(Grass-fed) ground beef is 65% lower in saturated fat and its New York strips are 35% lower than conventional beef, as measured by the USDA. “Any feedlot-fattened animal has a much higher level of saturated fat than a forage-fed steer,” says Dr. Steve Atchley.

It makes sense. Grass is a low-starch, high-protein fibrous food, in contrast to carbohydrate-rich, low-fiber corn and soybeans. When animals are 100% grass-fed, their meat is not only lower in saturated fats but also slightly higher in omega-3 fatty acids, the healthy fats found in salmon and flaxseed, which studies indicate may help prevent heart disease and bolster the immune system. Ground beef and milk from grass-finished cattle also have more conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), which recent data suggest may help prevent breast cancer, diabetes and other ailments. Moreover, grass-finished meat is higher than grain-finished meat in vitamin A and vitamin E, two antioxidants thought to boost resistance to disease.

Link to the full article at Time.com – “The Grass-Fed Revolution”

Thanks to our friends at Family Friendly Farm in Cape Girardeau, MO for sending us to time.com to find these articles. Be sure to check them out for your local food buying needs – this year, in addition to carrying our pork and grass-fed beef in their on-farm store, they are carrying a number of other local products, including pastured eggs, grass-fed milk, pastured broilers, veal, turkey, lamb, catfish, homemade bread, honey, organic vegetables, and even local soap!

I hope that you click on the link and see what he and she have to say. I’m not a big Martha Stewart fan but was very impressed at the level of enthusiasm that she had for organic, local, grass fed, pasture raised, foods. She knew what she was talking about and really seemed to be supporting our type of farming. Of course Joel was himself, being both educational and entertaining.

Today I’m thankful for my family most of all but I’m also very thankful that there are more and more people getting on board and realizing the health (for soil, animal, and human) benefits of grass fed meats.

Personally I think that there are two things (one feeds off of the other) that really make our food system what it is. The first is federal subsidies of crops such as corn and soybeans. This encourages a mass amount of monoculture farming where now the same fields in our area are being used year after year for corn. It also encourages more and more processed foods that are made of elements of corn and soy. These aren’t good for you but the biggest worry for me is the fact that most of these corn and soy are now GMO (genetically modified organisms). The reason there is so much of this stuff is because farmers can produce the crops for more more than what they are worth on the market and still make a profit with their multiple subsidies. This is not the fault of the farmer, it’s a policy problem.

The second big problem, and this is huge, is that one multi-national chemical corporation M****nto (can’t be too careful is taking total control of our food. Not our country’s food but our world’s food. The are buying up seed companies and are bulying farmers into not saving their own seeds anymore. Soon we will all be eating GMO foods, not because farmers want to grow it but because they have no other choice. The stories in Food INC. about lawsuits against farmers and seed cleaners were really eye opening.

Of course there is something that we can all do. First, everyone can eat local, transparent food. Second, farmers that are thinking about raising natural and organic foods can take the plunge and start doing it.
Visit the Farmers Forum to see and get involved in a discussion on the movie.

I’m moving the cows every day between 5:00 and 6:00 pm. We’ve got 6 Dexter cows, 6 Dexter calves of all ages, 1 Dexter Bull, and 5 Belted Galloway yearlings. All of these bovines are grazing paddocks each day that are right at 0.14 acres. That’s just over 1/8 of an acre. At this time, May 30th, each paddock is starting at knee high and over, of alfalfa, clover (ladino and red), orchard grass, and a little Max Q fescue. There is a small amount of weeds and I’m starting to see crabgrass and some other grasses that I haven’t identified yet. We are now on our second rotation since…. I believe March 27th of this year. This is the date that we let the cows off of their winter paddock by the barn and stopped feeding hay. We did supplement with just a little hay to help them keep from bloating though. When we first started rotating the cows were grazing most of the forage off, after a couple of weeks we were able to get the right paddock size that caused the cows to trample any forage that they didn’t eat. This has been spectacular for the regrowth!

Now, in the second rotation the grass is tall and the cows are continuing to do lots of trampling, now as much as 40 or 50%. If we were grazing existing pasture I might feel bad about all that trampling but we have to keep reminding ourselves that 13 months ago this “pasture” was all dirt! Being crow crop land for 30 years or more, the organic matter was very low and this trampled forage is helping to build soil and create the excellent soil fertility that we desire. It’s amazing to see how long moisture is held in the areas with tall forage and or trampled forage. It’s also great for us to see how soil life is thriving. We see many insects in the fields, worms in the ground, and dung beetles working hard to bury the manure! This is actually really important because the manure (fertilizer) is being moved closer to the plant’s roots, flies aren’t able to reproduce in the cow pies, and holes are left in the ground that help to absorb and store water when it rains.

On to some pictures of this years forage.

