The great steak debate: salt only vs. marinade.

We got 72 new heifers! Doing out part to help rebuild the US beef herds.

We Bought 72 Heifers — Here's the Bigger Picture We went to buy 65 heifers last week. Came home with 72. Kim says I have a problem. But there's a real story behind why we did this. It's bigger than just adding to our herd. If you've noticed beef prices climbing at the grocery store lately, this post is going to explain a lot. The US Cattle Herd Is at a 57-Year Low Most people don't realize how serious the state of the US cattle supply is right now. The national herd is at its lowest point in 57 years (and some say even longer). And it didn't happen overnight. A few years back, wildfires in Texas wiped out hundreds of thousands of cattle in one of the biggest ranching regions in the country. Those animals don't get replaced quickly. Rebuilding a herd takes years. A heifer has to grow, breed, have a calf, and that calf has to grow before the numbers start moving in the right direction. The ripple effect of that loss is what you're feeling at the grocery store every time you buy beef. Supply is down. Prices are up. And it's going to take time and a lot of ranchers making long-term investments to turn it around. Why We Bought 72 Heifers Most of these heifers and their calves (we'll breed them naturally with our South Pole bull) will eventually be sold to other beef farmers to help rebuild their herds (anyone who's looking can contact us here). That's how you move the needle on a 57-year low. One ranch at a time. We won't sugarcoat it. Good stock isn't cheap right now. These girls weren't far off $3,000 a head. Multiply that out and you're talking about a significant investment before a single calf hits the ground. And the payback period? It's long. Here's what that actually looks like: A heifer typically doesn't breed until she's around 15 months old. She carries a calf for 9 months. That calf is born, raised, and if it's a heifer herself, she won't be ready to breed for another 15 months after that. If the calf is destined for beef, you're looking at 18-24 months before it's ready for harvest. From the day we bought these girls to the day we see a meaningful return... we could easily be looking at 2-3 years. Minimum. That's not a complaint. That's just the reality of the cattle business. It's a long game, and you have to be willing to play it. Kim and I are truly blessed to be in a position where we can make that kind of investment and sit with it. Not everyone can, and we don't take that lightly. We're doing this because we love this land, we love these animals, and we believe the beef industry is worth investing in. About That Unloading Now. About the unloading. I was told the trailer would be a ground loading trailer. It wasn't. So there we were (72 heifers, no ramp, no chute) unloading from the side. It got a little chaotic. We did the best we could with what we had and kept things as calm as possible. We got some pushback on social media about how it looked. We get it. It wasn't the prettiest unloading you've ever seen. But I'll tell you what... every single one of those girls came off that trailer just fine. Not a scratch on them. We don't use electric prods, we don't rush the animals, and we don't take shortcuts when it comes to how our cattle are treated. Ever. That's not who we are. When you're dealt a situation you didn't plan for, you adapt and you figure it out. That's ranching. They were a little skeptical on day one. By day two they'd figured out the grass was good and nobody was going to bother them. Funny how that works. Watch the Full Unloading Day We filmed the whole thing. All the action, a little Tennessee rain, and 72 heifers hitting fresh pasture for the first time. Watch Part 1 right here: If you want to keep watching: ▶ Watch Unloading Part 2 (in the rain when the stragglers get off) ▶ Watch Exciting Short Clips (for some quick highlights) Thank You for Your Support We don't take it for granted. Every order you place helps us do things like this... raise good animals, take care of the land, and do our small part for an industry that needs it. The most direct way to support what we're building here is simple: choose 2 Coots when it's time to stock the freezer. You can SHOP GRASS FED BEEF HERE. We're grateful for every single one of you.

Why air chilled chicken is superior to 97% of the other chicken that's dunked.

