When my wife, Eve, attends Farmer's Markets, she is often asked for recipes or instructions to properly prepare our Dry Aged, Grass-Fed & Finished Beef. 
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Dry Aged Beef, of any type (Grass fed or not) cooks much differently than non-Dry Aged, so, the bulk of discussion centers on this topic. That is fine, for your average steak lover, but, occasionally we have a talk with a what I call a "clean eater".

These are folks who follow a strict dietary regimen, such as AIP (auto-immune protocol eating), KETO, PALEO and the like. These eaters are not just mimicking something the doctor told them in passing, like "You should really stay away from...(fill in the blank).

,These people are food prodigies, seeking out each ingredient with diligence, dedicating hours to crafting their meals. They prepare what I have found to be the purest, most nutritionally dense plates available. Their kitchen is an alter to food righteousness. It's a place of creation and purity - almost a holy ground. It's not terribly complicated - the meals don't win awards and would never be featured on the latest installment of "Top Chef".

They pour themselves into taste, quality and sourcing the cleanest food available. In truth, it is how the culinary arts and domestic skills of yesteryear were practiced.

They've created a larder of nutrition in their home. This is food purity, sacredness, consecration - truly a sight to behold and, if you are ever fortunate enough to join them for a meal, it will be an experience you will not soon forget.

In our home we grow what we eat. When we do purchase food, it comes from only a few trusted Farms we know, personally. Thus, the lexicon of food righteousness, for lack of a better term, has become a second language for us.

Eve speaks the language of food righteousness fluently, with grace, and is no doubt a true darling of the movement. 

The few processed foods found in our house usually fall into the category of condiments. I've always struggled to find good condiments - it seems like every Ketchup found in the entire universe have loads of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) or Sugar in them. Add to that the risk of pesticide accumulation found in all the common, industrial, factory farmed condiment ingredients and you have a real risk of tanking your own personal ecosystem.

So, in keeping with our anti-establishment thinking, Eve made our own BBQ sauce. In light of the impending holiday weekend, I thought we might share it with you...

First, grab these items...

• 15 ounce can of organic tomato sauce (better yet, make your own - it's super easy)
• ¾ cup Braggs Organic apple cider vinegar
• ½ cup Xylitol or equivalent stevia
• 3 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1 ½ tsp organic garlic powder
• ¾ tsp himalayan sea salt
• ¼ rounded tsp organic ground cayenne
• ½ tsp organic pepper
• 1 Tsp organic onion powder

Here is the skinny on how to put this stuff together...

Add all ingredients to sauce pan. Heat over med-high heat, stir and bring to a simmer. Simmer for about 15 minutes, stirring frequently. Cooking longer results in a thicker sauce. Doubling the recipe will take an additional 10 minutes to thicken. 

Once you are done, here is what you will have; about 2 cups per recipe

Grab some short ribs, flank ribs or back ribs and pressure cook them as described in this FACEBOOK post. Once done, place them in the broiler and cover with BBQ sauce. 

Be prepared for a food odyssey! 

Sure, we offer Pastured based livestock products like Grass-fed & finished Beef and Pastured, Pork and Chicken – all stuff people desperately need, but on a daily basis, but I’m increasingly convinced that our primary purpose, here at SonRise Ranch is to reach out to the consumer and offer them an education.
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What kind of education can you get from someone who moves Pigs around a pasture all day long?In the early 20th century ninety percent or more of the U.S. population was involved in Agriculture to some degree or another. Today, Farmers don’t even rate being counted on in the US census. In fact, the current population of incarcerated persons in the United States dwarfs the number of Farmers by two-to-one.

People, for the most part, due to no fault of their own, are agriculturally illiterate. They have no idea how food is grown, how animals live, what they should or should not eat – this comprises the bulk of our conversations with our constituency.

Conservatively, I have over 100 conversations per week regarding food, food production and sustainable agriculture.
And we are by no means, a big attraction. On the contrary, we are a small farm.

I meet and talk with folks at the Farmers Markets, at Weston A. Price dinners and conferences, at social events, via email and phone calls – literally hundreds of concerned mothers, steak loving fathers, and environmental activists each week contact the Ranch seeking knowledge and information.
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The level of interest in farming is staggering.

