Grass Fed Beef

A recent comment that I made on a lowcarber forum post about naturally fed beef

JoreyTK’s post:

Hey all,

I asked a local farmer if their cattle are grass finished. I’m pretty clueless about cattle raising but is this basically just as nutrient devoid as the supermarket meats?

My comment:

Great question JoreyTK and a super response from Jacki too.

From my perspective there are really two different criteria that needed to be looked at whenever we buy beef. The first thing are the animals fed natural food as opposed to food that is laced with antibiotics, hormones and other drugs and is it GM free? Generally speaking if those criteria are met then the meat product is usually pretty good simply because any farmer who is willing to go the extra mile not to use drugs and hormones and to ensure their feed is GMO-free will tend to take care of their animals far more conscientiously than those brought up on vast feedlots.

Whether or not they are finished on grass or corn fed or any other type of grain for that matter, as Jacki has said, will affect how quickly they come to kill weight and that will obviously  affect in many ways both the texture and the taste  as well as the look of the meat as well.

Then there is a third option for finishing cows off and that’s one they use quite extensively in Europe which is once the  growing season has stopped the cattle are transitioned on to silage which if you don’t know about it is fermented grass. This has the advantage of retaining a much larger proportion of all the good stuff, the nutrients as compared to say, dried hay or something like that.

Another popular feed in Europe is also root crops such as turnips, carrots parsnips, sugar beets and even sweet potatoes. Kale is also a very popular hereabout and it seems to last in the field quite well where the farmers will allow the cattle to strip graze it progressively each day.

So even though there may not be grass growing through the winter where you live, farmers do have a choice to feed their cattle in as natural a way as possible according to the resources they’ve got at hand. Whether they’re finished on grass, whether they’re finished on corn or whether they’re finished on solid or kale or whatever, the key issue for me is more is it natural and free of drugs and other additives that I just don’t want passed on to me through the meat I eat. The rest is really just more of a question of taste.

Cheers,

Mark