What’s in a food label? Grass Fed

I’ve been working on a series of blog posts about the meaning behind the labels you find on meat packages. Previously, I’ve written posts about the meaning behind the Organic and Natural labels and I’ve talked about how those two terms can be confused with each other and with Grass-fed labeling.

The next labeling term I’m going to cover is Grass-fed.

Hawaii Big Island Beef was popular in Hawaii.
It is all grass fed.

 

To use the Grass-fed label on a beef package, the USDA requires that the cattle were…

·         Only allowed to eat grass or hay for their entire lives

·         Never given grain or grain byproducts

·         Allowed access to pasture during the growing season

That basically means that, in the summer time, they were turned out on pasture and ate grass and in the winter time, they were fed hay because the grass wasn’t growing. They are never fed grain (corn, rice, barley, oats etc…).

You may be asking yourself, “So, what does that mean about the beef that is not labeled Grass-fed?”

That’s one of the things that makes this particular label confusing. Some people may think that beef that is not labeled as grass-fed come from cattle that never see a pasture. That’s not really true at all.

In the US, all cattle are grass-fed. 

Grass-fed cattle.

Cattle are ruminants. Their bodies are able to digest grass and convert it into energy that they can use to grow, fatten, make milk, or raise calves. Their digestive systems are much more diverse than ours. We can’t metabolize grass, but cattle can. That’s part of what makes cows so awesome!

Vallie and some of our cows.I think she was
demonstrating gymnastics to them

Calves are born and live with their mother’s for 5 to 7 months. They may be fed some grain to supplement them, but for the most part, they drink their mother’s milk and eat grass. Their mothers will eat mostly grass, too. Once they are old enough to be weaned (teenagers), they are usually sent to a stocker farm to grow for a few more months. How much grain vs. grass they get at this step depends on the time of year and the weather. If there is grass growing, they will get to eat it. If not, they will eat a combination of hay and grain.

For the final few months of their lives, cattle that comprise most of the beef in the US, will be fed a greater percentage of grain in a feedlot. In the cattle industry, we call the high-energy ingredients used in these diets concentrates because the energy is more concentrated; whereas, grass and hay are called roughages. The high-concentrate (grain) diet allows them to gain weight more efficiently and gives the beef the flavor and tenderness we expect in the US. Even then, they have to get fiber (roughages), too. So, they get hay, silage (fermented hay) and other forms of roughage. It would be unhealthy for the calves if they only ate corn. Their diet is closely controlled by nutritionists.

I have a post about the steps cattle go through to become beef.

One of my favorite blogs is written by Anne Burkholder, a mom, feedlot operator, Feedyard Foodie. She writes about daily life in a feedlot in Nebraska and her kids and beef and life in general.

Ryan Goodman, of the Ag Proud blog just wrote a great post about how cattle digest grass and grain.

Personally, I prefer the flavor of beef from cattle that have been grain-finished (fed grain for the last few months before harvest). Some people prefer the flavor of beef from grass-finished cattle (fed exclusively grass and hay). The great thing is that we have the choice.

Sometimes, labeling claims like organic and natural are confused with grass-fed, but those labeling claims have different meanings that I covered in previous posts.  Most of the time, grass-fed labels are accompanied by claims about being raisedwithout hormones or raised without antibiotics, but those labels have different meaning and will be coming up soon in my labeling blog series.

Farmland

I normally don’t have movie reviews on my blog, but for one movie, I’m going to make an exception. Last night, I was invited to the Arkansas screening of the movie, Farmland.

Chances are, if you read this blog, you have an interest in how your food is produced, and if you’re interested in learning about how food is produced in this country, you need to see Farmland. A group called the Farmers and Rancher Alliance financed the film, and it was directed by Academy Award-winning director, James Moll.

Six young farmers were featured, from across the country, representing many aspects of modern American agriculture.

·         I have to say my favorite was Brad Bellah, a cattle rancher from Texas. His ranch is not too far from where I grew up, and the scenes from it made me gasp with reminders of home. I practically cheered when they pictured his family all decked out in the red and black of my alma mater, Texas Tech. He and I probably had many of the same professors. During the movie, his twins were born in the same hospital where I was born. Most importantly, he raises cattle for beef production. Our family also raises beef cattle.

