Tag Archives: grass-fed beef

Define Your Terms

You may know by now that we are one of those geeky homeschool families, where every discussion with the kids is a “learning opportunity.” It doesn’t help that Matt and I were shamefully nerdy before we had kids. Our poor children can’t get a straight answer out of us when it comes to their questions about the world around them! 🙂

We use a fabulous curriculum called Classical Conversations, and during the middle school and high school years that we look forward to, many sages of classical home education advise you to use the maxim, “Define your terms.”

They’re right. You can’t have a meaningful conversation with anyone unless you’re using your terms in the same way.

So when you read headlines like, “Grass-fed beef is no healthier than conventional,” before you can understand the meaning of their conclusions, you have to understand just a bit about the industry.

Where Do Grass-fed Cows Come From?

No matter how badly you may want to farm, everyone knows cows don’t appear out of thin air—you have to buy seed stock from someone who’s already doing it. In our quest to continue expanding our beef herd, we’ve “shopped” around for cattle. Some of the herds we considered were as far away as Wisconsin, some were way down in central Texas, some were in Missouri or Alabama or Arkansas or Oklahoma, and some were scattered around East Texas, and of course, the closer to us we could buy, the better.

I can tell you first hand—cow-shopping is not like car-shopping or house-shopping. The cows keep making more cows just like them, so whatever characteristics they start out with, the babies will have also. With a car or house, if something doesn’t work right, you can just fix or replace the quirky parts. But you can’t change genetics, so if you buy a cow that’s not a good fit for your climate or operation, it’s just going to go downhill from that point.

Why are good genetics important?

Well, when it comes to cows, grain-feeding is a type of crutch. If a cow is “nice and fat,” in the dead of winter or in the heat of summer, if she’s been supplemented with grain, it’s very likely she will always need to be supplemented with grain in order to stay fat and healthy through the tough times of year. The benefits of really-grass-fed beef are too extensive to deal with in this post, so let’s just assume we’re wanting truly all-grass-fed beef that’s grass-fed all year long.

That’s where defining one’s terms comes into play.

On more than one occasion, even right here in East Texas, we’ve visited operations that, on the phone, assured us that they were all-grass, nice fat cows, very healthy, very clean.

What you’re about to read is exactly why you need to go visit the farm you buy from, at least once, and ask LOTS of questions.

We went to visit one farm, not too far from us, that had been recommended by the friend of a colleague. The owner drove us out to the field in his truck, and we were immediately suspicious of his claims to “grass-fed.” There were lots of trough structures around, and hardly any healthy pasture, in spite of the wet year and the not-too-hot temperatures up to that time. It was a large field, and when we finally found the yearlings, they came over to the truck, curious and searching.

Cattle are not particularly curious animals. Not like chickens or cats. They don’t come up to vehicles unless they are accustomed to doing so. Unless something has lured them. Unless they’re expecting a treat. That was our first clue. The cows were WAY too excited to see us.

We asked a few more questions. The truth finally came out. “Well, we do feed them cubes sometimes.”

How often?

“Well, just when we need to move them.”

Ok, so how often?

“Uh, just about every day.”

Oh. Every day. Every day? Our definition of grass-fed was clearly different than this man’s.

We drove a little farther in search of his breeding herd.

What’s that big tub over there?

“Oh, that’s just fly control we put out this time of year.”

Do all the cows get it?

“Well, no, just the yearlings.”

What’s in it?

“Oh, just a little bit of Ivermectin.” (an insecticide that is terrible for soil health)

Not that we were even remotely interested at this point, but perhaps just to try to get the guy to realize how ridiculous his own claims were… We asked about the “fly lick:” No protein? (aka soybeans and/or corn)

Wrong. A simple check of the label lists “grain by-products.” Cows don’t eat poison unless it tastes good. Apparently this guy’s definition for “all natural grass-fed” beef did not match ours or most customers’ definitions!

Needless to say… we didn’t buy any cows from that operation.

Buyers, beware!

Being in the industry, we know what we’re looking for, so the scariest thing about this whole incident was that the man had heard about the higher prices he could get for “grass-fed beef,” and clearly was contemplating marketing his beef accordingly.

If you think this is just an isolated incident, here’s another story. Again, in a quest to find some good grass-fed genetics, Matt drove all the way to Kansas—that’s upwards of 8 hours one-way, with a 30-foot cattle trailer—only to find out that the seller had misrepresented the breeding heifers he had for sale. A two-day trip for nothing. Just an empty cattle trailer and a continued search for good animals. The industry is riddled with downright deceit!

It’s far worse in the supermarket, where buyers are very far removed from sources, maybe even a half-a-world away, and no one is asking the hard questions—there’s no one to ask!

Well, the label says, “Grass-fed.” They couldn’t call it that if it wasn’t true, right?