Most of the chicken you've eaten in your life took a bath after it died. A big communal one. Here's how it works: after processing, the vast majority of commercial chickens (about 97% of what's sold in the United States) get dropped into large vats of chlorinated ice water to bring their temperature down quickly. It's efficient. It's cheap. And it means your chicken spent time soaking in a cold tub with hundreds of other birds and whatever they brought to the party. That's the standard. That's what's on the shelf at basically every grocery store in America. There's a better way, and it's what we do with our pastured chicken. First, what actually happens during chilling After any chicken is processed, USDA regulations require the internal temperature to drop to 40°F or below within a set window of time. It's a food safety requirement, and a reasonable one. The question is how you get there. Water chilling solves the problem fast and cheap. Drop the birds in cold, chlorinated water, cycle them through, pull them out. Done. The chlorine is there to manage bacterial load (because when you're dunking hundreds of carcasses into shared water, bacteria from one bird can spread to all of them). The antimicrobials are doing cleanup duty on a problem created by the method itself. The downside: chicken is porous. It absorbs what it's sitting in. Studies show water-chilled birds can absorb anywhere from 2 to 8% (sometimes more) of their body weight in that water. Which means when you pick up a package at the grocery store, a meaningful percentage of what you're paying for is bath water. It also shows up in the package (that pink-red liquid pooling in the bottom of the tray isn't just chicken juice, it's also the bath). Air chilling takes longer and costs more. Each bird is hung individually and moved through a series of cold air chambers over the course of a few hours until it reaches safe temperature. No water contact. No shared vat. No antimicrobials needed because there's no communal bath creating the cross-contamination risk in the first place. Nothing gets absorbed. Nothing gets added. The bird comes out of processing weighing what it actually weighs. Why it cooks better This is the part that should matter to anyone who's ever wondered why their chicken skin came out pale and rubbery instead of the golden, crispy situation they were picturing. Water is the enemy of browning. The Maillard reaction (the chemical process that creates a proper sear, a crispy skin, real flavor development) requires surface heat. If the surface is wet, the moisture has to cook off before browning can even start. By the time that happens, the interior is often already overcooked, the skin is steamed instead of crisped, and everything looks a little sad. Our air-chilled chicken comes out of processing with a drier surface. Put it in a hot pan or a hot oven and it browns faster, more evenly, and with more flavor. Skin gets genuinely crispy. Not "pretty good for chicken skin" crispy, but actually crispy. It also absorbs marinades and dry rubs better because there's no water barrier sitting on the surface preventing contact. It cooks a little faster too, since you're not burning time and energy cooking off absorbed moisture. Why it's cleaner The chlorine in a water-chill tank isn't there by accident. It's doing active work managing bacteria in shared water. That's the honest reason it's in there. The birds are cross-contaminating each other in the vat, and the chlorine is the solution to a problem the process created. Some processors have moved away from chlorine toward alternatives: peracetic acid (a vinegar and hydrogen peroxide compound), lactic acid rinses, or cetylpyridinium chloride, which is also in your mouthwash. Some market these as more natural or consumer-friendly options. Apple cider vinegar rinses show up occasionally from processors trying to make the intervention sound wholesome. They're all solving the same problem. The problem exists because of the method. Air chilling removes the problem at the source. Each bird stays separate through the entire chill process. There's no shared water, no bacterial mixing, no antimicrobials needed to manage what the method introduces. Research has found air-chilled chicken carries significantly less bacterial load than its water-chilled counterpart (one University of Nebraska study put the difference at 80%). Our pasture raised chicken isn't treated with chlorine, peracetic acid, lactic acid, or apple cider vinegar. Nothing but cold air touches it after processing. Why you're actually paying less (in a way that matters) Chicken is sold by weight. The water that water-chilled chicken absorbed is part of that weight. So when you're comparing prices at the meat counter, the water-chilled bird has a built-in padding on that number that air-chilled doesn't. Beyond the pricing math, there's the cooking yield. That absorbed water cooks off. You're not eating it, you're evaporating it... and then paying to heat your oven or pan long enough to do so. Air-chilled chicken loses less weight during cooking because there's no added water to cook off. What you buy is closer to what actually ends up on the plate. Why 97% of chicken is still water-chilled Simple: it's faster and it's cheaper to operate at scale. The equipment costs less. The throughput is higher. When you're processing millions of birds, speed and volume run the math. Air chilling requires more space, more time, and more upfront investment in equipment. Smaller processors can make it work. The massive industrial operations optimized for volume and margin generally haven't made the switch... though that's starting to change as water costs rise and consumers start asking more questions. Europe figured this out a while back. Air chilling has been the standard there since the 1960s. The EU eventually banned water immersion chilling altogether because of bacterial concerns. The US is, characteristically, a couple decades behind on this one. The bottom line Air chilling is better because nothing gets added and nothing gets in the way. Better flavor, better browning, cleaner process, no hidden water weight. The only thing you're paying for is chicken. That's a straightforward reason to do it, which is why we do with our pastured chicken.

Cows and vaccines. Here's what we do with a common sense approach.

