Cowboy hats are regular rancher apparel and Jason Schoenfelder wears two of them, so to speak. Under one of his hats, he’s Pasture Beef Manager with Northwest Beef, where he manages the pasture-based feedlot where Country Natural Beef (CNB) cattle are finished. Under his other one, he’s a supplier of CNB beef through the ranch he owns with his wife and her family in northeast Oregon.
He has a unique opportunity to see the benefits of grass-fed, pasture-based systems literally from one end of the beef supply chain to the other. The calves on his ranch are born on and live their lives on grass, even through finishing. For Jason, he gets a front-row seat to how working with the land to manage the landscape produces a better beef product over the longer term.
His philosophy is pretty simple:
“At the end of the day, grass is grass, forage is forage, and cattle are cattle,” says Jason. “Matching those resources to the livestock you run — or vice versa, matching the cattle to the landscape—at the end of the day, we’re ultimately just trying to produce pounds of protein out of a product or out of a feed, that humans enjoy eating.”
His system starts with following Grazewell standards. Grazewell is a holistic approach to ranch management that treats the land as part of the natural ecosystem. Like other CNB members, Jason completed a baseline monitoring program for selected pastures, then submitted a written grazing plan for how they are going to improve those pastures over a five-year period. Technical advisors and peer groups help with information on how to make improvements, and observations are made to track changes.
For Jason, Grazewell starts at his home ranch and transcends to the finishing facilities he manages as well.
“At our ranch on the Zumwalt Prairie, we’re measuring soil carbon content, water infiltration and bare ground cover. We’re setting long-term goals to see how grazing practices influence change over time,” says Jason. “We take a model like that to the finishing facility and look at soil microbial activity, water infiltration, species diversity and soil nutrient loads. We have a number of things we’re trying to investigate.”
First and foremost, Grazewell is a system that benefits ranchers and their land. It is also the backbone of a system that creates a premium beef product valued by consumers. When consumers purchase CNB beef raised in the Grazewell system, everyone participating in the CNB co-op benefits—the ranch families who are part of the cooperative, the animals in the program, and certainly the ecosystems where those animals are raised. That’s what makes Grazewell an important, full-circle system that delivers economic benefits.
“We do a lot of things for the right reason, but it’s really important to me that we focus on the economic benefits and that we’re able to build a business out of it and maintain ranches over generations,” says Jason. “It’s important that we support rangeland health to produce a better product and better manage the landscape over a longer term.”
Jason Schoenfelder was a guest on the Grazing Grass podcast recently. To listen to the full podcast, click here.