·         The film traveled to Georgia to the poultry farm of Leighton Cooley. We watched him fill a barn with baby chicks and teach kids about chickens.

·         I was so impressed with the work ethic and drive of Margaret Schlass on her Certified Naturally Grown vegetable farm in Pennsylvania. She was the first-generation farmer in the group and she talked about how hard it was to start a farm from nothing.

·         Ryan Veldhuizen and his family raise pigs, corn and soybeans in Minnesota. He and his brother comically argue about tractors and land.

·         Large scale organic farming was represented by Sutton Morgan from California. He learned about farming produce from his dad, but turned his operation to all organic.

·         David Loberg took over his corn and soybean farm from his dad, and it’s tough to watch one of the sadder points of the movie when he talks about losing his dad to cancer.

This film doesn’t shy away from the hard subjects. They cover GMOs, Organic farming, pesticides and chemicals, hormones, antibiotics, and animal cruelty videos. It was interesting to hear all the different takes on those tough subjects.

The main take away from the film was that our food is produced by people. People who work hard and want the best for their families.

It’s hard to devote the time and energy to traveling to a farm for a tour. Lots of farmers would love to have you. This film is a great chance to spend about 70 minutes on farms with young farmers and learn how our food is produced.

Its a HUGE HUGE HUGE industry!

In my job, I have lots of great opportunities to see the inside of food processing facilities and farms that most people don’t get to see. That’s part of the fun of being a meat nerd. I am always amazed by the sheer size and scope of the industry when I get to see these facilities in action.



Mound of bacon.

 

For example, I was in a pork processing plant last summer and I was standing in the middle of the bacon slicing room. The slicers are these huge machines with circular blades like 4 feet across. They move so fast you can’t see them. They sliced pieces of bacon faster than I could count. I found a really cool  bacon slicing video on youtube.

At the plant I was visiting, I think there were six lines slicing bacon all running at the same time, at least 16 hours a day, 5 days a week. That is an incredible about of bacon. That plant harvested 19,000 pigs per day in 2011. Processors get about 15.4 lbs of cured bacon out of every hog, that’s 292,600 lbs of bacon, PER DAY, in one plant! The daily hog slaughter in the US in 2011 was 438,630 PER DAY, that’s 6.7 million pounds of bacon, PER DAY!!!  
Of course, there are 313 million people in the US and they usually eat three times a day, seven days a week. Not to even mention exports.

(See how I can get lost in the enormity of our food system! I’m just a meat head.)




A few of the 80,000 chicks on the Munyon Farm

We went on a tour of farms with some ladies a few weeks ago called Moms on the Farm Tour. Some local chicken farmers, Jared and Anita Munyon were nice enough to allow our group to tour their farm on a Saturday morning. They have four chicken houses where they raise broilers for a company called Simmons. Each of their chicken houses hold about 20,000 chickens. That’s 80,000 chickens on their farm! They will get about 5 sets of chickens each year, so this one farm produces 400,000 chickens each year. There are about 30,000 farms that raise chickens in the US, and 95% of them are family-owned like the Munyon’s Farm. Americans eat, on average about 83 pounds of chicken each year, so we need lots of them to keep us supplied in chicken nuggets, breasts, and chicken wings, over 37 billion pounds of chicken meat.




One of Vallie's beef cows. She has 13.

The beef industry is even more amazing to me because the cattle come from so many different farms in so many different places in the US. There were over 34 million calves born in 2012 and the US produced over 26 billion pounds of beef, but 90% of the beef farms in the US have fewer than 100 head and the average herd size is 44 head. That means a whole lot of people have input in the beef industry; from folks like my dad with 8 cows to the Deseret Cattle Co. in Florida with 42,000 cows. That’s right; the largest cattle ranch in the US sits between Disney World and Cape Canaveral.




Some students learning to make hotdogs.
A little slower than the commercial plants.

Then there are the hotdog numbers: It’s hard to know exactly how many hotdogs are consumed in this country, but it is estimated that Americans consume 20 billion hotdogs each year, which works out to about 70 hotdogs per person. On Memorial Day alone, US consumers will enjoy over 150 million hotdogs. That’s enough hotdogs to stretch from Washington DC to Los Angeles five times!!! During the summer time, US consumers will eat 7 billion hotdogs, or 818 each second.

