Pasture Raised Grass Fed Beef in Colorado: We are located 12 miles west of Montrose, Colorado and southwest of Olathe, CO . We raise hay on the ranch for winter feeding without use of chemical fertilizers or pesticides. During grazing season, we employ rotational grazing to allow for re-growth and variety.

The ’08 harvest currently has available 2 – 2 year olds for order. Expected time of harvest is from the end of April through 'til the end of May.  Orders will be taken until mid-May. Call or e-mail to make arrangements for your order. Other animals come to maturity throughout the season. We are also pleased to announce that we will now take orders for  our USDA label quantity retail  Beef Paks  (an assortment of steaks, roasts and hamburger) in the $250 and $500 range + shipping. Give us a call to reserve your order. We are also taking order reservations for free range chickens ($15 each) and Thanksgiving free range turkeys ($45 each) and are constructing the first of 6 large greenhouses to grow clean produce. We will be at the Montrose Farmers Market each Saturday beginning mid-May. Plan on a pick-up date for the halves or wholes after two weeks of aging. Bon Apetite!

Natural Grass fed beef from our family to yours. Know your food source.

The Green Place Ranch was originally homesteaded in 1884. We are motivated providers of clean food sources for you, your family and friends. All animals sold in our program are born and raised right here on the ranch. No cross-country road trips in a semi with a bunch of strangers in coach class, these cows are content to feed in our rotational grazing program and soak up the sage scented southwest Colorado sunshine of the Uncompahgre Plateau. We are a sustainable operation with all of our power for water pumping, tools and building systems, including ranch headquarters being produced by solar electric and wind power. We are also a low input system with our weed control efforts being performed manually and with goats by selective feeding. We are licensed wildlife rehabilitators.    Additionally, we have entered into wildlife habitat improvement efforts with the Colorado Division of Wildlife agency. We consider our relationship with the land, and as your food provider, a sacred trust to be respected and cared for.

Winter feeding, snow's gone and it's warming up.

We are pleased to pass along our particular flavor of the Colorado mountains to you and look forward to visiting with you and making your healthy food sources a vital part of our work.

A new spring calf greets the this March of '07 world on a spring morning.

Note: you can believe it, these critters have personalities. They let you know what’s going on and what they want (mostly food and water and a little bit of mischief). The babies run and jump, the cows and bulls do the same, especially when they think they are getting away with something.

Natural grass fed beef is clean and healthy. The meat is lightly marbled by the forage. Word is, the cow’s digestive system was never meant to handle grain anyhow. The animals, raised on clean forage, never leave the ranch area. They were born here and live their lives being handled with a minimum of stress, with readily available feed and water.

Natural grass fed beef has low Omega 6 fatty acids (associated with heart disease, the kind you hear of as saturated fat) and has a relative high natural Omega 3 fatty acid content: "pasture finished beef cattle has a higher content of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA)= a fatty acid in beef linked in health research to prevent heart disease, cancer, obesity and diabetes" {University of Missouri Forage Systems Research Center}.

The Green Place Ranch is a pasture-based operation utilizing minimum input rotational grazing principals and no chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or GMO's (genetically modified organisms). We employ pasture rotation techniques and treat our livestock with care in a low stress, non-confinement environment.

How it works:

All animals to be sold as natural grassfed beef are born and raised here on the ranch. Each animal is sold between the age of 22 to 28 months with a target weight of 1250 pounds to 1350 pounds live weight and will provide approximately 600+#'s to 700+#'s of hanging weight, bone-in. We sell the animals directly to you, 1/2's or wholes and provide transport to the processing facility. You make your arrangements directly with the processing facility regarding cuts, # of pieces/package, aging time, etc. (we recommend a hanging time of two weeks for proper aging of grass fed beef).  A beef chart is helpful in visualizing the possible cuts from your half or whole order. We will take your order form with payment for the amount of the order and provide you with a scheduled date of delivery to the processing facility and an order cut sheet. You will have the two weeks of hanging time to send in your cut sheet to the processor (plus whatever time between your order and the delivery date to the processor. People sharing a half will need to agree on the nature of the cuts for the processor. You pay the processor when you pick up the order. You may expect the total cost of the meat to run between $ 2.75 to $ 3.25/lb overall, bone-in weight (depending on the total weight of the animal). This means the average cost of the meat per pound (bone-in) after you have paid us and the processor (all costs associated with your order when you pick it up). You will need around a 16 cu ft freezer to hold a whole and about half that for a half a beef. Five to seven (15 to 17 qt.)full size coolers should hold the half a beef when you pick it up at the processor to take home with you.

