Bred, Born, Raised & Finished

When Jake and I submitted our DBA ("Doing Business As") and saw it in the local newspaper, things officially starting to sink in. A small passion project that he and his brother started as teenagers was expanding into a bigger reality.  The Doonan family's trademark "Farming for the Future" would take root and grow as the potential inventory available to sell direct to consumers was set to occur more frequently. 

Fast forward to today - it has taken us many years to traverse our many family business ventures or employment opportunities and we are back with a keen focus on where it all started: in the fields, doing the work, and growing the product. At this time, it is only our family that tends to the cattle, farms hay, and even owns an irrigation business, furthering the passion of knowledge sharing and supporting others in their agriculture endeavors. 

So what makes our beef particularly unique?  We often say that our cattle are "bred, born, raised, and finished on our high Sierra grass and hay for a product that you can always trust." and we truly mean it. Let me share: 

Bred
Our family selects some of the highest quality bulls to add genetic thrift to our herd. All of our bulls are purchased at a reputable auction where we study the Expected Progeny Difference (EPD's) once released to look for the best bulls that fit our herd goals. We especially care about size, calving ease (we keep all of our cattle so they need to breed heifers), meat quality, demeanor (we have to be able to work them on foot and horseback), confirmation, and return on feed intake.  All of our bulls live cover the cows, meaning we select a few months out of the year where they get to dance with the cows and nearly ten months later we see how they did. Our bulls are mostly Angus, and we really like to have one Hereford and Charolais bull as well. It's always fun to see who breeds the most, one year we had a Hereford bull breed over half our herd of mother cows, even with 3 other Angus bulls competing!  We've always kept our heifers to grow our herd instead of introducing new mother cows and therefore alter the genetics with the introduction of new bull genetics. 

Born
It takes approximately 283 days or 40 weeks or nearly 10 months to make a baby cow, so after the bull and cows dance their spring soiree, they are separated into different pastures until the following spring.  Starting in January, baby calves make their grand appearance.  In the beginning, this happened in the brush and our cattle were incredibly talented at hiding their babies.  It did make for some adorable pictures and was nearly impossible to keep track of.  Now we are thankful to most often calve on the alfalfa stubble and it is very obvious when there's a new baby.  We've also (mostly) bred our mothers to be gentle, allowing us to get close to them without fleeing.  In the recent years with an attempt to collect more data about our cows, we've actually ear tagged our calves to better track their genetics.  The months of January-March are filled cow-calf adventures!

Raised
Since all of our cattle are born on our pastures and stay on our pastures, we are lucky to raise them on all of our private and permitted ground. During the late fall and winter months, all of the herd stays in the Benton valley, close to our home ranch. The temperatures are a bit more mild and they are have access to the most nutrient dense feed. In early spring through early fall most of the herd travels around the Adobe valley on leased and permitted land, grazing the High Sierra (desert) grass.  After their first year, steers typically stay in the Benton valley with access to the highest quality feed to maintain growth.  Our cattle grow naturally with feed available in the pastures.  We've never given our cattle growth hormones, or treated cattle raised for beef with antibiotics.  We are proud to say that the genetics of our herd, and the health of our pastures helps our cattle to naturally thrive. 

Finished 
Jake’s family has been farming for multiple generations and specifically farming alfalfa in the Owens valley for nearly 6 decades. It is the experience of growing crops starting at such an early age that sparked the creativity of raising cattle to finish with hay scraps and ultimately keep some of the hay local. We have developed these hay fields in such a way that they grow a healthy crop during the spring and summer months, and provide a nutritious feed (and space) for our cattle during the winter. There are several steps involved: growing, cutting, curing, raking, baling, and hauling the hay.  Every year we purchase some of this hay to finish steers and supplement feed our cattle during the winter months. Since we grow the hay ourselves, we know everything about the nutrition our cattle are consuming and can be absolutely certain that they are grass fed and grass finished. Additionally, that alfalfa finish is imperative for making a delicious product. 

Trust
We believe that people should be able to know where their food comes from: how and where it was raised, the nutrition received, and the final product.  We strive to be completely transparent about our cattle, our management, and our operations. Additionally, we are always striving for improvement, with the health of our animals and health of our land at the forefront of our practices. 

We welcome all curiosities and questions.
We are the Doonan Family. We love growing local food and we're excited you're here!