Schlangen Dairy Farm: 2022 Outstanding Sustainability Award Winner

Aug 23, 2022

By Sunny Andersen

Stearns County (Minnesota) Farm Bureau members Steve and Cheryl Schlangen are one of four dairies to receive the 2022 Outstanding Dairy Farm Sustainability Award from the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy.

Schlangen Dairy implements numerous environmentally friendly practices on their 60-cow, 200-acre farm in central Minnesota. The farm incorporates over 30 conservation practices, providing a blueprint for beginning farmers and generational farms to follow.

Practices include LED lighting, cover crops, a manure-stacking slab that prevents nutrient leaching into the water and a manure injection system that uses less time, less fuel and has virtually eliminated the need for commercial fertilizer on their crops.

The U.S. Dairy Sustainability Awards program recognizes farms, businesses and partnerships for socially responsible, economically viable and environmentally sound practices and technologies that have a broad and positive environmental impact.

Click here to see more...

Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.