Building a diversified grassfed farm

A niche of beef, lamb, and pizza

By Martha Hoffman Kerestes

Decorah, Iowa — Tom and Maren Beard are building community around their grazing farm in the rolling Driftless hills of northeastern Iowa.

That includes direct marketing grassfed lamb and beef raised on the farm, and it includes welcoming hundreds of folks onto their farm each weekend during warm weather for wood-fired pizza made with local and regional ingredients.

The Beards manage around 250 acres of land, about half of it rented. Tom does about 50 acres of organic row crops, and the rest is permanent pasture and hay ground. Only half of the land is tillable, given the slope and tree cover of some parts of the acreage.

Managing both species

Tom and Maren keep about 150 hair sheep ewes and 20 cow-calf pairs and finish 6-10 head of beef a year slaughtered at 20-30 months (the rest of the calves are kept as replacement heifers).

Both species are moved once a day with 30-day rest periods for pastures when the grass is growing fast, and lengthening when growth slows.

May 6, 2025

Pushing the boundaries of grazing

Grazing 300-plus days a year in the north

By Martha Hoffman Kerestes

Loganville, Wisconsin — Darren Yanke and his family graze a grassfed beef herd in the hills of southwestern Wisconsin, and one of the farm’s aims is to feed as little hay as possible.

“My goal is to graze for 360 days a year,” Darren says. “I’m not sure if it’s gonna happen or not.”

Last year was the first 300-day grazing season, and he thinks there’s plenty of upward possibility. Darren guesses that 330 days of grazing would be a reasonable average, since this part of the country usually has a month sometime in the winter where things are iced over and grazing isn’t very feasible. Snowfall is usually moderate and the cows graze through the snow without issues.

Most people in his area feed hay for five or six months over the winter. Darren wants to use the money saved on hay for other pasture expenses including more winter watering spots so more parts of the farm are available for stockpile grazing.

Finding the limits of grazing days per year is just one way the Yankes are experimenting with the grazing operation to find new practices that work for the farm.

“We’re pushing the boundaries all the time,” he says. “I don’t want to be traditional. I want to keep pushing forward, doing what other people aren’t doing, staying in front of the curve.”

November 8, 2024

Processor values grassfed demand

Nordik Meats finds success serving a variety of alternative meat producers

By Joel McNair

Viroqua, Wisconsin — “If there was no such thing as grassfed beef,” says Joel Morrison, “We wouldn’t be as successful as we are.”

Lots of grass farmers might make such a statement, but Joel is not one of them. Instead he is the general manager for Nordik Meats, an unusual meat processor with an uncommon ownership structure that produces some interesting end products in addition to the usual sides, quarters, and retail cuts.

Beef tallow, pork lard, bone broth — these and other products often associated with micro-processing ventures are a growing part of Nordik Meats, a USDA-inspected plant with 25 employees serving a handful of grassfed/alternative meat marketing organizations in addition to much smaller producers having processing done for their own consumption and direct-market sales.

Certainly the traditional cuts account for the bulk of Nordik’s business. Grassfed beef and lamb, plus pastured pigs, are by no means everything the plant does: Joel says that grassfed accounts for roughly half of the total volume here.

But Joel sees grassfed meats and the associated added-value products as important to Nordik’s future as “cornerstone” customers such as 99 Counties (Graze January 2023) and Wisconsin Meadows innovate and grow, and smaller, often direct-to-market ventures tap rising interest in grass-finished, organic, and local meats.

August 6, 2024August 6, 2024

Finding opportunities in obstacles

From low milk prices to 100% raw sales with the CSA model

By Martha Hoffman Kerestes

Alfred Station, New York — After four decades of dairying, hauling costs and low milk prices made shipping grassfed organic milk unsustainable for the Snyders. Sometimes the milk check hardly covered the electric bill.

For Kelby and Kristina and Kelby’s father Jerry, there were two choices: stop dairying or massively scale raw milk sales.

The odds looked stacked against the raw milk option. The farm isn’t in a densely populated or wealthy area, New York regulations only permit on-farm sales, and current raw milk customers were relatively few. It was going to take some serious creativity to make a go of it.

In the face of the unknowns, the family took a leap of faith and gave notice to their milk buyer in November 2022. The milk truck came for the last time on April 29, 2023.

CSAs were the ticket

Existing raw milk sales were consistently 30-50 gallons a week. The 45-cow herd milked once a day was producing about 500 gallons weekly, so the Snyders needed to make ten times the current sales. A tall order, but they believed the demand would be there and therefore didn’t scale down the cow herd.

June 4, 2024

Custom heifers and direct-sale meat

Redetzkes build a farm around grazing and diversification

By Martha Hoffman Kerestes

Colby, Wisconsin — Flexibility and fluidity are the strategies of choice for Mike and Gina Redetzke as they pay off their farm and raise a young family.

They started out planning to raise and finish Holstein steers, but when beef markets were down and a family member needed a place to raise replacement dairy heifers, the couple decided to pivot.

“There were opportunities, and we took them,” Mike explains.

Soon, more dairy farmers came knocking, and custom raising heifers for a handful of confinement dairy farmers became the main farm income in addition to a growing direct market meat sideline.

February 28, 2024

Filling a meat processing niche

Siverlings decide on-farm plant makes sense

By Martha Hoffman Kerestes

Bloomer, Wisconsin — When the butcher shop that had been processing all of their pastured beef closed, Jared Siverling and his wife, Vanessa Klemish, had two options. One was trying to squeeze the 30 steers they annually finish into slots at the remaining two small facilities in the area.

The other was to start doing their own processing.

Jared and Vanessa chose the latter, in part because they wanted more control over the quality of the processing and packaging they feel is an important part of delivering the best meats to their customers.

“One of the biggest frustrations is to take a beautiful animal raised with a lot of love and care and some really good, high-quality feed, and then not control the vital processing step,” Jared explains. “Every farmer is fighting for processing slots, and opening a processing plant is a way to grow an additional revenue stream while adding value to the community.”