>Why you probably won’t ever see Organic Beef coming from my farm

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The reason is pure economics. Has nothing to do with the quality of beef produced. Let me lay it out for you.

I’ve already covered in a broad sense how grain-finished beef is more expensive to produce than grass-fed beef.

Let’s look this over:

• I don’t have to have a lot of expensive equipment to run my farm or produce my crops.
• I don’t have to spray anything as the cows eat almost all of the weeds.
• I don’t have to deal with insects, since the more I can get in the pastures (well, except maybe face flies) the better the pastures do.
• If I do it right and manage my grazing, I don’t have to even cut and bale hay for the winter.
• And If I manage my herd properly, the soil will actually improve in quality – which means I can actually start adding more cows just to keep up with the grass.

Follow the money…

What’s my net cost for each calf I produce? About $40 in shots for the new ones (and I’m beginning to think those are even unnecesary…)

Now, per beeffrompasturetoplate.org,

The truth is it takes 2.6 pounds of grain and 435 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef in the United States.

When you take a 400lb just-weaned calf up to 1100lbs, you are using 1820 lbs of grain (usually corn and soybeans, ground and mixed). If it were just corn and I had to buy it at commodity prices, I’d be paying at least $4 per bushel (more or less) – so a rough cost would put the extra cost at $7280 – at least on paper. Large operations will get their feed much cheaper than this (and have to.) But that tells you right there why you pay high beef prices and farmers still go broke.

My own experiences, from fattening cattle on this farm, told me that the feed bills alone took half the calf crop. We never made enough corn on our land to feed out cattle, so we’d sell the corn we raised (for real minimal profit) and then buy the other feed.

Now, the funny thing was when I found out feeder calves (sold right after weaning) made as much income as keeping those calves up to fattening weight – well, I never fattened cattle on corn again. (And I got to keep the money from that corn we raised.)

The next price break was when I found that a calf fattened to a year old on just grass will give me about $600 profit per head – and that’s taking out the cost of keeping them and their mother alive during the winter with hay.

So my profit of selling these calves as yearlings was better than feeding them on corn I didn’t have.

The next break – selling them as finished cattle (about 20-22 months) was no better profit, because you have to winter them over with hay again. Since they are now eating more to put those last few pounds on, it’s a wash for those extra months. (Of course, when I go over to “mob grazing” and no hay in the winter – every calf is nearly sheer profit…)

The cost of Government-inspected Organic Beef

Here’s where organic comes in. Annually, I would have to keep paperwork and get this inspected to prove that I didn’t add anything to the land or the cattle. So I pay a fee to have my paperwork checked – for every single acre and animal (as I understand it.) Essentially, this is a government tax at work.

Right now, the premium paid for locally-raised, grass-fed beef is the same or higher than organic beef. Why? Because people know where it came from and who butchered it.

And the last case of e-coli infecction I heard of came from what? USDA Government-inspected beef – which came from cattle out of four states and two countries, all mixed together into a yummy, tasteless, uniform-sized, frozen, plastic-wrapped, gray patty.

So if it costs more to get the government involved, but I make the same amount of income – which is more profitable? Pasture-finished or organic pasture-finished? (And we’re leaving out the idea of making organic corn – a whole ‘nother expense…)

That’s why I’m not going to be raising organic beef anytime soon. It gets the government into your operation and makes it cost more. I’ll make more money and higher quality beef, even if I just sell to my neighbors in our local cities.

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While I raise my own grass-fed beef here in Missouri, I suggest you try a vendor such as La Cense Beef if you want to sample some truly wonderful, Montana-raised grass fed beef.

>How grass fed beef improves the land it comes from

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A lot of exaggerations are used by “animal rights” activists to forward their own agenda. One of these is how natural grass-finished beef is lumped in with all the rest of the ways beef is produced in the US.

Practically, they’d be better off taking more vacations from the urban blight they live in and go get some lessons from their country cousins. (Or maybe just try to raise some of this stuff themselves for once instead of giving advice all the time…)

While New York and other coastal cities are busy dumping its waste into the ocean on a daily basis, as well as covering huge masses of land with their garbage landfills, the lowly cow recycles between 75-100% of what it eats directly back onto the ground (depending on what study you believe).

You see, cows are some of the most efficient and environmentally-friendly automatic harvesters we have. And not only that, they also produce another of themselves every year.

