Our Story

It all started when...

Justin and I (Caroline) were eighteen. He lived in Townsend, Montana, working for his dad on the family farm and I was in town for the summer working as a ranch hand. I had pulled up to get some fuel at the gas station when I noticed the boy on the other side of the pump. I leaned over to my friend and said, “I’m going to marry that guy.” And years later, that prediction came true. And the wildest part is, that occurred at the very same place where we have now opened our feedstore!

We started our direct-to-consumer meat business in 2018, with grassfed lamb. Shortly thereafter, we added beef and a few of our favorite seasonings to share with our community.

And Little Creek was born.

Named after a small mountain creek up in the Montana high country that never runs dry, the name "Little Creek" embodies our scrappy and hopeful spirit. We hold transparency, sustainability, and old fashioned customer service as core values. And we aim for the regenerative nature of a circular economy in our local and regional community. We understand that "fast is slow and slow is fast," and so we appreciate your patience when we have limited inventory. And we love sharing our story every day with you on Instagram (@littlecreekmontana). Thank you for joining us on this journey!

Our practices

Our agricultural ethos falls broadly under the regenerative agriculture umbrella. And we're very proud of that. To us, that means on the farming side that we do not spray crop chemicals, we minimize tillage, we maximize plant diversity, and we prioritize natural fertilizer over synthetic nitrogen.

On the livestock side that means pasture raised, happy livestock with no added hormones or antibiotics (sub-therapeutic included) in butcher animals. We practice rotational grazing (of varying durations and densities, depending on landscape and other factors), and being very thoughtful about what we feed our animals (because they will be feeding us, after all).

Our sheep are 100% grass-fed and finished and our cattle are grass-fed with an additional light barley ration just prior to harvest. This gives us a best-of-both-worlds style beef that looks and tastes like it should be served at a premier steakhouse, all while having been raised in Montana's high country.

The idea behind regenerative agriculture is to go beyond sustainability. We aren’t trying to simply sustain, we are working towards regeneration in the form of organic matter and carbon storage capacity in the soil. There are five main principles of regenerative agriculture: keeping the soil covered, leaving living roots in the soil, integrating livestock, limiting chemical inputs and disturbance, and encouraging diversity.

All that said, we want to make clear that our practices overlap with 97% of the other wonderful cattle producers in our valley and beyond. (We made that stat up to get our point across.) Regenerative ag can be dismissive towards so-called "conventional" agriculture. While we are passionate about sustainability, "conventional" farmers and ranchers are too. They have been our teachers, our inspirations, and our heroes. And there's actually nothing conventional about them at all.