“Hi – I am looking for chicken that is grown only on California soil, eats no Gluten, Soy, Wheat, Corn, Grains, Bugs, Dirt, Ants, Rodents, Fish or Fish by-products, Can you help me?”

My first question would be; “What do you propose we feed them?

Air? Snowflakes? Clouds?

Theirs is a valid question, don’t get me wrong, in fact we invite people to ask these questions. But seriously folks, what, pray tell do you propose these wonderful creations eat while being raised on our farm?

I need to feed them something!

The impetus for this disconnect is a lack of understanding between what the Doctor is prescribing, and what the chicken is metabolizing. The customer, in this case, is severely allergic to the aforementioned foods and desires the chicken they are consuming to have the same dietary restrictions they do. This is completely unnecessary and dysfunctional.

What a chicken eats, and how it affects the human who eats the chicken, fall into one of two categories.

1. Products grown or found in nature - Examples include seeds, corn, lentils, beans, peas, wheat, and other grains as well as bugs, plants, grass, legumes, forbs etc.
2. Products made by man. – GMO corn, GMO lentils, GMO beans, etc. Pesticides, Herbicides, Synthetic Hormones, De-worming agents, and the like.

The chicken has no problem digesting the gluten found in grains.

Trust me – they’ve been doing it for years.

Birds (Chickens) eat seeds in nature. This is why they exist symbiotically with Herbivores. They can eat a handful of seeds and a few will pass right though, undigested then get deposited on the soil after a short flight. Nature relies on birds to spread the seeds just as it relies on bees to pollinate. If we were to travel to the Caribbean a few thousand years ago, to find an un-domesticated chicken, in its natural habitat, it would surely be eating grains – gluten and all!

When a chicken eats, the gluten (a form of protein) will digest down into amino acids; starches will break down into simple sugars, and fats will be converted into fatty acids and glycerol. This is all perfectly normal. These basic elements are what make a chicken, a chicken. They comprise its whole structure, its feathers, legs and feet. The sacrifice of the wheat grain, in this case, created the life of a chicken. It’s the whole circle of life.

In the second category, products made by man, the story is entirely different. Transgenic modified foods (GMOs) are un-natural at best and diabolical at worst. They can be metabolized, but at a considerable cost. The unpronounceable compounds, assembled by someone in a laboratory with a post-secondary education and a well worn pocket protector are not natural!

Man made products can, and will transfer directly though the chicken and into you. If you are allergic to glyphosate, for example (the primary ingredient in Monsanto’s Round Up) you will be given a hefty dose when you eat a chicken that has spent its whole life eating feeds treated with Round up.

Glyphosate will bioaccumulate(1) in the tissue of the chicken and enter you directly. Your body will no more know what to do with glyphosate, than did the chicken – so it will insulate it, catalog it and wait for further instructions. "This is a toxic invader, we better surround it with fat cells and make sure it can’t travel anywhere in the body" the immune system cries.

Not so with heritage, natural, non-GMO wheat. The chicken’s great, great-grandmother ate the same wheat, gluten and all that the grand- chicken is eating today, it hasn’t changed in a millennium.

The chicken, like you and I, have a three-trillion member, internal, bacterial team alive and well inside it’s craw (they don’t have stomachs, like we do – but it’s the same concept). This guest society is well adapted, over thousands of generations and stands ready and waiting with all the right enzymes to break down and digest some wheat to convert it into energy.

Do you get the point here?

Our customer, in this case, was not really allergic to gluten, wheat or corn. They are allergic to the chemicals and transgenic modified versions of gluten, wheat and corn. Ancient, natural gluten, wheat and corn are nourishing, and have been for thousands of years – Jesus used it to feed 5000 hungry listeners and not one complained of an allergy!
Just because modern grains are sprayed with chemicals and have modified DNA, does not mean that ancient natural grains are bad! This requires putting your thinking cap on.

Throwing out all grains, because some have been sprayed with Round up, would be akin to outlawing cars because some are operated by careless drivers that cause ten-car pile ups on the freeway.

Would it not be wiser to simply arrest the offenders and revoke their driving privileges?

This is one of the reason we feed Non-GMO feeds to our Pork and Poultry (not Cows) – we don’t want the trace elements of glyophosate to enter the bloodstreams and muscle tissue of our animals.

