INDEPENDENT FARMER-OWNED
Since our founding in 2003, Thousand Hills has been focused on one Mission: To nourish the soil, the plants, cattle, and people by holistically grazing cattle for their lifetime. What began as a passion to simply share the nutritional benefits of Lifetime Grazed 100% Grass Fed Beef with more people has evolved into a full embrace of regenerative agriculture—with its many critical benefits to people and planet.
After a 20-year career working in conventional food marketing, I returned to the farm I was raised on, only to witness the damaging results of tilling the undulating watersheds for decades to plant a ruthless rotation of monoculture corn/soy crops in all the neighboring farms. All the now-aged, small farmer land stewards were renting their tillable fields to large corporate farmers whose sole interest was to extract a crop this growing season by any means possible. It didn’t really matter to these renters if the soil was degrading every year. When it degraded to the point of not producing a sufficient crop two options still remained:
1. Government subsidized crop insurance payments
2. Simply don’t renew the lease
This was the fertile land I grew up on, I couldn’t bear to see this happen!
My beginnings into grass-fed beef meant urgently adopting my local community project of recapturing and converting as many acres as possible from these extractive practices and instead re-establish diverse grasslands for grazing. And thus, beginning the process of soil regeneration in my own back yard. We began with 120 acres from our home farm and have now expanded to over 1,000 acres affecting 13 different small farm landowners. The process of regeneration can seem slow, but I remind myself, it took 70+ years to do the damage. Seeing dramatic results after 5-7 years is a testament to nature’s ability to heal itself when allowed.
We now source cattle from an additional 50 hand-selected, like-minded U.S. family farms across 3 regions: Midwest, Northeast, and West. Each of these farms are deeply committed to their own community project of regenerating land to provide for their children and grandchildren—while sharing their output of nutrient-dense beef with as many people as possible under the Thousand Hills brand. This group of Regenerative Renegades has already positively affected 600,000 acres in the U.S.
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