Ever wonder where the organic beef you just bought came from? If
you bought it at a Whole Foods store in this area, the beef
started its life as a cow wandering the range of an expansive
ranch in Wyoming. Grass hugs much of the 595,000 acres of hills,
valleys, and mountains that make up the Arapaho Ranch in north-
central Wyoming. This sustains the thousands of cattle that live
on the property, the largest organic, grass-fed cattle ranch in
North America, a nearly 70-year-old enterprise on the Wind River
Indian Reservation and run by the Northern Arapaho tribe. The
cattle that roam this range have it good. They spend their
entire lives beneath the huge skies of these high plains, never
doing time at feedlots, muddy corrals into which most cattle are
squeezed for months to feed on grain and get fat. Cowboys do not
strike them with electric prods to move them around, nor are the
horns of males removed. When calves are weaned from their
mothers, they are not forced into pens. Hormones? Unlike most
cattle, the one