What Certifications Do and Do Not Tell You
We are not certified organic, and we are reasonably often asked why. The honest answer involves saying something slightly unpopular about certification.
Labels on meat do a job, and it is worth being precise about which job, because the answer tells you when to care.
What a certification actually is
“You know, a certification, really what a certification is you're paying someone else to go tell you what is true. Tell you what is happening somewhere.”
Gray Shipley
That is not a criticism, it is a definition. You pay a third party to go and look at something you cannot look at yourself, and to tell you what they found. The value of that is real and it is entirely a function of whether you could have looked.
When it is genuinely useful
“So, yeah, I understand the need for certifications and third party inspections when, you know, you just can't get there when you're buying, you know, salmon from Alaska.”
Gray Shipley
Exactly. If the food crossed a continent and three companies before it reached you, a certification may be the only mechanism you have. Nobody is driving to Alaska to check. In that situation the label is doing necessary work.
When it is redundant
When the farm is twenty minutes away and you can go and stand in the field. We are at 1699 Linville Creek Road in Vilas. The thing a certification would tell you, you can find out by turning up.
The part that frustrates us
“And I even on the wholesale side, you know, when we have an institution or a grocery that says, well, you can't sell those unless you have this certification. You know, I'm tempted to respond, Hey, it's kind of your job. Like if you're going to buy and resell food, you should know where it comes from. We don't have any margin. You guys do get some, you know, you got enough staff, send somebody out here. We'll show you exactly what's going on.”
Gray Shipley
That is the wholesale side of it, and it is the one place where the system bites. A buyer who will not source food without a certificate has outsourced the part of their job that was actually their job.
What is checkable about us
Grading and labeling terms are separate, defined systems, and we set out what each one means in beef buying terms, with the agency pages linked at the foot of this page. For the thing a label would never tell you, see why we work with partner farms.
From a farm at a published address that you can visit.
View Product- Grades and Standards: Beef, USDA AMS
- Meat and Poultry Labeling Terms, USDA FSIS
Food-safety temperatures and storage times on this page are cited to the agencies above rather than to us.
Written at Shipley Farms in Vilas, North Carolina: a family cattle farm raising and dry-aging beef in the Appalachian Mountains, now in its fifth generation. No shortcuts since 1872.
Every quote on this page is Gray Shipley talking, the man who runs this farm. We sat down with him, turned on a recorder, and kept his own words. Hesitations are trimmed so they read on the page. Nothing else is added or reworded, except where Gray revised his own words in review.
Nobody knows this beef better than we do. On food safety we leave it to USDA FSIS, and we have linked their pages above. Reviewed 3 October 2026.
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