Our method of feeding is called Bio-mimicry. Bio-mimicry is a fancy term that simply means “to impersonate nature”.
Let’s take corn for example. In nature, without human intervention, chickens would not eat GMO corn.

The Organic designation on our feed guarantees they are non-GMO and thus not poisoned with Round up. And while we are on this topic, a chicken diet restricted to vegetarian feed only, as is the craze right now, would be just as destructive as one doused with Round up. Chickens, like all birds, eat bugs. A chicken deprived of bugs would be a very unhealthy, unnatural chicken.

If a Farmer eliminates 99% of all feeds available, due to the unfounded fear that if humans are allergic to certain feeds, then so are chickens. Or worse, that chickens somehow transfer allergies to humans when consumed, will have a serious problem – his chickens will starve.

In days gone by, all, or nearly all Americans knew this stuff.

Of course, they didn’t have the allergies we have today. The credit for the absence of allergies went, first to the hearty immune system of past generations. Simply put, it was more robust than ours today. Those folks played with other snot-nosed kids in the park as children, ate more dirt wiping out on their bicycles or falling off tire swings, and did not have the so-called benefit of anti-bacterial soap.

Secondly, their immune system was not constantly assaulted with foreign substances, chemicals and transgenic modified organisms. They, unlike us, were not raised on sterile food, devoid of helpful bacteria.

They were healthier.
We are sickly.
​And it’s all a result of what we eat.

Notes: (1) Bioaccumulation is the tendency of  a consumed substance to become concentrated inside the bodies of living things. The lying scientists and their government cronies at the UDSA and FDA will insist that glyphosate does not bioaccumulate. Is that why, since the introduction of chemical farming in America, we have the dubious honor (or dishonor) of leading the world in obesity and chronic disease? Think for yourself! What makes logical sense?

Consumers are daily faced with scathing predicament. How to support a local, small farm while still getting what they want and need to sustain their families? To be sure, most are not concerned at all with this predicament. Many just don’t care.

But, for the few that do, a near-vertical, uphill battle exists. Trusting a label to scrutinize a farm, feed regiment or agricultural management system can be treacherous at best, and deceptive at worse.  With the new de-regulation of words such as “grass-fed”, the task of deciding which box to check at the voting booth with your precious dollar has become as mind-boggling as a four-way stop in downtown L.A. (I know, I always have to ask my wife for help with who goes next?)

And now, LOCAL is on the chopping block, due to a loophole in the Country of Origin Labeling Laws (COOL) allowing the words “product of the USA” to be placed on beef that is only packaged here, not raised, or slaughtered in the USA.

Ever wonder how all of a sudden “grass-fed” showed up in all the major stores, online technology companies (notice I did not use “Ranches”) like Butcher Box suddenly popped up overnight? Or, how all the mega-chain grocers, overnight had Local “grass-fed” from a farmer nearby?

The answer is simple – it wasn’t “grass-fed“, nor was it local.

What can you do to help?

Click this link and join the 900 plus other folks who feel strongly that a rule change is necessary, forcing the regulating authorities to require country of origin labels on grass-fed beef products to be accurate and not deceptive.

Here is the comment we placed;

A heavy pall hangs in the air, visibility is down to a block or two while driving, and we haven't seen the sun for days. A few weeks ago in Southern Oregon, on a visit home, where Ranching first began for me, a record was set for the poorest air quality in the entire nation.

The Air Quality Index (AQI), used to measure smog and pollution, ticked up to 300+ in my little hometown. Hey, at least we made national news! 

This is the AQI range where mothers and the elderly are told to leave town. Folks are given masks at the local clinic for free and just about everyone you meet looks as if they've just finished a memorial service with puffy, red eyes.

As a young man, I well remember my first wildfire. It was in 1987 (I know, I just dated myself). My father, a Helicopter Logging Pilot for 30 years, was called off his logging assignment, to dump water on a wildfire near our hometown. The teams, both ground and air, extinguished the fire in a few days and returned to logging.

Back then, firefighting with a Helicopter was a narrow occupation. He was one of the first pilots trained for it - up to that point he had only used a "Bambi-Bucket" (the water tote under a helicopter) a few times in his whole career. It would be another two or perhaps three years before he would be ordered to fight his next fire.

