Idaho rancher Glenn Elzinga explains why certification, transparency, and customer trust still matter in a shifting marketplace — as well as how stockmanship practices have transformed his operation

Acres U.S.A. You are 100 percent grassfed and organic. That’s rare — probably especially in Idaho.

Elzinga. We live in a very traditional ranching state. There’s excellent cattle production in these mountains of central Idaho. Genetically they’re great black cattle, but they’re not organic. They are grassfed up to the point of leaving the state, which is usually around six to seven months old. They’re sold on video live auctions, and they get on semi-trucks and go to places all over the Midwest. There are very few cattle that get finished here. They’re all going to grain; very few, like ours, stay on grass.

Acres U.S.A. Let’s talk about the current state of organic grassfed beef. There are a lot of grassfed finishers who are essentially organic; they just don’t certify because they don’t see the need to. Do you have solid markets because of organic? Do you think it’s worth continuing the certification?

Elzinga. Great question. The demographic of buyers — we call them partners, not consumers — has changed fairly dramatically. We got started on this in the ’90s, serving farmers markets in Boise, which is five hours away. Nobody was interested in grassfed closer to us, but you go to the city and people are starting to hear about it. But we had to do a lot of education at that farmers market. 

People would say, “Wait, aren’t all cattle grassfed?” And I’d say, “Well, they are to a point, but these are actually grass finished. They never get corn in a feed lot.” And then the second thing they would say was, “Are these cattle organic?” And at that time, we weren’t certified. We were practicing things organically, but we’d never gone through the certification. We’d have to give way more of an elevator pitch to describe why it was safe to eat our beef — no hormones, no antibiotics, no chemicals, etc. We’d go through all this, and they’re glazing over. I realized that if I could just say, “Yes, they’re organic,” people wouldn’t even know what that meant, but they’d be like, “Oh, well, then I’m going to buy that.” 

The organic movement at that point in time, in the ’80s and ’90s, had already established that this was clean food. People didn’t know what that meant, but they were willing to jump through that window because they had this view of what those attributes were. They knew organic was good. So, being organic and grassfed gave me a way to open a door for people. 

And besides that, we believed in it. We were already doing it. I was in conventional agriculture as a young kid, and so was my wife. We were both surrounded by atrazine. I was spraying Roundup. I was putting nitrogen fertilizer down on hot days, and it’d be burning my skin, and I was putting organophosphate ear tags on cattle, and I’d go to bed with these headaches. I was fed up enough that I didn’t want any part of that anymore.

There had to be a way to raise these cattle like they were designed. That became a long journey. But it was the customers who really motivated us to be certified. It only took two years to transition because we were already there on a lot of requirements. We just needed better record keeping. We became fully organic in 2005. Of course, we were grassfed before that. 

It was a natural transition to move into an internet-based market. Being organic really got our foot in the door there because we were among the first organic grassfed beef producers in the world online.

Acres U.S.A. Do you think you would still go that route if you were starting today?

Elzinga. I think a lot of people have freaked out about what organic means in today’s marketplace. I have Real Organic Certification as well, which was started by Dave Chapman and Linley Dixon, and they’ve become good friends. There’s over a thousand of us in Real Organic.