Parker Pastures

Parker Pastures Vision

We strive to be excellent stewards of Creation, to promote life in all forms, to produce healthy grass-fed meats in a way that regenerates the land, to support an excellent quality of life for our family, and to have absolute honesty and integrity in all of our relationships.

 

Our Conversation with Bill and Kelli Parker

We visited our largest supplier, Parker Pastures in Gunnison, and sat down with Bill and Kelli Parker for an interview. We discussed holistic land management, farming as a way to regenerate the land, food as medicine, and why customers make the best business partners. You do not want to miss their incredible story!

Andrew Faires · Interview with Parker Pastures

Parker Pastures Beef

Our cattle are 100% pasture-raised, grass-fed, and grass-finished.  They graze on the pristine, lush, and high mountain pastures of our beautiful Gunnison Valley and eat their fill of a wide diversity of plants, drink clean mountain water, bask in the sun, and interact within their natural social system.  Our passion for the Devon breed as well as our passion for Holistic Management combine to create well-marbled, flavorful, and healthy beef that you can feel good about feeding to your family.   Holistic Management means the cattle are also regenerating the ecosystem in which they thrive. Careful pasture management and a late autumn harvest assures that our beef is consistently very well marbled, tender, and delicious.  You can be assured that Parker Pastures does not use any grain, antibiotics, growth hormones, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides.  Our cattle are a Step 4 in the Global Animal Partnership (GAP). 

 

mEET THE PARKERS

Born with a passion for healthy lands and humanely raised livestock, we (Bill and Kelli Parker) founded Parker Pastures in 2006 after years studying and gaining experience in livestock production, ecology, and Holistic Management. Along with our 3 children, we own, manage, and provide most of the labor for this family owned business.

 

Rancho Largo's Mission

Our primary mission is the land. We strive to adapt and survive within the ecosystem at Rancho Largo, rather than considering it separate from ourselves.

 

Rancho Largo: Harvesting healthy cows starts with healthy land

Over the last 22 years we built an intimate relationship with the 14,000 acres of arid grasslands and canyons that make up Rancho Largo. The ranch is home to several hundred head of cattle that participate with countless other species in a thriving ecosystem. Centuries ago, buffalo, elk, deer, antelope and big horn sheep grazed local areas and moved throughout the region in migration patterns. Elk, deer, antelope and sheep still move through these grasslands today but our cattle now fill the buffalo niche. In the most general sense, we plan grazing to mimic historic migration patterns. More specifically the seasonality, intensity and duration of grazing in a given pasture affect plant species, rain retention, the life cycles of birds, rodents, insects, bacteria and fungi, and the cycling nutrients back into the soil. Our land monitoring protocols evaluate all these interactions and drive our decision making toward overall ecological health. The best measurement of this health is ecological diversity. Rancho Largo is part of the largest intact working landscape in the entire Central Shortgrass Prairie Ecoregion. 

Meet the Grissom's

Grady always dreamt of one day owning and managing his own land. After ten years away pursuing education and meeting his wife, Lynda, and having their daughter, Brooke, the Colorado-native finally returned home in 1996. 

The first few years on the ranch were not without their challenges, but it turns out it is possible to make a living tending to 14,000 acres of grass and canyonlands in southeast Colorado. The Grissoms learned that ranchers do not manage ecosystems, instead they are immersed within them. They came to understand that management decisions were actually ecological adaptations. Each adaptation, changes the surrounding system, and changes the output. To this day, Grady stands by his mantra:
"We can’t tell our land what to do. Instead, the land tells us when, where, why and how we will graze in a given place and time." -Grady Grissom