For more than 200 years, Brookshire Farm in Abbeville has been a staple for cattle crops but recent changes to how they operate could forever change the way they do business for generations to perhaps come.

In the early 2000s, the farm’s owners wanted to find new ways to help improve their product. With some experimentation, they were able to do that.

Brookshire Farm now produces grass-finished, dry-aged beef, according to their website. Pastured beef’s distinctive flavor comes from healthy soil, nutritious plants, clean water and the weather seasons, and then is enhanced by the artisan’s methods.

But it hasn’t always been that way for the family, which can be traced back to the Civil War.

Started in the 1840s, Brookshire Farm became what it is known today after the first of seven generations, John Alexander Brookshire, married into the Harrington family, who originally owned the land when they moved into the cattle business in 1790.

Ben Blanchet is the sixth generation of the family and has been working on Brookshire’s Farm since the middle 1990s. He joined the business to carry on the family legacy that has stood for centuries.

Born and raised on the farm, Blanchet graduated from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette — known then as University of Southwestern Louisiana — with a degree in music history and literature before attending Harvard Law School.

“Cattle has always been on the property,” Blanchet said.

When he took over the farm from his father some 25 years ago, Blanchet went to a cow-calf operation, which is sending calves to a market after they are weaned.

“We set some goals and after doing that for three or four years and beating the goals in terms of production, we realized we could never make money on the scale we are,” Blanchet said.

The farm currently operates on a scale consisting of 200-plus acres of land and over 40 cows a year. Blanchet’s wife Anne learned about grass-fed beef vs grain-fed beef, which started the journey they are on now. She wondered, according to Blanchet, what would happen if they switched to grass-fed.

“We only decided we can do that if what we produced would be a better product,” Blanchet said. “So we finished one animal on grass for ourselves as the test case. We harvested it and we decided, ‘Yeah, this can work.’”

The pastures at Brookshire Farm, according to the farm’s website, are carefully managed to graze grasses at optimal stages of growth necessary to promote pasture health and meet the animals’ nutritional requirements, as they use no growth stimulants, antibiotics or other synthetic additives, and are raised in a natural environment at Brookshire Farm.

When they are ready, customers have two options when wanting to buy the product at Brookshire Farm: First, in the spring and the fall, they sell shares, which are quarters or half of the animal. To sell a share, the calf needs to be sold before it is taken to the abattoir.

“It’s being slaughtered as their animal, so typically they are buying an animal from us,” Blanchet said. “They buy the whole animal, which goes to the market, which is cut and they divide the meat.”

When the cattle are ready, Brookshire Farm picks up the cattle from the abattoir and the customers can pick up the meat at the farm.

Separately, they package the food under a label, allowing customers to buy a pound of ground beef, or even a ribeye steak or a roast or even stew meat.

To find more information to order from Brookshire Farm, visit brookshirefarm.com.

It’s a labor of love for Blanchet and his family and their farm, including his son Bob, who is the seventh and latest generation to work in the family business, something that the elder Blanchet isn’t worried about.

“I’m not worried about legacy,” Blanchet said. “I am lucky to have lived on the farm but that’s what I wanted to do. And if Bob and his children and (daughter) Catherine and her children want to do that, that’s terrific. If not, that’s also terrific.”