Matt and Janelle Friesen of Winkler, MB operate Heartwood Pastures four and a half miles south of Morden, MB, a farm that specializes in grass-fed beef, pastured pork, free-range chicken and eggs striving to raise their animals in the most natural environment and to avoid GMOs.
Heartwood Pastures markets their produce from their web-based store, at heartwoodpastures.com where they take orders and keep the inventory up-to-date as best as possible.
“The easiest way to see all our products is to go to our farm store on our website and to follow our social media,” said Matt Friesen.
Friesen’s website describes how for more than 65 years their family farmed cattle at the foot of the Pembina Hills.
“After three generations of dairy farming, we turned our focus to raising quality meat products to market directly to the customer. In the past 65 years, many things have changed in the farming industry, and one of our goals is to help you understand what you are buying and eating,” he said. “We were dairy farming together with my family and, I sold beef that way for several years. But then when we quit the dairy, my dad and my brother moved on to grain farming, and I took on some livestock, added some pigs and some chickens, to the beef cattle, and it took off from there.”
Friesen moved to using more grass and more pasture from what they used in the dairy system. Initially, they sold most of their products in bulk form cut and wrapped by Southern Meats in Schanzenfeld where customers would pick it up. Next, they sold at Farmers’ Markets and now today through their home-based web store through direct pickup and deliveries.

While getting rid of the dairy in 2013, the beef business started in 2015 when they had enough product to sell. Friesen talked about why he went this route.
“I do think that a lot of these things are experiments that if you had asked me four years ago, I might have looked at them a little differently,” said Matt. “At the time it was a convenient method of getting into a small scale, a low infrastructure business giving us an advantage on people who might be starting because the buildings and everything was all there for us, so I may as well use them. But aside from that, the little shelters I need for my chickens in the yard or an electric fence for the pigs are very affordable. I guess that was part of the reason why we went with that structure.”
Once customers were starting to use their products, they noticed their product is different from something that they’re buying in a store or whatever.
“Once we got more of that feedback, it encouraged us to keep trying to improve our stuff in the direction that we’re going,” he said. “Since then, in the last year or two, we’re trying to improve the farm rather than the more classic approach of taking as much out of it as we can. We’re trying to put more back into it, so that we can leave a better place.”
Today their grass-fed ground beef is their best seller using the example of selling one and half quarters of ground beef within the same day after putting it on the market in the morning.
“And so many times for us, it’s unfortunate we wish people would cook something other than ground beef and some other cuts. But it seems to be the popular trend in our area at least,” he said.

And what makes it popular, “I guess, probably the simplicity of cooking it, but our beef particularly, it’s Holstein beef, a lot leaner than what anyone else is selling in the area raised on grass even through the winter,” he said. “Now we’re fighting the market to find hay to raise the beef on hay rather than corn or potatoes or whatever else people in the area might be feeding. So yeah, I do believe our ground beef is probably the most significant difference from what you’d buy in the store.”
They sell a reasonable amount of pork raised outside in an electric fence, but the difficulty of cooking pork makes it harder to expand.
While enjoying the aspect of running their own business, Heartwood Pastures, a recent untimely death, of his father John has changed things for Matt and Janelle.
“My mom Anne is on the farm, so I’m doing the grain farming together with her,” said Matt. “It’s a difficult year for us in a sense, because I’m trying to prepare for spring on my own, on the farm, and trying to keep the business going with no one to help. I expect it’ll be a bit of a learning curve but, I consider myself fortunate that I got most of 15 years after high school to learn things about the farming operation anyway.” •
— By Harry Siemens