Factory approach to meat production

It’s only since WWII, when we started feeding grain to cattle that we started interrupting their natural process with our man-made “efficiencies”. When you add the cost of planting, fertilizing, spraying, and harvesting miles of corn just to coop up animals in a concentrated feeding operation – well, that’s where things get messy. Literally.

In their natural environment, cows roam around the pastures, usually with one calf at their side and another on the way. For about every 50 cows or so, a bull keeps it that way – year in and year out. Meanwhile, all concerned are simply eating all the forage they can. When they get full, they rest and digest, then get up and go at it again.

As they eat, they drop their manure in the pasture, where it is digested and improves or restores the ecosystem with concentrated nutrients. And when their calf is born on a grassy field, there is little bacteria that they can’t handle on their own – because they are already immune to most everything out there.

However, when you take that calf and shut it up in a dirt feedlot to eat grain on a schedule, that whole ecosystem is interrupted. Grain puts on low-quality pounds of flesh, with a lot of fat to go along. While their mothers had high Omega-6 to Omega-3 ratios (bad fat to good fat), grain-fed beef are known for their heart-stopping renditions of the “Cholesterol Blues”.

Grain does another funny thing – it robs the flavor. Anyone who’s ever gotten a hamburger from a pasture-finished beef and then went to eat one of these fast-food wanna-bes will tell you – nothing from a supermarket has any taste at all compared to an all-natural grass-finished beef burger.

And with all those cows in a small space – there’s a lot of cleaning up to do. Literally mountains of manure being piled up…

Let’s look further at the land it comes from – when you have a cow on pasture, you don’t have to spray for weeds or insects. Sure, there are a lot of insects out there – and they all have plenty to eat. Because there are thousands of varieties of plants out there. It isn’t a problem that we can only raise one type of plant and have to spray to keep any other plant from growing out there – or to get rid of just a few insects that attack that particular plant you are trying to raise.

Plenty for everyone.

And about those weeds – depending on the particular breed of cow you have, they are just as likely to become a meal as to get to their full height where they can shed their seeds.

Everything-bunched-up-together-and-on-schedule, please

Let’s look at another problem with these Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO’s): just like when you put a bunch of people into a small space and force them to live together, any disease spreads quickly through such a herd. The current veterinarian practice is to load the whole herd up with antibiotics to keep everyone safe.

And what about these hormones? These are used to create growth spurts so that the animal gains weight more quickly. The idea being presented is that you can factory-ize these animals.

• All cows chemically suppressed and then artificially inseminated so they are giving birth at the same time.
• Cattle are weaned at 7 montths. Either at birth or at weaning, the bull-calves are neutered so they put on extra weight. Calves are sent to a feed lot for fattening on corn or other grain rations.
• At 14 months, the steers are sold to a packing plant – and the heifers (if not also slaughtered) are now ready to be inseminated.
• If you check the schedule, this means that these heifers can now take their place in the herd besides their mama’s – and the whole oragnization keeps right on schedule. Fattened calves are sent off, the pens are cleaned – and just in time for the next set of feeder calves.

Grass finished beef is different.

It takes around 20-22 months to fatten a calf on grass. So it doesn’t fit that once-annual factory schedule. As well, the natural insemination from a bull isn’t as definite as an artificial one. So there are “windows” of birthing – weeks, not hours.

But everything is in sync with the natural conditions around them. Illness and sickness – rare. Visits with the vet – rarer. Cost and overhead – nearly non-existent. Just move your cows to fresh pastures frequently or infrequently and both the cows and the pastures stay healthy. And that makes for healthy beef.

When you know how your beef is raised, you know how healthy it is for you – or not.

Choose healthy beef to begin with – chose grass fed beef.

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While I raise my own grass-fed beef here in Missouri, I suggest you try a vendor such as La Cense Beef if you want to sample some truly wonderful, Montana-raised grass fed beef.

>How my local beef is better than your supermarket version – and I can prove it!

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While I’ve been working to improve the quality of the beef I raise, I find that many people don’t know that they can buy their beef directly from the farmer. Factually, this will actually save them money when they do.

Additionally, they know how that meat was raised and what it was fed.

Most local beef is raised in an environmentally-friendly and responsible manner. This is why a great deal of it is grass-fed, also known as pasture-finished. It’s as natural as they come.

Government Intervention in Beef

Now there is some discussion about organic versus natural versus grass-fed beef. And another discussion about USDA-inspected or not.