First is a picture of the grasses just starting to grow. We have really bad rows showing because of using a seed drill last year and it was worrisome to me in the beginning that we may have not left enough grass standing last year.

Next is a picture from just a little later. This is when we were allowing the herd to graze just a little each day, in preparation for the start of full grazing on the spring lush.

These pictures are probably 2 weeks into grazing. Each day the forage residue is a little different but this is a pretty good look at a typical move. The cows are eating tall (first rotation still) spring growth and leaving shorter, damaged forage behind with a high amount of manure deposited.

This is probably 2 weeks of rest.

The rest period on the first rotation was around 50 days but here is a picture at about 25 days rest. There is really no comparison to how it looks now.

This is my little girl sitting right in the middle of the salad bar at about it’s maximum height. I feel that allowing the forage to get tall and mature helps them to develop the root system that will benefit us in the future. Not to mention that our cows are our only tool to manage the farm at this point and they can only eat so fast!

Getting back to the thought that I had when starting this post, Moving the cows IS the best. I have such a great time moving the “mini mob” onto new forage each day, taking note of how the last paddock looks, now the new paddock looks, providing water and minerals to the animals, and walking backwards through the field to see how it’s all recovering and what is working the best. We do have an area that was trampled really badly when it got too muddy and it’s really interesting to see how it’s recovering over time too. If in the future we can get away from feeding hay at all, and just rotate cows onto clean salad bars each day, now that would be the ultimate job for me!

Do any of you have the same feelings about moving cows, have experience doing Management-Intensive Grazing or mob grazing, or have a similarly gratifying “chore” on the farm? I love comments!

I generally like the idea of helping a small business, and these two guys definitely seemed to constitute “small”.  Since I already have a freezer full of chicken and pork, I decided to take a look at their beef.  So they pulled out a box of beef and told me that “this is the same stuff they sell at places like Chili’s or Applebee’s”.  So they had some 6 oz bacon-wrapped filets, 10 oz new york strips, and a whole lot of 4 oz hamburger “steaks”.  They shot me a price, and my first question was how much per pound.  They only wanted to talk about price per steak, but that’s not how I think about price on meat.  I want to be able to compare the price to what I’d pay in the grocery store.  The fact that they weren’t willing to facilitate that head-to-head conversation really turned me off and made me doubt any other claims about their products.

I think it is critical that those of us in the slow/transparent/local/organic+ food movement need to be really careful about this same thing.  My goal is to help my customers understand exactly what they’d be paying at the grocery store for the same cuts of meat that they are buying from me.  If I happen to be more expensive than they expected for “farm direct prices” (some expect it to be 1/3 of the grocery store!), then I’ll try and win them over on value, rather than by talking about the price per pound of live animal or the hanging weight price, or on a “per steak” basis.  Those tactics are just avoiding the issue, and for many people (myself included), avoiding the direct comparison just makes the seller out to be a huckster.

The reason that you might notice the cattle bunched together is that we are practicing managed intensive grazing.  I could write volumes on the benefits of this method, but that’s not the topic of this post.

The topic of this post are those “oreo” cattle… five Belted Galloway cattle, to be exact.  We are experimenting with this Scottish breed in 2009, and so far, we are really impressed with them.  They are a larger breed of cattle than the Irish Dexters that make up the majority of our herd now, and the other major difference is that they lack the “dual-purpose” benefits of Dexters (Belties are primarily for beef, while Dexters are considered good milkers as well).  However, we’ve been really happy with their qualities so far, and they will certainly provide more beef per animal.  Later this year, we’ll be finishing both Dexter and Belted Galloway grass-fed beef, so we’ll be able to evaluate the two breeds for taste, cutting losses, and grade.

Belties and Dexters on pasture

This is our second growing season to graze on our newly reclaimed land.  If you haven’t kept up with the history of the farm, the brief version is that we converted to pasture a portion of the old family farm that has been in corn, soybeans, and wheat for ages (farmed with a non-family farmer in a profit-sharing arrangement).

Thanks to the wet weather last year, we weren’t able to actually plant anything until around mid-April.  When we did, we planted (onto bare dirt) oats as a cover crop, along with orchardgrass, alfalfa, and white clover.  In the fall, we overseeded fescue (endophyte-friendly) and medium red clover.  We also planted a couple of acres of Bermuda to have a strong hot-weather pasture to use in our rotation cycle.

So here we are, almost a year later, after having intensively grazed (though relatively gently) this crop, and we’re just starting to put our cattle out to pasture for this growing season (we’re easing them onto it an hour or two at a time to avoid bloat problems).  And since this is the rainy season and our pasture is still immature, we’re also taking it slowly so that we avoid too much growth-potential-killing tromping.

With all of that being said, the growth that we’re seeing in the pasture is really encouraging.  We’ll post updates throughout the growing season that show the progress of a 2nd year pasture on a rotational grazing program.