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Phone: 413-477-6500

About Us

Grass Finished Beef: About Our Company
We are Co-Founders Chuck Lacy and Ridge Shinn and President Michael Gourlay. We started Hardwick Beef to provide safe and healthy beef to consumers in the Northeast. Grass-fed beef is both natural and healthy for you. Because our farmers don’t feed their animals antibiotics, hormones or other drugs, you can be sure that you are eating a natural product of the highest quality.

Co-Founder Chuck Lacy

Chuck Lacy is co-founder of Hardwick Beef Company, the leading marketer of 100% grass-fed beef produced in the Northeast. He is also co-founder and Chairman of the Rotoakawa Cattle Company, based in Massachusetts, which imports, breeds, and sells breeding stock for grass-based beef production nationwide.

He produces 100% grass fed beef on his home farm in Jericho, Vermont, which consists of three former dairy farms converted to beef production. With these three beef projects, Chuck's goal is to promote 100% grass-fed beef production in the Northeast to improve human health, the environment, and the rural economy.

Chuck is also founder and President of the Barred Rock Fund, a Vermont-based venture capital fund. He works side by side with emerging entrepreneurs to plan, finance and execute businesses with a social purpose. Among his current or recent projects include: Indigenous Designs (organic sweaters produced in Peru by worker owned co-ops); CellBazaar (a cell phone-based kind of "Craig's List" in Bangladesh); Emergence BioEnergy (manure to electricity in rural Bangladesh); Vermont-based Samosaman Natural Foods (founded by refugees from Congo).

Previously Lacy was President of Ben & Jerry's; Director and Treasurer of Gonofone (founder of GrameenPhone the largest cell phone company in Bangladesh); and Director of PICO (the largest faith-based community organizing network in America).

Lacy has a BA from Amherst College, and an MBA from Cornell University. He is a regular guest lecturer at the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT.

Cell 802-355-6596
clacy@together.net

Co-Founder Ridgway F. Shinn III

Described in The Stockman Grassfarmer as a "pioneer" in the field of grass-farming, Ridge Shinn has extensive experience and achieved success in organizing and guiding innovative agricultural and business ventures.

Upon graduating from Earlham College, Ridge became a field representative for an environmental agency in Washington D.C., organizing conferences on environmental issues nationwide. From there his interest in farming led him to Sturbridge, Massachusetts, where he became a herdsman on a modern dairy farm in nearby West Brookfield and also developed agricultural demonstrations for a living history museum.

His work in historical agriculture included a survey of Devon cattle in New England, and in 1978 he organized the American Milking Devon Association. He was a founding director of the American Minor Breeds Conservancy (now the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy at www.albc.org) in the same year. In 1983 he became its executive director, and secured funding for the first survey of rare breeds of livestock in the United States.

Ridge and his wife, Lynne Pledger, purchased land in Hardwick, Massachusetts, and started their own farm and timber frame construction business in 1984, Hardwick Post and Beam Corp at www.hardwickpostandbeam.com, which is still operating, now under the direction of a general manager. Ridge raises Devon cattle, Soay sheep, and heritage breeds of swine.

In the winter of 2001, Ridge founded the New England Livestock Alliance (NELA), with the mission of revitalizing farming in the Northeast by linking farmers to markets for healthy meat. As Director of NELA, he created the Pasture Perfect brand of grass-finished beef, which Wine Spectator magazine rated the best among samples from five other purveyors of high-end grain-finished meat, including Omaha Steaks and Niman Ranch. He was also vice president of Stafford Enterprises, a slaughter-house in Stafford Springs, Connecticut, and was actively involved in the renovation and reorganization of that facility.

In June 2003, he resigned from NELA to focus on grass-finished meat exclusively, recognizing its health benefits and marketability as superior to natural or organic. In this connection he co-founded two related organizations of which he is executive director: the Bakewell Reproductive Center, LLC, finding and promoting bovine genetics for grass-based systems, and Hardwick Beef, Inc., organized to link farmers to the profitable markets for grass-finished meat.

Ridge Shinn's success has gained attention in the fields of food and nutrition as well as agriculture. In the past year articles about his work have appeared in House and Garden (March 2003) and Atlantic Monthly (May 2003).

Michael Gourlay, President

For more than 30 years, Michael Gourlay has been involved in food companies at the cutting edge, ranging from seafood farming to hydroponics to grass-fed beef. He came to Hardwick Beef in 2005 after overseeing a processing plant employing some 300 people and working for USDAID projects in agricultural development in Egypt and Pakistan.

At Hardwick Beef, Michael has been running all aspects of the company. He works closely with supply farmers, processors, distributors, stores and their customers, extolling the health benefits of grass-fed beef to people, animals, and the environment as a whole.

Michael is married and a daughter completes the family. When not running Hardwick Beef, he can be found outside, in the marshes kayaking or even grilling a few steaks and burgers.