My rule of thumb is this: the less the government is involved, the better. The Feds own the organic trademark and license it’s use. That doesn’t mean you get the best quality – but you can guarantee it costs more.

If you stick to the USDA definitions for these types of beef, you’ll quickly see that they are nearly impossible to achieve – as they are so limited. So that again means that you are going to have higher costs.

Same with USDA-inspected. All meat lockers and processors have to have regular inspections from the state health inspectors. When the USDA is involved, they have to check into other special items, like the conditions of the lymph nodes, and so on. All USDA means is that you can re-sell the pieces of a cow (like a single steak or just one pound of hamburger) and it’s guaranteed safe. (Well, almost always…)

Again, this just raises the overhead for the beef – which is passed right on to you.

The more your beef is connected to the government, the more it’s going to cost you.

Buying grass-fed beef directly

The best guarantee of your beef quality is to know how it was raised, where it came from, and who butchered it.

You should be able to drive out to these places and visit them. (Try that with Argentinean beef when you are in New York…)

I was looking around and found this great explanation from the University of Washington:

Many farmers do not sell meat by individual cuts, but offer it in sides, quarters, or smaller packs containing a variety of cuts. It may be more economical for you to purchase a whole, half (side), or quarter of grass-fed beef if you have the freezer space to do so. It is important to understand how you are buying the beef if you choose to buy a large quantity.

A variety of factors affect the amount of meat a whole, half, or quarter will yield. First, the dressing percentage (the weight of the carcass after the hide, blood, and organs are removed) will alter the amount of meat a 1,100-pound live steer will yield. Typically, dressing percentages range from 56 to 65%, so a 1,100-pound steer would result in a carcass weighing between 616 and 715 pounds.

Cutting yield is the amount of meat remaining once a carcass is further processed. Typically, with grass-fed beef, there will be a loss of 25–30%, which is attributed to the removal of bone and fat. Losses can be greater when the consumer prefers more boneless cuts. With a 650-pound carcass, a consumer can expect to take home 455–487 pounds of beef. A side of beef will yield about 200–240 pounds of beef, and a quarter will yield 100–120 pounds.

When buying meat as a whole, half, or quarter, be sure to ask who will pay the processing costs. In most situations, the consumer works directly with the processing plant and pays the processing costs; however, some farmers will pay the costs for processing and then include that charge in the overall price of the meat.

If you are unfamiliar with negotiating regarding cuts of meats and costs, ask the farmer from whom you are buying the meat to assist you with this process. Most farmers consistently work with the same processing facilities and should be able to address any questions you may have. You will need to follow up with the processing plant soon after the animal has been delivered to the facility to provide cutting instructions as well as any special requests you may have (e.g., sausages or special cuts). Depending on how long the carcasses hang before they are cut up, the meat will not be ready for 2–3 weeks. The processing facility should call you when your meat is ready. Payment is expected when the meat is picked up.

Questions to ask the producer

Farmers use a variety of production practices to produce high quality meat products, and it is worthwhile to talk to the producers about how their animals are raised. Typically, beef cattle are slaughtered at 18–24 months of age. Grass-fed beef is usually produced without growth-promoting hormones or other additives, but be sure to ask the producers about their production practices if it is important to you. Grass-fed beef may or may not be produced with corn. Some pasture-based farms feed a little grain to “finish” the animal.

One benefit of buying directly from farmers is you can talk with them about their production practices, develop an understanding of their actions, and learn the reasons for their production decisions.

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While I raise my own grass-fed beef here in Missouri, I suggest you try a vendor such as La Cense Beef if you want to sample some truly wonderful, Montana-raised grass fed beef.

With thanks to University of Wisconsin – A Consumer’s Guide to Grass-Fed Beef – A3862 – http://www.uwex.edu/ces/cty

>Cooking with Grass Fed Beef – not yo’ mama’s roast

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I ran across this excellent pdf created by the University of Wisconsin and just had to share this part of it with you.


This excerpt is about how to cook with grass-fed beef. As you see below, our whole culture has evolved to handle all the extra fat that grain-fed beef has leftover.


With the enhanced flavor of grass-fed beef, it isn’t hard to re-learn a few basics when you first order this natural protein.

