The PAR Feed Program

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Because we live on the ranch with our steers, we are committed to being good stewards of the land, making economic, social, and environmentally friendly choices.  We are committed to holistic practices and using regenerative farming  - we aim to work with nature and give back to the land rather than simply taking from it.  This ensures we can maintain and provide healthy pastures to raise our steers on.

We adhere to a careful rotational schedule to ensure our pastures are never overgrazed.  We monitor our soils and summer grasses, and over-seed during the winter to capture applied nutrients, fix nitrogen, build organic matter, and improve soil health and biology during the winter months.

What does this mean for you?  It means that, utilizing holistic practices, our steers are able to graze for 12 months out of the year.  During the short time that we need to supplement with hay, we carefully choose the best quality hay that we can, always using the philosophy that "what they eat, we eat".  PAR never uses filler feed, moldy "cow hay", or cheap oat hay that can lead to nitrate poisoning if not cut and baled correctly.

Brewer’s grain is a by-product of the brewing process during beer production.  Barley is soaked in water until it germinates and then dried to produce the malt (malting). The malted grains are milled and steeped in hot water so that enzymes transform the starch into sugars (mashing/saccharification). The resulting sugar-rich liquid (wort) is then boiled, filtered and fermented to produce beer (here is a useful article explaining the process).  Brewers grains are collected at the end of the mashing process, once all sugars have been removed from the grain. At a 24% protein count, the  remaining product is a protein and fiber rich wet grain that is excellent for feeding our steers.

We collect our brewer's grain from Mother Road Brewing Company as soon as each brew is completed.  The grains are fed immediately to our steers to prevent spoilage.  We refer to the brewer's grain that we collect as a supplemental feed, and here is why:  the brewer's grain that we use complements the pastures that our steers graze.  After years of doing this, we have perfected our feed program.  The wet brewer's grain that we are collecting fulfills all of our micro and macro nutrients, except in the spring when our grasses and are deficient in calcium.  We compensate for this by supplementing with  diatomaceous earth, which has the added benefit of acting as a natural parasitic.

Our steers carry the sought-after and respected Twin Arrows brand.  We not only work with, but are close personal friends of the owners of the brand.  We are on their ranch to help during calving season, branding season, and during weaning, sorting, and shipping.  Because of this relationship, during weaning season,  we are able to carefully select out the steers that we want to raise at PAR.

Just after being weaned, at about six months of age, we bring the calves to our ranch and integrate them into our herd.  They will spend the next twelve to eighteen months on our irrigated pastures, lounging underneath shade trees, and eating brewer's grain.  Because our weanlings are purchased from a reputable ranch with excellent genetics in a closed herd, we can guarantee quality and consistency in our beef, steer after steer, time after time, year after year.  The excellent genetics in the steers that we purchase, combined with our irrigated pastures and feed program, has resulted in flavorful, tender beef for our community.