Pap-Pap (Matt’s dad) is an avid fan of murder mystery novels, and once shared this quote with me from Dorothy Sayers’ novel, “Murder Must Advertise:” 

“Truth in advertising,” announced Lord Peter sententiously , “is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal. It provides a suitable quantity of gas, with which to blow out a mass of crude misrepresentation into a form that the public can swallow. Which incidentally brings me to the delicate and important distinction between the words ‘with’ and ‘from.’ Suppose you are advertising lemonade, or , not to be invidious, we will say perry. If you say ‘Our perry is made from fresh-plucked pears only,’ then it’s got to be made from pears only, or the statement is actionable; if you just say it is made ‘from pears,’ without the ‘only,’ the betting is that it is probably made chiefly of pears; but if you say, ‘made with pears,’ you generally mean that you use a peck of pears to a ton of turnips, and the law cannot touch you— such are the niceties of our English tongue.””

Define Grass-fed

The last nail in the coffin of truth-in-advertising of grass-fed beef is this: A couple of years ago the overseers of this particular industry (the USDA) quietly deregulated the term “grass-fed” (which was poorly defined even at that time), stating that they’d decided it was really a marketing claim, and that companies should be able to define it for themselves, and customers could just visit individual brand websites to find out what the internal meaning of “grassfed” is for a particular company.

Since most consumers want to do a big research project in the middle of their grocery shopping expedition… Not!

The best way to be sure is to define your terms, ask lots of questions, then buy from a farm you can trust and visit. And when you do go, make sure the cows don’t follow the ATV like the pied piper, looking for “candy!”

So… want some really grass-fed beef right here in East Texas? Here are some easy meal ideas for this summer!

 
 

Sometimes Momma Has to Run

Most of our cows don’t have real names anymore–truly, there are over 100 cows out there in the pasture, and most of them have a new baby every year, so it would be pretty tough to keep track of every single one! Matt knows a lot of them by number and will report in sometimes, “Boy, A07 is looking really good!” But the handful of cows that we started with all had names, chosen for personality quirks or looks or even just for fun.

We have this one cow named Tilly. She’s feisty and does not put up with farm dogs, so we figure she’d be pretty good at defending the herd if needed. We named her after a favorite movie character in a movie called “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner.”

Tilly was one of the first cows we bought to stock Shady Grove Ranch, and when she finally had her first calf, it disappeared down in the West Pasture, a distant paddock that is more wild and remote than the rest of the farm. Matt searched and searched for that calf. Pap Pap searched. I searched. Even Tilly searched after the herd moved up to a new area (rotational grazing and all). I remember her running up and down the fenceline, bellowing loudly, to no avail. After three days, we thought there was no hope, and that surely the coyotes or even a bobcat or cougar had carried it off. What could have got past Tilly, we didn’t know, but we were heartbroken. And then one day, out of nowhere, that calf appeared, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and has been with us ever since.

We named that calf (a female) Millie after another favorite movie character from “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” We hoped that the losing-your-calf trait was not genetic, but as it turns out, it is. We have a tricky time keeping calves with the herd in spring anyway, even before the Tilly-Millie trait, because calves are slow and sleepy for the first few days, and we have to move the cows daily to achieve “flash grazing.” Why not just leave the cows in one big pen until everyone’s done calving? Well, that would lead to poor management during the most nutritious grazing of the year, both for the cows and the land.

Instead we just try to keep up with who’s who (thus the ear tags!), checking frequently for new babies, scouring perimeters, and making sure new moms have been nursed on. Now, as we had already discovered years ago, the whole line of calves out of Tilly and her daughters just LOVE to disappear in the same way. Maybe their moms hide them. Who knows? We try not to worry too much now, but it’s hard not to. 

Here’s how it goes: They’re born, we see them within the first 12 hours, then they fall asleep for three days in some tall grass at the edge of the woods someplace and we don’t see them again until they’re too fast to eartag. I guess they don’t like having name tags… It wouldn’t be so bad except that we really do rotate our cows daily, so after three days, they’ve covered a lot of ground, and that calf may or may not have made it with the rest of the herd! The weirdest part is this particular tendency seems to be isolated in this one line of cows–Tilly and her daughters! I suppose we’d cull them if they didn’t produce such nice, fat calves every year!

The kids and I decided to go blackberry picking one lovely Sunday afternoon while Matt did evening chores. In passing he said to me, “Millie’s calf is missing. Keep your ears open for a calf mooing.”

Tevka offered to pull the wagon… until she realized how huge Matt Jr. has gotten!

The 3 Musketeers, aka the 3 Berry-Pickers!

Oh boy. Good ol’ Millie loses another calf. Sure enough, about the fourth berry I put into my basket, I heard a little baby moo. I hushed the kids because I wasn’t totally confident of what I had heard or where it had come from. Yes, I heard it again! It had come from the very paddock that Matt suspected, which the herd had left behind some two days before.

