WATERTOWN, S.D. — After dedicating 24 years to serving in the Air Force, Bruce Staufer returned to the Watertown, area with a mission: to provide healthy, locally-sourced food options for his customers while also working to regenerate the land.
Staufer owns and operates Frosty Acres Ranch, which was established in 2017 and offers grass-finished beef, free-range eggs, and wildflower honey to partner customers looking for quality, healthy food, raised regeneratively and consumed locally.
“Our customers are from all over the area — as far as Sioux Falls and a few in this immediate area. People come from a long way away to get it, and I assume that's because they have a hard time finding it where they're at,” Staufer said. “If you want to call it making money, that's what makes the money.”
Staufer is also not afraid to try something new, recently adding butcher pigs to the mix.
“I raised my first hogs last year. It went really well last year, and then I probably made a mistake with these Kunes,” he said. “They're great on pasture, but it takes forever to finish these little guys off, so I wasn't really expecting to have pigs over winter but I’m going to have pigs over winter, and we're going to see how it goes.”
Staufer said he accepts beef orders as supplies last, primarily offering quarters, halves, and whole cattle. His beef is processed locally at the end of summer, once the grass season begins to wind down.
Honey harvest is usually at the end of August to allow the bees to have time to recover and restock before the frost. Honey can be purchased in bulk or pre-packaged by the pound. Staufer said egg sales are year-round but laying tapers off during the shorter days of winter. Some of his customers also share in the excess bounty of his no-till vegetable garden and fruit trees.
For Staufer, the quality of his products is more important than quantity. He said he prioritizes keeping inputs low and utilizes regenerative practices, such as cover cropping, rotational grazing and no-till, in his day-to-day operations.
“I try really, really hard not to use any unnecessary inputs. Obviously, we don't do any grain, no supplementation of that sort,” he said. “Gotten away from pour-ons for insect control — haven't done any of that in a few years. Got away from a lot of immunizations that it's pretty much a closed herd now, and I think with the way that I manage them, I just don't see a big need for it.”
Although Staufer did not grow up on a farm, he grew up on a small acreage in the area and says he is most passionate about working with livestock. He also credits his non-farming background as being one of the main reasons he was most interested in more sustainable practices on his operation.
“I grew up on a small acreage type farm, so cattle and animals were part of it, but crops never really were,” Staufer said. “After being away from it for almost two and a half decades, I didn't develop a lot of bad habits, probably came to it fresh, I guess is what I would say. I did a lot of reading, a lot of research, and kind of came to my own conclusions on what I thought was the best way of producing beef.”
Having also been involved in organizations like the South Dakota Grassland Coalition, Ducks Unlimited, the South Dakota Specialty Producers Association and the South Dakota Soil Health Coalition, Staufer was able to seek out resources and funding to help make some of the management decisions for his operation.
“Those organizations pushed me down that road, or at least gave me the opportunity to go down that road without taking all the risk myself,” he said. “And then after I proved it to myself that these are fantastic practices from a soil health perspective, from an animal health perspective, from a bottom line perspective, I was able to graze cover crops until January, when I probably would have been feeding hay for almost two months at that point.”
Staufer is also active in the Farmer Veteran Coalition, a non-profit organization that helps veterans transition into careers in agriculture through a variety of services including training, education, and financial support. He said he is working with another fellow veteran in the local area to start a chapter in South Dakota.
“We've been talking about working with the folks out in California where it's headquartered, to set a chapter up here locally,” Staufer said. “I think there'd be interest in it, it's a great organization. I mean, you do whatever you want to with them. If there's something that you need their assistance with, they're really easy to work with.”
While Staufer said everyone has to make their own decisions about their operations, he sees the benefits to his approach of sustainable practices on his land and livestock.
“I'd say probably the less that we get involved as humans is maybe the better solution,” he said. “Let nature take its course and try not to screw that up.”
The Trust Project