(844) 406-BEEF
Around the time of the turn of the 20th century a young Talbert Shaw boarded a west-bound train with his mother to leave New Hampshire. After unloading their belongings in Harlem, Montana, they rode a freighter north across 26 miles of wild prairie land to an area of Montana nicknamed "The Big Flat", so called for its high elevation and mostly flat landscape (save for some wildlife-rich coulees).
As an adult in the 1920s, after purchasing the ranch next to his mother's homestead, he married Ms. Lydia Kimmel, a young widow with four very young sons. He "added on" a couple homestead shacks to a Sears-Roebuck house, and the couple farmed and ranched together until Talby's untimely death.
Lydia's youngest son Pat M. Kimmel assumed operation of the ranch at the tender age of 16. After a stint in the Army, Pat returned home and continued the family business, eventually swooned and married a little Wisconsin girl named Jenny, and had four children of their own. Pat passed away in an accident in 1991, leaving his high school-age boys to pick up where he left off.
Today, the ranch is owned and operated by Pat's oldest son, Patrick J "PJ" , his wife Tricia, and their two sons Shane and Trever...just three Cowboys and a Cowgirl. They purchased the ranch from PJ's mother in 2001, and have continued to improve and change and build the operation. The teen boys are a huge help on the place, in between high school activities and basketball.
After a couple decades of chasing every blade of hay and playing nurse maid to a herd of 550 cows calving in -30*F February/March Montana winters, PJ and Tricia took a big leap of faith and sold off the entire herd, determined to make a big change.
The couple had a vision and dream...to get back to the way Nature intended cows to be run.
Through a series of fortunate introductions, PJ and Tricia visited a ranch in northern Canada where the entire herd winters on nothing but grazing forage and "swath grazing". The Canadian, who was a transplant from New Zealand, shared this sage advice: "Let the cows be cows and do the work for ya! Quit doing all the work for THEM!"
Now, some time later, the Kimmels have dived into doing just that, and are expanding into a future that does NOT include baling and feeding hay for 6 months of the year.
The strategy is two-fold. By building a smaller-framed cow herd that calves in the summer rather than the winter, the nutritional needs of the livestock are more aligned with when nature can provide what they need. And by managing the grazing herd in a way that provides greater rest for the grass and more biodiversity in the plant and animal life, the soil health improves which means the plant health improves along with the health and vibrancy of the livestock and, thus, the humans who get their nutrition from these animals. Maybe one of the most powerful benefits to all of this is the amount of carbon that can be sequestered by flourishing plants.
We accomplish these goals by running two different herds and livestock classes: Both a Year-round Cow-Calf herd and a Summer Yearling herd, of which many of these yearlings are grazed all the way to finish as beef, rather than feedlot finishing. It’s a Win-Win-Win -- for the cattle, the land and for beef consumers.
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