I gave instructions to the kiddos to stay in the berry patch and keep feeding the baby berries (he loves those!) while I went to investigate.

Matthew got really excited when I set the berry basket right next to him!

My little berry-lover!

I don’t think there’s much in this world that is cuter than a baby stuffing his face full of blackberries!

I walked quickly, watching and listening to try to put eyes on the calf. I didn’t know whether he’d be standing or lying down, in the woods, or in the fields or brambles. I stopped to listen. Another baby moo!

I sped up and headed toward where the sound had come from. I rounded a tall bramble bush, and there, in the midst of a blackberry patch, was our missing calf!

I was between him and the herd. Calves are particularly difficult to “steer” by pressure because they don’t always go in a predictable direction. So, giving him plenty of berth, I jogged around behind him to prepare to chase him up the hill.

We had a long way to go and a wide open field to cover that was filled with random patches of brambles and downed trees waiting to be milled into lumber for our farm store. Thankfully the calf headed the right way, so I ran behind watching to see what he would do. He passed the open gate, so I went top speed to try to head him off and send him back to the gate. This part would be tricky because if he didn’t turn left, he’d end up in another 20 acre paddock, and you know, I just didn’t want to run across 20 acres on my day off! I’ve never been much of a runner!

Suddenly the calf decided to go left, and he bolted right through the electric smooth-wire fence! He got shocked a couple of times getting through, but he made it and headed up past the house toward the other cows. What luck! There was only one more fence between him and his momma, but he needed to head toward it and not veer right along the house and up the driveway back toward that 20-acre open paddock.

I leaped over old garden rows and weeds and caught up with him. He scrambled forward and, yes! Ran right through the fence into the cows’ paddock.

He finally made his way back into the right paddock–now he’s trying to spot his momma!

It had been a couple of days since he nursed, so he latched on to the first momma cow he encountered, and she took a sniff of him and tried to kick him off since he didn’t belong to her. By then Matt had made it back to us and helped steer him back toward his momma, who was rather shocked by his eagerness to feed (and probably by her soreness from not having been nursed for 2 days!).

I went back to my own kids who were still happily munching on berries. During my calf-chase, I had spotted an excellent climbing tree, so we ventured out to that so that the kids could climb, and Momma could catch her breath. Farming sure keeps us young! Thanks for the exercise, Millie!

A lovely natural playground where I could catch my breath!

High Density Pasture Management

Matt has been researching and experimenting with a new cattle management technique called High Density Pasture Management. The strategy changes throughout the year depending upon seasons and the types of cows being grazed (momma cows nursing calves versus finishing steers versus pregnant dry cows), and is quite complex in strategy, so we won’t attempt to describe the entire method here and now. However, we can share what we’re doing right now during the winter season (i.e. hay-feeding season) to sustain our grass-fed cattle.

Pastureland likes to be disturbed for a brief period, and then left alone to recover and grow. The disturbance method we use is livestock and manure because it involves no chemicals and it works so well to restore the soil’s health. Our soil at Shady Grove Ranch was in pretty poor condition when we arrived 4 years ago. But we’ve already seen tremendous improvement in many areas, despite a 3-year-long drought that may or may not have actually ended. 

The grass is dormant at this time of year, so we feed hay (stored grass) to the cattle. This is a critical time for the pasture–it can receive the nutrients from the “recycled hay” (aka manure) but it also needs time to grow and get established without hungry bovine mouths nipping off the baby grasses and legumes just as they emerge from the seeds. 

This is where High-Density Pasture Management comes in. Simply put, we spread out just enough hay to last the cows one day, let them eat and poop to their hearts’ content, and then move them to a new section of ground and repeat. They can’t be allowed to return to the newly “fertilized” but immature, growing pasture until it has established enough underground energy storage to bounce back from the grazing that will come later. This can take as long as 120 days, but after that initial waiting period, we can graze the land multiple times with just short periods of rest between grazings. The end result is more cow-food produced in a season when using strategic pasture access, rather than allowing cows to free-range constantly over an entire pasture.

Why does this work? By allowing the grasses to mature, we take full advantage of the balance between root energy storage and photosynthesis, and so the grass-based system becomes much more efficient and can feed more cattle on a fixed size pasture, even without chemical inputs or concentrated feeds (i.e. grain). It just takes patience and a watchful eye to judge when a paddock is ready for cattle pressure and how much pressure it can take. 

So here we are in Phase 1, the winter season, feeding the cows with stored hay and the ground with evenly-distributed manure, getting ready for the spring flush. The first video shows Matt’s nifty homemade hay-unroller. The second video shows Matt moving the fence so the cows can eat their breakfast.