I had grown up eating grass-fed beef my whole life. It wasn’t a health choice but more of a economic choice. My parents owned a herd of cows and we always kept one to eat ourselves. But times were tough and the extra money wasn’t there to feed the steer out on grain so it was just left with the herd until it was finished and ready to butcher.

I became accustomed to the flavor and began to prefer it over grain-fed beef. Later in life after I graduated from college and moved back to the family farm I decided I wanted to focus on producing grass-fed beef.  I didn’t understand why we were feeding corn to cows when it could be saved for humans, pigs and other animals that didn’t have the abilities of the cow. The cow has a special four compartment stomach called a rumen that enables it to consume and digest very low-quality feed that is not digestible to non-ruminant animals and still produce a very high-quality protein.

The problem was that the entire beef industry had been selecting its genetics based on a grain-fed diet. So finding genetics to work with was difficult. I started by importing Devon genetics from New Zealand and Red Angus genetics from Colorado. 25 years later we have a very unique herd of cows, which I call the Merlot breed, that produces a high quality product efficiently and effectively.