Organic Dairies
1,500 cows roam 2,000 acres at our three organic dairies nestled in the Willamette Valley, producing milk for products made at Lulubelle’s Creamery. They include the Rockridge and Mayfield dairies, both in Aurora, and the Valley Falls Dairy in Millersburg.
A mixture of Holsteins and Jerseys, our cows have plenty of access to organic pasture, ample space in well-tended barns and are milked at their own discretion via semi- and fully robotic milking systems. Cows enter the milking parlor as they please where they are automatically fed alfalfa pellets (grown and processed by our own Silver Sage Farms) and a mixed ration of other forages, grains, proteins and minerals.
Organic Eggs & Poultry
Always organic, free-range, never given antibiotics, and fed a 100% vegetarian diet, our hens and eggs are Willamette Valley hatched and raised, and sold under the Gwendolyn’s Organic Egg and Aurora Valley Organic poultry brands at fine retailers throughout Western Oregon.
Organic Beef
We raise our own organically certified beef on a diet of grass, supplemented with hay, our own organic alfalfa, and organic corn and barley grown in the U.S. and Canada. All feed and our cattle are certified organic by Oregon Tilth and never treated with antibiotics or growth hormones. The resulting beef is delicious, and available only at the meat counters of our Basics Market locations.
Organic Alfalfa
At Silver Sage Farms we manage more than 6,000 acres of organic alfalfa, a legume that naturally carries beneficial nitrogen deep into the soil and is well suited for the high desert region of Harney County in Eastern Oregon. Our crops are organic, certified by Oregon Tilth. We use no synthetic fertilizers or pesticides.
Our fresh alfalfa is transformed after harvest into nutrient-dense pellets in just a matter of hours at Silver Sage Mill in nearby Hines. It takes just 1 pound of alfalfa to make each pound of alfalfa pellets.