 41 nature centers nationwide. Audubon oversees the design and execution of the ACR certification program, but is not otherwise involved in the conduct of the Blue Nest Beef business.  Legally speaking, Blue Nest Beef is a licensee of the National Audubon Society.

The Audubon Conservation Ranching (ACR) program is a 3rd Party Certification system that assures compliance in four key areas:

Habitat Management - Every farm and ranch must be managed according to a set of bird-friendly protocols. Audubon also helps each ranch develop a habitat management plan that identifies and actions specific opportunities to help birds in its local setting.  Forage & Feeding - All animals must have continuous access to pasture and receive no hormones and antibiotics.  Although no feedlots are allowed, ACR protocols do allow modest supplemental feeding of grain in pastures - something not allowed under additional Blue Nest Beef protocols.Animal Health & Welfare - Ranchers must demonstrate a set of practices enabling of maximum animal health and welfare.  Any animal mistreatment is not tolerated in the ACR program.   Environmental Sustainability - Use of pesticides are restricted and a range of practices that might impair ecosystem health are further restricted.  

You can find more information about ACR protocols here.

Our take on animal welfare is really simple. Feed the diet they are designed to eat- forage and no grain. Keep them on pasture and never confined in a feedlot. Make sure all interactions with people are low stress. Only use processors with a long history of low stress management and quick, careful and painless harvesting. Personally inspect every animal before purchase. 

We feel these Blue Nest Beef requirements, in addition to the Audubon protocol, which already sets a high bar for animal treatment, results in animals that are happy, healthy, safe, and calm their entire life. We do this not just because it’s our responsibility to the animals in our care but its also the only way to deliver an incredible eating experience to you and our other customers. Cattle that are stressed, sick, anxious or mistreated will never create beef that is amazing. 

Here is a link to the full ACR protocols to that you can see more specifics yourself.

Birds need both food and habitat.  Kill the bugs and many birds have nothing to eat.  Poison the plants or the bugs and the birds can also become sick.  The full food pyramid actually begins underground where microorganisms eaten by slightly bigger organisms and so on - starting a cascade up the food chain that leads to edible food for birds.  So practices that grow healthy soil also create more and healthier food for birds.  Birds also seek different kinds of habitat - some even have a different needs or preferences at different times of year.  Our kind of “regenerative” grazing creates a rich and diverse habitat with time-varying structures (i.e. some tall grass and some short grass) that create liveable spaces for all kinds of grassland birds year round. 

“Regenerative” means our producers farm and ranch in a way that leaves the land better than they found it.  Scientifically speaking, this happens because working with the complexity of the natural system, instead of fighting against it, shortens the cycles of nutrients in order to maximize the capture and flow of solar energy by and through biological life.    

In the case of cattle grazing, this means ranchers do their best to mimic the herds of roaming bison that once grazed close together, ate a bit, and moved often.  Instead of just standing behind a fence, animals in our program graze any particular spot for just a while, then move and don’t return to the same spot until plants have recovered.  Growing grass ‘leaks’ 20% or more of the sugars it makes during photosynthesis to the soil microbes to feed an underground barter economy that returns nutrients to the plant roots.  But grass eaten to the nub when an animal stays in one place causes root die-back, and thus no sugar coming out of the roots to feed microbes and the rest of life in the soil.  Alternatively, the high frequency graze/rest cycle accumulates carbon-rich organic matter in soil that makes more nutrients and water available to the plant to capture more sunshine.

In the end, the same grazing practices that do good things for birds yield a pulsing cycle of growth where the growing grass grows healthier soil that further grows more and better grass. That’s how the land is left better than a rancher found it.

Why yes, we’re glad you asked :-).  That stuff building healthier soil all falls under the umbrella term of “organic matter.”  Organic matter is made up of slightly more than half carbon. That means some carbon ends up in the soil instead of the air.  It turns out that worldwide, soils hold roughly 3 times more carbon than all the carbon in the air. So small changes in the volumes of carbon in soil can lead to bigger changes in the amount of carbon in the air.  We have much to learn about this aspect, and are actively involved in various science projects ourselves, but hint: the potential is quite big. Two recent studies in Michigan and in Georgia are examples of the potential for this kind of grazing to create a net carbon sink.  For a sense of just how big this effect might be on the Earth’s atmospheric carbon balance, we suggest you check out this paper or read this book.

But hey, healthy soil does more than just store carbon.  Healthy soil is more porous and permeable, so it also holds more water when it rains.  That means more water stays where it falls to grow more grass which can greatly mitigate the impact of drought.  But it also means healthy soil slows downstream runoff that can lead to erosion or, worse, flooding. Healthy soil also grows more diverse kinds of grasses and forbs that not only attract birds, but other wildlife.  

For a good overview of what this all looks like and how it works, check out this short film “Soil Carbon Cowboys” by our good friend Peter Byck.  Oh, and keep your eyes open in that flick for our own Dr Allen Williams.

We are chartered as a “public benefit corporation” which means we’re legally a for-profit with a purpose that includes but goes beyond profit.  We’ve done our best to design our business to work just like a regeneratively managed pasture. In other words, our business ‘roots’ leak to other members of our ecosystem that are involved in our nutrient and energy cycling.  In addition to market premiums for finished animals, a full 5% of our gross revenues go to our business ecosystem partners. Just like regenerative grazing grows more and better grass, everyone comes out ahead at the same time as the birds and the land.  When you buy our beef, you’re like a microbe participating in the supply of nutrients into this economic ecosystem.  

To learn more about our business design, click here. 

We have chosen to work with Crystal Creek Logistics to ship our packages to your door.  By design and default, all Crystal Creek shipments are carbon neutral - the full footprint of shipping offset with credits from things like planting trees.  We hope to one day work with them to provide credits for carbon our supplying ranches are capturing in soil - something that would literally close the carbon cycle while connecting our customers back to the lands of our farmers,  You can learn more about Crystal Creek here. 

Subscriptions help us create a more sustainable food system.  You save money, but subscriptions also help us plan our cattle needs with our ranchers.It takes almost three years from conception to your plate and subscriptions really help us manage that for the benefit of all involved. 

We don't officially grade our beef as the cost to hire an official USDA grader for the relatively few cattle we kill is cost-prohibitive.  We do informally grade them, and if they were graded, they would be High Select and Choice.

We've been raising, processing, and selling 100% grassfed beef since 2003, and we've learned that the USDA grade is one of many, and not the most important, criteria to predict a high quality eating experience.  Tenderness, juiciness, flavor, animal health, animal temperment, stress level in 12 hours prior to kill, are all essential to my goal of producing and selling the very best beef.  Unfortunately, since what gets measured gets done, and the presence of visual marbling is easy to see in a chilled carcass, this one measurement is the only thing the commodity beef industry cares about and pays a premium for.   We have taken a different path, and focused on all the more difficult to determine, but more important to overall quality attributes listed above, in addition to the diet of the animal.