By the time he retired, in the late 90's, fire fighting accounted for three quarters of the annual revenue for his company.  He often commented "we used to log these forests, now we get paid by the goverment when they burn"
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​I've found a fascinating TEDTALK by Paul Hessburg on this subject. In about 15 minutes you too, can understand what is really happening.  

Here is where it gets interesting. The Native Americans actually lit fires...why?

​Well, I can tell you they weren't playing with matches. They intuitively knew that the Buffalo, their primary source of protein and central to their way of life, grazed in silvopasture - widely spaced trees interspersed with perennial grasslands. Thus, burning the forest served two purposes; first, this allowed the brush that had collected and dead trees since the last disturbance to be eliminated. 

Secondly, these wise stewards of the land (much wiser than their successors, I might add) understood the simple natural maxum - "death creates life".

Or, as America's favorite Farmer, Joel Salatin puts it "everything is either eating or being eaten"

Perennial grasses store their energy in their roots, below the surface. Annuals - crops that require plowing and planting, store energy in their seeds. A perennial has 2/3rds or more of its structure below ground and 1/3 above. Thus a wildfire would not destroy the perennial plant life, it would envigorate it. 

The opposite would be true of annual crops.

​Stay with me here - if I come and light your cornfield, an annual crop, on fire, you will lose all your stored energy in the ensuing inferno, much like Sampson did in the biblical book of Judges, when he lit a few foxes on fire and sent them running through the Philistines wheat fields. Have you ever uprooted a corn stalk? They are about foot deep.

​Not so with perennial grass. 

Now, with that in mind, take a look a this picture...

Here I am standing next to some perennial grasses that were restored with proper cattle management using a holistic, regenerative, management intensive approach - in other words, we move the cattle daily, just like they would in nature due to predation pressure. These grasses stand as tall, or taller than I do - about 6 feet. If the subsurface structure is 2x the above surface structure, then the roots stretch nearly 12 feet below the topsoil. 

What pretell do plant roots do?

Bingo, they transport minerals and nutrients to the surface - something cattle can sense, seek out and love to eat.

In other words, the Native Americans were doing good - pruning, vine dressing, stewarding the land - with the ultimate end state of attracting large Herbivorous Grazers back into the silvopasture and feeding them with the richest, deeply-mined, subterranean minerals they could get, all transported for free by well meaning perennial grasses.

Those grasses were pressed into service by being burned, grazed or trampled. They followed their one true instinct - rebuild for further propagation. It's akin to lifting weights at the gym for you and me. And without the weights - the whole symbiotic system falls apart. Without the grazers, the plants don't propagate. They die and build up flammable fuels. Increasing carbon in the atmosphere.

Ok, now for the punchline. 

The Native Americans were unable to control their herds. They didn't have the benefit of portable water troughs, mobile electric fence and salt licks that can be moved from field to field. Most importantly, their herds were not trained - heck, they weren't even domesticated. They were at the mercy of the herd mentality - seeking safety from predation, better grass, deeper springs. It was up to the herd.

Not so, us.
Not modern man. 

We can control livestock with biomimicry. Yes, biomimicry (haven't heard that before have ya?) It means to copy nature. How? By using systems that impersonate the predator, like a portable electric fence, that delivers a harmless tickle to the back end of a Cow when it brushes up against the fence wire. Or, to entice the herd to move by offering  better feed, salt or water.

Move where, you say?

To an overgrown forest that needs trimmed before it erupts in a fiery inferno - that's where!

If cattle graze a forest they remove the undergrowth, the stuff that burns real hot and boils the sap in trees - killing them instantly. They trample the branches that have fallen, reducing the fast burn fuels and speeding up the carbon-cycle. On top of that, the cattle grow - yes - grow. 

Grow what?

Milk, meat, hide - all good stuff.

And at what cost?
Free.

In fact, opposite of free. Think about it. I told you my Dad's company earned three-quarters of all their revenue from fire-fighting in the late 90's. That was 12 Million dollars! And that was "back then". 

We are spending millions per hour fighting fires right now. This could all be done for free with good, properly trained cattle managers, and the correct eco-regenerative-carbon-sequestration-fire-prevention mentality from our forest management.

Why not?