Cows and vaccines isn't exactly dinner table conversation. But it's a question we get, so let's talk about it plainly. A Quick History of Vaccinating Cattle Vaccinating livestock isn't new. Louis Pasteur developed a vaccine for cattle and sheep anthrax back in 1881, and not long after that, the Pasteur Institute introduced blackleg vaccination kits around 1895. At the time, blackleg was causing heavy losses to cattle herds across the western United States. That kit was about as low-tech as it gets: a mortar and pestle, a glass funnel with linen filters, and packets of vaccine that had to be ground up and mixed with water before injecting. The point is, the blackleg vaccine isn't some new development. It's one of the oldest tools in the cattle world, and it's been doing the same job for well over a century. What's changed is everything around it. As cattle operations got bigger and more animals started moving through fewer facilities, the list of vaccines needed to keep a herd healthy got longer too. What Conventional Cattle Are Usually Given A typical calf in the conventional system gets anywhere from 3 to 8+ separate vaccinations, depending on the operation. Nearly all cattle entering feedlots get vaccinated for BVD and IBR (two of the major viral causes of respiratory disease) and about 95% of cattle receive these. Often that respiratory shot is a combo vaccine covering four viruses at once: IBR, BVD, PI3, and BRSV. Then there's the clostridial vaccine, usually a "7-way" or "8-way," which in a single shot covers blackleg along with several other clostridial diseases (black disease, malignant edema, gas gangrene, and a few types of enterotoxemia). Only about a quarter of cattle entering feedlots get vaccinated for the bacterial causes of respiratory disease specifically, like Mannheimia or Pasteurella, so that's often a third shot for calves considered higher-risk. Add it up, and a calf can be vaccinated against 10+ different viruses and bacteria before it ever sets foot on a feedlot. And it often this happens more than once, with another round of shots given again at branding, at weaning, and again on arrival. On top of the vaccines, antibiotics often get added to feed or water, mainly to prevent the kinds of problems that come up when a lot of animals are kept close together. None of this is a knock on other farmers. It's just what it takes to manage cattle packed together, eating a diet they didn't evolve to eat, dealing with the stress of transport and crowding. Some research even suggests that cattle who get more rounds of vaccination before reaching the feedlot end up with worse health outcomes... which says less about the vaccines themselves and more about how stressful that whole system is on an animal's body. What We Do at 2 Coots One vaccine. Blackleg. That's it. Here's why we still give that one. Blackleg is caused by a bacteria that lives in the soil and can survive there for years. If cattle have ever grazed land, the spores are probably already there. It's not contagious, but it's almost always fatal, and animals are often just found dead with no warning. There's no real treatment once it sets in. So this isn't a "just in case" vaccine. It's protecting against something that's already in the ground, that can take a healthy animal down fast, and that you can't treat after the fact. That's common sense to us. Skip it, and you're gambling on an animal's life over something cheap and easy to prevent. For what it's worth, it's also about as old-school as vaccines get. It's not mRNA, not new technology, not anything experimental. It's a toxoid vaccine, a type that's been used in cattle for decades with barely any change in how it's made. The vet equivalent of a tetanus shot. Same basic idea Pasteur was working with over a hundred years ago, just refined. Why People Care About This Stuff in the First Place We get why this matters to people. When animals are raised in crowded, high-stress conditions, they need a longer list of vaccines and routine antibiotics just to stay healthy enough to make it to market. Some of that ends up being a question people have about what's in their food, and a lot of it is really a question about the system the animal came from. We're not here to tell you what to think about any of that. But we can tell you what we do, because it's simple: one vaccine, no antibiotics, and a way of raising cattle that doesn't require either one. Why That's the Only One We Need Our cattle live outside, on grass, in small herds, the way cattle have lived for most of history. They're not packed into pens. They're not eating a diet that messes with their gut. They're not getting shipped across the country and mixed in with cattle from a dozen other farms. Take away the crowding, the stress, and the unnatural diet, and you take away most of the reasons disease spreads in the first place. Cattle raised outdoors and in less intensive conditions tend to need far fewer antibiotics than animals raised in confinement, and that tracks with what we see on our own ranch. We don't reach for antibiotics because we don't need to. It's kind of wild how much changes when you just... let cows be cows. It's just common sense. ----- Sources Revisiting Blackleg: Frequently Asked Questions about the Disease and Its Prevention with Vaccine in Cattle — Ohio State University Beef Cattle LetterBlackleg: A Preventable Disease of Cattle — West Virginia University Extension Veterinary Vaccines and Serums — Smithsonian InstitutionFeedlot Vaccination: Does It Really Matter? — PubMedAPHIS Feedlot 2011 Report (Part IV) — USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection ServiceGlenn's Response to the mRNA Vaccine — Organic Beef Matters

The great steak debate: salt only vs. marinade.