Cooking with grass-fed beef

Because grass-fed beef can be leaner than grain-fed beef, modified cooking methods may produce better results. Because of its typically higher fat content, grain-fed beef is more forgiving when cooked in that it is less likely to dry out or toughen if overcooked. Grass-fed beef depends more on juiciness than fat for its moisture. Searing the outside of the meat to trap moisture, then cooking it slowly is recommended for grass-fed beef. For best results:

• Bring your grass-fed meat to room temperature before cooking, about 30 minutes for steaks and not more than 90 minutes for a roast.
• Don’t overcook! Because of the leanness of grass-fed beef, cooking to well-done can dry it out. Cooking to rare or medium-rare preserves the meat’s natural juiciness.
• Reduce the cooking temperatures by 25–50°F. The USDA recommends an internal temperature of 125–145°F for roasts.
• Fat and juices make beef tender and flavorful. When grilling or roasting, sear the meat quickly over high heat to seal in the juices.
• Ground beef can also be very lean. You may find that you need to add a little olive oil when browning or pan-frying hamburgers.

General guidelines for cooking different cuts

Loin cuts: The highest quality, most tender cuts of meat come from the rib and loin areas of the animal. These include such cuts as rib, T-bone and porterhouse steaks, and prime rib roast. Next comes the sirloin area which includes sirloin steaks and sirloin tip roasts. All of these cuts are good for grilling, broiling, and roasting. They can also be pan-broiled over low heat on the stove. The roasts are good for dry-roasting in the oven. 

Round cuts: Rump roasts, round steaks, and round roasts tend to be somewhat less tender. Round steaks can be marinated and grilled, but they’re more often cut into chunks or sliced thin and used for kabobs, stir fry, or stew. Rump and round roasts work well either as pot roasts or in stews cooked in liquid on the stove or in the oven.

Shoulder cuts: Shoulder, or chuck, cuts include chuck and arm roasts as well as short ribs. These cuts all work well braised or roasted slowly in liquid. Braising involves browning the meat, then cooking slowly in a small amount of liquid in a covered pan on the stove top. If prepared in the oven, these roasts are best cooked as pot roasts in a deep pan with liquid.

Working with frozen meat

Buying meat directly from a farmer often involves working with frozen meat. Butchers use either white freezer paper or plastic vacuum packing for packaging meat. The plastic maintains freshness for longer periods in the freezer and reduces the risk of freezer burn. If your supplier’s butcher uses freezer paper, ask if it is wrapped in plastic inside the paper. This will help maintain quality during storage.

While it is possible to cook a roast starting with a frozen cut of meat, most people thaw meat before cooking. There are several ways to thaw frozen meat.

Refrigerator thawing: This can take 24 hours or more, so you need to plan ahead.

Microwave thawing: Most microwave ovens have defrost settings that work fairly well for thin cuts of meat, but thicker cuts often end up being cooked around the edges before the center is thawed. The meat should be cooked immediately after it is thawed.

Thaw in cold water: If your meat is wrapped in freezer paper, remove and place in a water-tight plastic bag. If it is vacuum-packed in plastic, you may place it directly in the water. Change the water every 30 minutes. Thawing will take 1–4 hours, depending on the size of the cut.
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While I raise my own grass-fed beef here in Missouri, I suggest you try a vendor such as La Cense Beef if you want to sample some truly wonderful, Montana-raised grass fed beef.

With thanks to University of Wisconsin – A Consumer’s Guide to Grass-Fed Beef – A3862 – http://www.uwex.edu/ces/cty

>What is grass-fed beef?

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What is grass-fed beef?

Some purists consider that grass-fed means only animals which “have have eaten nothing but their mother’s milk and fresh grass or grass-type hay from birth to harvest—all their lives.” Technically, this is a bunch of bunk and impossible to achieve.

Reason being is that there are seeds, legumes, tree leaves, even small shrubs that cows need to eat to keep their bodies in balance. A pure grass diet would actually make them a bit sick. But cows eat a wide variety of forage to keep themselves healthy. They do this because they have a four-chambered stomach and so re-digest it until all the nutrients they can use are extracted.

Any healthy pasture you look at has a thousand or more different varieties of plants growing there, and not all of them are really grass.

The best, most environmentally responsible grazing (called mob grazing) will actually have them eating stalks that have grown up and gone to seed. So it’s not some academic issue phrased by government dictocrats. Cows eat a lot of varieties of stuff to make your beef. And that’s what gives it real flavor.

