Don’t All Cows Eat Grass?

So what’s the deal with grass-finished beef? Don’t all cows eat grass? Why would I pay more for this beef?

Maybe you’ve had one of these questions or another, so I’ll try my best to give some answers.

First of all, conventional beef is raised for a year or so on pasture, but then the animal is put into a feed lot where it consumes a mix of grains that fatten it up quickly so it can be off to the slaughterhouse in as short a time as possible. This is somewhere between 16-20 months of age. As you can imagine this does not make for a very healthy animal. Imagine a person sitting on their couch all day, every day eating nothing but chips and ice cream. It wouldn’t take long for that person to become overweight and sick. In fact, most of these animals would not be able to survive much longer than their processing date due to the diet that they consume.

Grass-finished beef, on the other hand, is never fed any grain. They are raised on pasture for their entire lives, eating fresh grass and legumes. Typically in the winter, some hay is fed while the pastures go dormant. A grass-finished animal may take up to 3 years to get to an ideal finishing size. Here at Nurtured Lands Farm we move our cows nearly every day to fresh pasture and even when we do have to feed hay, it is done out in the field and never in confinement.

But grass-finishing a cow isn’t just a way to give them a better life; it actually produces healthier meat. One of the great things about cows is that they are ruminants. This means they can take complex carbohydrates, like what makes up grass, and ferment it in one of their stomachs. So, they are basically taking the energy stored in the pasture and converting it into a product that we can consume. In doing so, they also create a fat profile that is much healthier than the animals that are fed grain. Grass-finished beef regularly shows lower totals of saturated-fatty acids and also greater amounts of omega-3 fatty acids which are typically found in fish. Grass finished beef is also found to have higher levels of vitamins like beta-carotene and vitamin E probably due to fresh grasses being higher in vitamins.

Another benefit of grass over grain is the animal’s health. Typically, animals in a feed lot are given hormones and antibiotics to increase their feed conversion rates. The whole point of feeding animals’ grain is to get them as fat as possible, as fast as possible. So, in order to keep the animals growing and not getting sick from their all-grain diet, they are given slow releasing hormones and feed with antibiotics in it. Again, this is a system that makes unhealthy animals so they must be propped up with drugs.

One of the biggest reasons I am a proponent of grass-finished beef is because this is the way nature intended. Cows are designed to eat forage, not grain. They are complex organisms that can take a bite of grass, convert some of the energy to meat, fat, and bone and send the rest out as fertilizer for the soil, which in time can produce a new bit of grass. This is the cycle that can build healthy land!