 

All of this meat has to be produced by somebody. According to industry stats, the meat and poultry industries employ over 2 million workers paying them over $68 billion in wages. See what I mean about a HUGE industry?!?

When we buy our 2 or 3 pounds of meat at the grocery store or a steak a restaurant, it’s easy to forget that there are 313 million people in the US who are buying their few pounds of meat for this week, too. Our food system is huge! It’s really amazing to me that we can produce and distribute so much food each day.

It’s also sad to know that so much food is wasted each day, but that’s another day’s post.

More about beef farming



 This is me on the bus on our
Moms on the Farm tour.

A few weeks ago, I worked with a group of ladies in agriculture to host the Moms on the Farm tour. About 30 ladies attended a tour of a dairy and a beef farm, and then returned to campus for some cooking demonstrations by the Arkansas Cattlewomen. We plan to repeat the event in the springtime and improve it. There were lots of great questions and the ladies were really interested to learn about where their food comes from. All the questions and interest have become a great resource for my blog posts.




 Mrs. Marsha Hedge talking to the ladies about
her beef farm during Moms on the Farm tour.

We visited a single-mom, beef farmer, Mrs. Marsha Hedge, who has about 40 cows. She used to have over 100 cows, but because of the drought this past summer, she had to sell about 60% of her herd. So, now she is working off the farm part-time and going to school part-time to get her teaching certificate. Most beef farms have circumstances similar to hers. Ninety percent of beef farms in the US have fewer than 100 cows, and the average size of a US beef farm is about 44 cows. Most beef farmers have to work off the farm or have some other type of income to make a living, or their spouses do.

Anyway, Marsha raises the calves from her cows until they are weaned and she sells them to another farmer who will either take them to grow some more on green pasture or to a feedlot to eat grain. This seemed to surprise the ladies on the tour that the beef cattle from the farms around Northwest Arkansas don’t go directly to slaughter. One lady wanted to buy a calf from Marsha to slaughter and another asked if she sold her beef to WalMart. Marsha doesn’t have any calves that are the right age or size for slaughter.

As a host, I should have done a better job explaining that the beef industry is segmented. Cattle sold for beef production may have several owners in their lifetime. I wrote a whole post about the beef industry in February with lots of facts and figures, but I didn’t talk about the different kinds of beef farms in the US.


What are these different types of farms?

1. First, you have beef farms that raise calves to be sold as bulls and heifers (young females) to other farmers. These are called seedstock or purebred farms. Their cows and bulls may cost crazy amounts of money, but they hope to raise animals that will be in demand by other farmers to buy to improve their herds. Most of the time, they only have one or two breeds (like Angus or Simmental), and they specialize in genetic traits that other farmers want. They may have really lean animals or cattle that raise calves with lots of tasty marbling. Other traits are important to farmers, too, like growing fast and having small calves so the cows don’t have trouble in labor. There are books and websites full of numbers reporting these traits of purebred cattle. A knowledgeable farmer can evaluate these figures to buy a bull or a heifer that will improve traits in his or her herd.



This is a picture of my husband,
 Ed, exhibiting one of our
purebred heifers at a fair

If you go to the fair, the farmers that you see exhibiting are usually purebred farmers. They bring their animals to the fairs to show them off to other breeders and to potential buyers.

Most of the 'fluffy cows' you see on the internet are actually very expensive purebred bulls.

2. Second, you have cow-calf farmers. Marsha, the farmer we visited on our tour, is in this category. She bought bulls from a purebred farmer and bred them to her cows. She keeps the best of her heifers (girl calves) to go back to the cow herd, but she castrates her bull calves to become steers, and the steers and most of her heifers go to market to become beef.




 These are some of Marsha's cows.
Her bull is the solid red one on the left.
He is from a purebred breeder.
He actually looks a lot like our bull.

Like most cow-calf producers, Marsha’s cows are cross-bred, or a mix of several different breeds. In the industry, we call them 'commercial' cows. Also like most cow-calf farmers, Marsha uses grass growing in her pastures to feed her cows. She buys them hay and some other nutritional supplements, when the grass isn’t enough for them, but she wants them to eat grass as much as they can. Cattle are great at using grass to grow and make protein.