Which then brings up the problems that grain-finished cattle producers have – a pure grain diet changes the body chemistry of cattle and makes them put on extra fat, which causes all sorts of problems for us human consumers (as well as the cattle.) Since our corn has similarly been commoditized to be always yellow and 1/3 of the possible protein geneticized out of it, it’s mostly tasteless starch – which to us would be similar to having a diet of Twinkies. Sure, we put on extra fat and gain weight. That’s what a grain-fed diet is supposed to do.

The bulk of our meat in grocery stores and local markets and restaurants are grain-fed beef. The problems with this is that it is fairly tasteless and a steady diet of it would not help your heart much. Too much fat, too little of the good vitamins people need.

And the current trend is to get back to more traditional methods of raising beef – which is just on grassy pastures. Of course in the winter, unless you make other preparations, you’ll be feeding them hay – which is just grass dried up and compressed into big rolls or squares and kept out of the weather so it doesn’t decay.

Environmental and health benefits of grass-fed beef

To be most environmentally responsible, it make far more sense to raise animals on pasture. High quality, healthy pastures reduce soil erosion, improve water quality (a University of Wisconsin study showed that pastures are the “best” crop for reducing runoff and erosion), increase plant diversity, and provide high quality wildlife habitat. Properly managed, grazing cattle will actually improve the quality of the pasture in both quantity of forage and diversity.

Grass-fed meats are associated with a variety of health benefits as well. It is leaner and lower in fat and calories ounce for ounce than grain-fed beef.

Additionally, studies have shown that grass-fed meat contains more of vitamins A and E, conjugated linoleic acids (CLA), and omega-3 fatty acids, all of which have been shown to lower cholesterol and high blood pressure, and decrease the risk of diabetes and cancer.

Nutrition information for grass-fed beef: Galloway beef nutrient content comparison to other cooked meats, three ounces, trimmed

pasture-finished Galloway beef loin

USDA Prime Grade beef loin

USDA Choice Grade beef loin

Pork loin

Lamb loin

Chicken breast without skin

Chicken thigh without skin

Protein (grams)	27	24	24	26	26	26	22
Fat (grams)	3.5	11.6	8.7	6.6	8.2	1.3	7.0
Calories	129	201	175	165	176	119	151

And Grass Fed Beef has real taste

A pasture-based diet directly affects meat flavor. It changes the fatty acid content of meat. Grass-fed meats are often described as more intensely flavored. And this changes your approach to cooking this meat, as it requires far less additives to make it tasty. It already is tasty..

The other points affecting beef flavor are age (how old the animal is) and stress at slaughter (when the animal is shipped to a remote location, it is often excited and releases hormones into the muscle). Many locally-raised beef producers will have the animal slaughtered on site and then processed at a locker nearby to avoid that stress. And older animals, even when made into hamburger, are still far more flavorful than their corn-finished cousins.

(My old standby is to tell someone to take an average fast-food burger with everything on it, then take out the patty and eat the rest. Usually, there is no difference in taste, just slightly softer in texture.)

Another action taken with most pasture-finished natural beef is to “dry-age” it for 3-4 weeks, allowing the natural enzymes to break down the tissues and make the beef more tender. (Commercial grain-fed beef is “aged” only the amount of time it takes to ship it cross-country to its destination.)

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While I raise my own grass-fed beef here in Missouri, I suggest you try a vendor such as La Cense Beef if you want to sample some truly wonderful, Montana-raised grass fed beef.

(Thanks to the University of Wisconsin, “A Consumer’s Guide to Grass-Fed Beef” Bulletin A3862 http://www.uwex.edu/ces/cty)

>Welcome – and thanks!

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Julie Brown’s Missouri Angus Grass Fed Beef Cattle

Thanks for visiting my blog and giving me some of your time.

I hope to bring you consistently good content about raising and marketing grass fed beef cattle through the posts on this blog.

I’ve been working in this area for about 9 years now, having taken over my parents’ farm and learning all I can about it. Turns out, with the land we have, grass fed beef cattle are more profitable than any other crop we have – but the two cheapest crops to raise are grass and trees. Of course, then, the most profitable sight you can see is a herd of cattle grazing under a tree-shaded  pasture.

(It turns out, oddly, that cattle will eat more if they have shade, and grass grows better if it’s shaded during part of the day. So my farm needs to look like a savannah to be the most profitable.)

Anyway, I have tons to write about as I keep my own research going. Hope to keep you informed, entertained, or enlightened as I work this rural lifestyle.

Cheers!