Committed to Our Animals
At Estancia, we raise healthy animals without using any growth hormones or growth-promoting antibiotics. Our animals live their entire lives grazing out in the open. They eat what they evolved to eat over thousands of years: fresh, high-protein grass. They live as they evolved to live: wandering in open pastures.
Always Grass, Always Pasture
Each of our animals has two football fields of grazing space. Only in the naturally-occurring grasslands of Argentina and Uruguay can this must fertile land be dedicated to year-round grazing. During some cold or dry seasons, we may supplement our cattle's grass diet with silage (stalks and leaves from harvested sorghum) to ensure the consistency and quality of our beef, but silage composes a very small part of our animals' diet.
Cowboys & Cattle
Our cowboys (called gauchos in Argentina and Uruguay) watch over our herds and make sure that any injured or sick animals are treated quickly. Our cattle are the beneficiaries of centuries of cowboy wisdom, traditions and best practices that have withstood the test of time.
Cow Karma
We respect our animals and treat them with dignity right up until their last moment. We believe that killing animals is part of the cycle of life and that the domestication of the cow to provide protein was a key development in the rise of human civilization. But we also know that our animals are more than just walking steak.
When you spend as much time with cows as we do, you know that they feel fear and suffer pain and feel attachment. Maybe they aren't self-aware and maybe they don't feel love or pain or fear exactly as we do, but we know they feel something.
Short Transport
When our animals are transported to our state-of-the-art processing facility, we make sure they never travel for more than eight hours and that groups that have grazed together are kept together during transport.
Temple Grandin
Our transport and processing protocols were developed by experts to comply with Dr. Temple Grandin's recommendations. We keep the cattle cool and shaded while they wait in the holding pens, employ music and screens to ensure they don't get stressed by their proximity to unfamiliar groups of cattle.
We never use electric prods to move our animals and in general take care that their last day on earth is as pleasant and stress-free as possible.