Marsha weans her calves off their mothers at about 500-600 pounds, which is about 6 to 7 months of age. Then she sells them to one of the next two types of beef operations.

3. The third type of beef farm is a stocker farm. These farmers buy weaned calves and let them grow. Sometimes they eat grass and sometimes they feed them grain, whichever is most economical for them at the time. The Peterson Brothers of I’m Farming and I Grow It fame, have a stocker cattle farm. They buy cattle that weigh 400-500 pounds and feed them until they weigh 800 to 900 pounds.

4. The fourth type of farm is the feeder or the feedlot, like the one owned by Anne and her family over at Feedyard Foodie. Here, cattle are fed grain in addition to hay or other forage and supplements. Feedlots will feed cattle until they are fat enough to harvest. They are usually only there for about 4 to 6 months. In the meat business, when cattle are fat, we say that they are ‘finished,’ meaning that they are ready to go to the processing plant. Finished cattle may weigh anywhere from 1000 to 1400 pounds, some even more.


In the US, people like to eat grain-finished beef. We prefer the taste and tenderness associated with it. I know that not everyone likes it, and there is beef from cattle that have only been fed grass available to buy for those who prefer it that way.





 Cattle in a covered feedlot in Michigan.
Notice that they are eating a
chopped-up mix of grain and hay.

In the western US, feedlots are huge, outdoor facilities, but I visited a cattle covered feeding operation in Michigan on a trip with students a couple of years ago. You can see the cattle are eating a chopped up mixture of grain and forage.


The meat processors send buyers to the feedlots to buy the cattle once they are ready. Then the cattle are sent to the processing plant for harvesting.

Now, lots of farms may be any combination of these segments. For instance, our family has some purebred cattle that we raise bulls and heifers for sale, and we have some commercial cows that just raise calves for market. So we are kind of a mix of the first two. Some farmers may have cows that raise calves and have a stocker section of the farm, too, especially if they have lots of green grass. Farmers have to figure out what works best for them considering the nutrients available and the market for cattle.

So, these calves that we saw at Marsha’s grazing in the fields with their mothers in Northwest Arkansas will probably be sold soon. Then, they may spend a few months grazing and growing on a stocker farm in Oklahoma, and then be sold to a feedlot in the panhandle of Texas. Once they are fat, they may be sold to a processing plant in Kansas and their beef may go to any and all parts of the US. Not only do the calves have several owners throughout their lifetime, they have also probably traveled several hundred miles.

I hope that you understand a little more about the beef industry, and the next time you are buying beef at the store or eating a juicy steak, that you will know that a little more about the path that got the beef to your plate. 

Please feel free to ask any other questions you may have about beef or cattle.

Moms on the Farm Tour

Did you know that more people feel more knowledgable about doing their taxes than they do about making healthy food decisions for their familes?

Its true. Only 2% of our country's population work in agriculture to make the food to feed all of us. People don't understand where food comes from. This is most of the reason I started my blog, and I hope my posts have been helpful.

Now, I am working with other women in agriculture to host an event called Moms on the Farm Tour. We are going to take a bus load of non-farm ladies to a beef farm and a dairy so they can see up close where their food comes from. Several ladies with farming backgrounds will join us to get to know our tourists and help answer any questions they may have one on one.

Then, we are going to have cooking demos by the Arkansas Cattlewomen to learn new ways to prepare food from those type of farms.

I'm so excited!!!

This is the flyer for our event.


Hopefully, this will be the first of many of these tours. We would like to eventually take ladies to poultry farms and vegetable farms and fruit orchards and vinyards. There are lots of farms producing lots of different foods practically in our backyards!

Do you live near Northwest Arkansas? Would you like to join us?

Our first trip will be October 8. Monday, Columbus Day. We will all travel in a bus from Paulene Whitaker Arena in Fayetteville to two farms.

1. Triple A Dairy in Centerton. It is managed by Susan Anglin. She blogs about being a dairy mom on her blog, the Spotted Cow Review.

2. Hedge Farms in Lincoln. It is managed by Marsha Hedge. She doesn't have a blog, but here are some pictures of her cattle.

 

We have invited women from all walks of life to join us. Several of them are local food and mom bloggers. I can't wait to get to know more women in our community and to connect with some other women bloggers.



Please join us and tell your friends!



Check out our webpage and our facebook page.