Two things you'll never find in our operation: routine antibiotics and growth hormones. But that doesn't mean we let animals suffer. Here's the difference — and why it matters for the meat your family eats.
The Short Version
Routine antibiotics are low-dose antibiotics mixed into feed or water given to all animals as standard practice — whether they're sick or not. Factory farms use them to prevent disease in overcrowded conditions and to promote faster weight gain. We don't do that. Our animals never receive antibiotics as a routine input.
Growth hormones are synthetic or natural hormones implanted or injected into cattle to accelerate weight gain. They make an animal grow faster on less feed, which is great for a factory's bottom line and terrible for everything else. We don't do that either. Never have, never will.
What we do: If an animal is sick or suffering — an eye infection, a cut, or during castration — we treat it. That's not routine antibiotics. That's responsible animal care. It's rare, and when it happens, we use common antibiotics the same way you'd take one for a sinus infection. Healthy animals raised on clean pastures with room to move simply don't get sick very often.
Why Factory Farms Depend on Routine Antibiotics
To understand why this matters, you have to understand what a factory farm actually looks like — and how routine antibiotics, growth hormones, and grain feeding are all part of the same system.
Thousands of cattle confined in feedlots, standing shoulder to shoulder in their own waste, eating grain their digestive systems weren't designed to process. Cattle are ruminants — their entire digestive system, including a four-chambered stomach, evolved specifically to ferment and digest grass. Feeding grain to a ruminant is like running diesel in a gasoline engine. It works for a while, but it causes damage. The grain causes acidosis, liver abscesses, and bloat. The antibiotics mask those problems. And the hormones speed up the clock so the animal reaches slaughter weight before the whole thing falls apart. It's not three separate practices. It's one model: push the animal as hard as possible, as fast as possible, and manage the consequences with chemistry.
Rather than fix the conditions, the industry medicates the feed. Low-dose antibiotics given to every animal, every day, whether sick or not. This suppresses the disease that confinement causes and promotes faster weight gain as a side effect. The industry calls these "sub-therapeutic" antibiotics — below the dose you'd use to treat an actual infection, but enough to keep the whole herd functional in conditions that would otherwise make them sick.
This isn't a fringe practice. Roughly 70% of all medically important antibiotics sold in the United States are used on livestock, not people.
The Problem That Creates
Bacteria are adaptive. When you expose them to low doses of antibiotics continuously, you don't kill them — you train them. The ones that survive pass on their resistance. This is how antibiotic-resistant bacteria develop, and it's a growing public health crisis.
The antibiotics your doctor prescribes when you're seriously ill become less effective because the same classes of drugs have been used at sub-therapeutic levels in feedlots for decades. This isn't theoretical — the World Health Organization, the CDC, and the FDA have all identified routine agricultural antibiotic use as a major driver of antimicrobial resistance.
Growth Hormones: What They Are and Why We Don't Use Them
In conventional beef production, cattle typically receive hormone implants — small pellets placed under the skin of the ear — that release synthetic or natural hormones over time. The most common are estradiol, progesterone, testosterone, and zeranol. These accelerate growth, allowing a feedlot steer to reach slaughter weight weeks or months sooner.
The industry argues the levels are safe. We'd rather not have the conversation. Our Dexter cattle take three full years to finish on grass. That's what happens when you let an animal grow at its own pace, on its natural diet, without chemical shortcuts. It takes longer. It costs more. The meat is better.
What Healthy Cattle Actually Look Like
Our Dexter herd is healthy, slick, and athletic. They graze open pastures on our ranch in Edmonton, Kentucky, moving through rotational paddocks the way cattle are meant to live. They eat grass. They move. They're not stressed, not crowded, and not medicated.
Here's the thing most people don't think about: our cattle can live for years. A healthy cow on pasture has a natural lifespan. She's not on a countdown clock the way a feedlot steer is — an animal that's been pushed so hard, so fast, on a diet its body can't sustain, that it would develop serious health problems if it weren't slaughtered within the narrow window the system allows.
That fragility was exposed during COVID. When meat processing plants shut down in 2020, factory farms had nowhere to send their animals. Millions of livestock were euthanized — not because they were sick, but because the system that created them couldn't sustain them outside a rigid timeline. They were too unhealthy to simply keep living.
Our cattle were fine. They just kept grazing.
What This Means When You Buy From Us
When we say no routine antibiotics and no growth hormones, we mean our animals are raised in conditions where those inputs aren't necessary. Clean pastures. '-Cide free land. Certified organic, no-soy feed. Room to move. Time to grow.
And if an animal needs medical care, it gets it — because letting an animal suffer to protect a marketing label isn't something we're willing to do. That's not a compromise. That's good stewardship.
We invite you to visit the ranch and see for yourself. Walk the pastures. Look at the herd. You'll see the difference between animals that are healthy because of how they live and animals that are kept alive despite how they live.