Big Picture Beef

01/20/2023

For the skeptics that think we need high-tech to sequester carbon, on the 18th this is what Reuters had to say about how carbon is best removed from the air:
"To date, almost all successful C02 removal has been achieved through measures like planting trees and better managing soils." Of course managing soil for carbon sequestration is exactly what these two bovines are doing by grazing!

11/27/2022

Yeah, winter's here - but we're pumped!
Look what Seth Itzkan (Soil4Climate) had to say about our new book! “This book gives me hope. In it, soil and climate heroes Ridge Shinn and Lynne Pledger bring us a giant step closer to the regenerative future. Buy it. Absorb it. Cherish it. Share it.”

11/12/2022

Civil Eats has a post summarizing the ways that the mid-terms might affect the new farm bill.

Who wins in this election will impact key federal legislation including the farm bill and the Child Nutrition Reauthorization.

08/23/2022

The Inflation Reduction Act that Biden signed into law this week includes billions to make farmland more environmentally friendly. Specifically, 8.5 billion for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program for practices such as cover-cropping. Stay tuned...

08/14/2022

Pre-order Ridge and Lynne's new book, Grass-Fed Beef for a Post Pandemic World, (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022) from any book store! Foreword by Gabe Brown, author of Dirt to Soil.

11/30/2021

Just saw Audubon's good YouTube about grass-fed beef and birds. They have a program called "Conservation Ranching." See it here:

Grassland birds have suffered an unparalleled decline over the past half-century, with some birds like the Western Meadowlark declining by 80%. This crisis s...

10/10/2021

"Cows were meant to move about and grass was meant to stay in place, and we have a system that does the opposite."

— from Francis Thicke, dairy farmer member of the Real Organic movement

06/13/2021

Here's a link to a video (animation) that explains regenerative agriculture, including regenerative grazing. We' hadn't seen this one before. It does a pretty good job with the topics of no-till, grazing, and agroforestry.

Regenerative agriculture is an effective way to restore biodiversity and stabilize the climate, but what exactly is it? This video explores three different r...

06/07/2021

On a hot day, these young devons at Spring Pastures farm in Maryland take a break from work (eating grass) to visit at the water cooler.

04/21/2021

WGBH recently interviewed Ridge (our founder and CEO) on how grazing is going to save the planet. You can watch it now from the GBH website.

Grass-fed beef producers in the U.S. have begun a movement to restore soils and stabilize the climate with a fundamentally different approach called regenerative grazing.

04/19/2021

With all the wildfires in CA, scientists say that grasslands might provide more reliable carbon storage than forests because grass stores the carbon underground unlike trees, which store most of it in the wood, where it is vulnerable to fire and drought. This study acknowledges that it did not even factor in the superior ability of well-grazed pasture to store even more carbon.
https://climatechange.ucdavis.edu/news/grasslands-more-reliable-carbon-sink-than-trees/