We sell our halves for $ 975.00 and wholes for $ 1,950.00 . We will take deposits for the order (50% of total order) if you wish, up to 8 weeks before delivery to the processor, with the balance due prior to delivery to the facility.

We are now offering free-range eggs and poultry (chickens and Thanksgiving turkeys) products, and organic produce along with the natural grass fed beef. This year will mark the first of several large greenhouses being erected to grow a variety of clean healthy produce. Feel free to give us a call for more information regarding these products.

Our cattle are fed hay raised on the 320-acre ranch during the winter months, relying on the spring for water and stored hay cut from our fields in the mid summer. We then let the pastures recover for the balance of the season while the animals are on our adjacent grazing area of 5200 acres.

Organic Certification is something the Green Place Ranch is eligible for, considering the terms of qualification. We are, it turns out, "organic by default". Other criteria require a three year resting period during which no prohibited substances are used on the land or animals. Since GPR was essentially a cow "drop camp" for many years (previous owners simply dropped the cows off to graze and then would return to collect them) and no chemical fertilizers were utilized, GPR is eligible for organic certification. "We are considering becoming organically certified, though would like to see the direction that the USDA goes in with regards to their regulations." The big corporate ag-industries are continually pushing for modifications of the certification regs so they will be able to make the claim of being organic, at which time we feel the certification is worthless. We believe actions are more important than words. As a politically savvy fellow once said, "Watch their feet". Considering the latest developments of the USDA allowing the designation of "natural" to include feedlot finishing and confinement feeding, we wish to make it clear to our customers that our animals are entirely raised on pastured grass and winter feeding is non-confinement hay raised on the ranch without the use of chemical fertilizers or pesticides.

     We find the recent bending of the phrase "natural grass fed" (originally developed by independent pasture based rotational grazing small family farmers) by the USDA and big industrial producers to grab market share disappointing, to say the least. We do not grain or feed corn based supplements in our raising protocal and are careful to avoid being grouped with conventional producers' operational methods. It is important to ask for this information when choosing your provider, and you will often find that those claiming to be "natural", in fact, still feed grain and supplements to their animals, vaccinate and inject hormones and the big marketing labels in your grocery stores claiming to be "natural" are not. In fact, they haven't changed a thing about the way they are bringing beef to your table. They still go from the field to the feedlot and then to the grocery store. When you are driving past those stubble corn fields with cows in them feeding, you can be sure that that corn has been sprayed all through the growing season and it is saturated with the very petrochemical based pesticide products you are trying to avoid by choosing the natural label. Better to know your own personal farmer/rancher and how the food you are buying was raised than accept the word of those content to bend the definitions and allow the conventional industrial ag practices to fit the definitions.

Our Products: Green Place Ranch has a USDA approved label and, for those who would like to try our product without buying a half or a whole beef, we are offering our products in the form of our BeefPaks in the $250 to $500 retail price range for an assortment of steaks, roasts and 95%+ lean ground beef. Give us a call if your interested in making incremental orders this way.

     Our products are carried at Sawpit Mercantile in Sawpit, CO and at the Montrose Farmers Market, beginning mid-May. If you have a favorite store or restaurant you would like to have carry our products, let them know and let us know too and we'll be happy to visit with them about setting up an account. For those of you who would like to get your friends together to place multiple orders, let us know and we will work with you to develop a buying club to deliver your orders and share the costs of getting them to a location central to your area. As always, we invite you to visit. Just give us a call ahead of time to coordinate.

     We are registered with Eatwild.com and Local Harvest.org and applaud the idea of people "following their food to the farm" promoted in Michael Pollan's landmark book, "The Omnivores Dilemma". We would like to be your source for healthy food and are open to ideas for what we consider raising here on the ranch. We look forward to visiting with you and your visiting with us to share your ideas. Perhaps we will meet at one of the local farmers markets in the area or you may drop us an e-mail.

What else we do. The above e-mail address is also the contact for Sundance Solar Designs, LLC.   www.sundancesolardesigns.com is the website that describes our 30 years of experience designing solar homes that heat, cool and power themselves. Sundance Solar Designs provides passive and active solar home design services, renewable energy systems (solar electric/photovoltaic, solar thermal/hot water and space heating). Energy efficiency equals cost efficiency in the long term. This premise determines how we run the ranch and guides our daily decisions. Feel free to give a call at the same phone number 1-888-786-3374 if you would like to discuss your project.