This video has been shared on a number of other farm blogs in the last few days but for those of you that don’t frequent these other blogs I wanted to make sure you saw it. The video was done by the Wall Street Journal. (They’ve done a few nice ones lately) It’s a quick look at corn-fed and grass-fed beef. 

  I think it’s got some valuable information but wonder about some things that are stated. For example, both the grass farmer and the feed lot owner mention how little profit they are getting per animal. There are so many variables to profit margin that I still believe we can try and keep our overhead low and make a profit with grass fed beef but I can understand that with 7 or 8 dollar corn it’s pretty hard to make a profit on commodity beef. 

   Any thoughts? Do you care what you eat, eats? Does any of this surprise you?

What is Salad Bar Beef?

“Salad Bar Beef” is a term used to describe cattle that have been fed a wide variety of grasses and legumes.  The whole notion here is that we’re extending the old phrase “you are what you eat” to “you are what you eat, eats”.  In other words, when you eat an animal product, you’re essentially eating a bit of whatever that animal ate in its lifetime.  And every day when our cattle are moved to a new paddock, they have a “salad bar” in front of them – consisting of a wide variety of grasses and legumes… just the kind of thing that your doctor would probably suggest that you eat!

Health Benefits

Our salad bar beef is healthier both for what our cattle eat and what they don’t eat.  Our cattle are given no hormones and no routine antibiotics.  Grass is essentially the only thing going into their bodies, other than the salt/kelp mix that they have access to for their mineral needs.  Kelp is dried seaweed, and is a natural source of trace minerals.

So what impact does this diet have on you?  In addition to minimizing potentially cancer-causing hormones and unnecessary antibiotics, grass-fed beef is better for your body overall.  According to Loren Cordain, a professor in the Department of Health and Exercise Science at Colorado State University, grass-fed beef resembles the wild game our ancestors ate.  It contains less fat, less saturated fat, more CLA (an anti-cancer fat) and more omega-3 fatty acids than grain-fed beef.  This means that the fat in grass-fed beef has more “good” fat, much like salmon, which has also been touted as a good source of healthy fat.

Quality / Taste

The heath benefits of salad bar beef would be of limited value if the beef ended up tasting awful.  But the beautiful thing is that beef that is finished on grass is wonderful – in our opinion, it makes other beef pale in comparison.  But don’t take our word for it:

Which steak tastes the best? – Slate Magazine

Environment / Sustainability

About 70% of the corn grown in the United States is fed to animals.  Instead of letting cattle pack on the pounds by eating grass, we move them all to centralized feed lots and ship in corn for them to eat.  We believe that it is a more sustainable option to let the cattle harvest their own food – by eating the grass directly from the ground.  This article from the New York Times Magazine lays out the life of a typical steer… it is well worth a read for anyone interested in the food that they eat:

New York Times Magazine – “This Steer’s Life”

How can I order?

Please let us know if you’d like to purchase salad bar beef from us.  We are building a list of folks who would like to be notified when we next have beef for sale.