A Midwest Journal

(While I don’t raise Holsteins, we’ve certainly had some tall grass this year.)

For grass fed beef, you really have just two major profit points – as long as you’re feeding hay:

1. When they’re weaned.
2. When they’re yearlings.

Anything else gets eaten up in the winter hay cycle. While a grass fed beef is only about 22 months old at harvest, it’s gone through at least 2 winters, usually 3. Because you have to add in the 9 months of gestation to the cost – which takes it up to nearly 2 1/2 years.

Cost of hay isn’t just baling it, you also have to fertilize the land it came from, or it won’t produce as well for you the next time (and eventually, you’d only be raising short, unpalatable weeds – or sand.)

So working to finish cattle actually takes the remaining profit out of that last 8-10 months. They are going to put on their final weight, but this is also where they lose their efficiency of gain – each pound of gain takes more and more pounds of forage to achieve. And so the relative efficiency of grain-fed beef, who are harvested at about 14 months. That is, if you have the cheap grain to feed them.

Trying to finish cattle on grass usually means another winter of hay, which is additional cost. Auction prices for beef gets you paid commodity prices, which are as low as buyers can get away with. So your fertilizer cost, plus equipment and fuel, eat up any profit from those last few hundred pounds.

Now Missouri has lots and lots of tough, but tasty fescue grass. So this is why it is one of the top beef-producing states. Mostly, it has feeder or stocker (yearling) calves which are then shipped off to feedlots for fattening.

What’s becoming more popular are grass-finished beef, locally marketed. This is where you get your premiums and the reason for finishing anything at all. When you can jump the final price up above your costs for that last year, you can then simply be able to make any profit you want that the final consumer will pay for.

Example is that while a cow at auction will bring about $800 and your 600-pound carcass will cost you another $300 for processing – this comes to somewhere around $2.00 a pound for the whole animal. Visiting the local big-city market found that just hamburger from a verified grass-fed beef was bringing $5.50/lb. and sirloin steak was $18-19.00 per pound.

Now, that was individually wrapped, USDA-inspected. But it shows that farmers taking over their own market can reap the profit harvest to the tune of somewhere around $3,000 per animal.

Without taking your own marketing into your own hands, you are really stuck with sellling yearlings at auction, your next best profit margin.

To create a sustainable farming solution, increasing profit on grass fed beef at commodity prices is to take out the hay costs – which entails something called mob-grazing. By intensively grazing cattle and letting the land recover (one expert at this says his cows only see the same spot twice a year) – this actually make the grass lusher and means you don’t have to feed hay at all, there’s plenty out there if you ration it during the winter.

The other point would be to get a premium above commodity levels – in other words, quit selling a commodity.

But I’ve got far more to study on this. I sure would like to move onto finished cattle, but there’s going to have to be some changes in order to “mine them them hills” of grass to see more gold.

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I’d heard recently about Joel Salatin moving over to part-ownership in a local abattoir. A logical extension, but the reason was in the management, not vertical integration. He simply had to protect that end of the production line.

This article does point out that for anyone wanting some real profit, it’s in the middle, not the farmer nor the supermarket. Grass fed beef roughly twice what conventional commodity beef is.

From my experience, farmers are happy to simply get a guaranteed auction/commodity price per live animal. But read down to the bottom. This guy can’t get enough beef to supply his clientele. And it’s a USDA inspected abattoir, meaning they can sell their parts direct instead of by wholes, halves, and quarters.

Figure out of the cost of grass fed beef, the farmer is taking a third, the middleman taking two-thirds. And that is just for hamburger. The whole animal can bring as much as $3,000 – so your farmer is getting roughly $800 of that and the middleman can rake in $2,200 per animal.

Can you say “six-figure income”?

Access to an abattoir was tough even for Joel Salatin <http://voices.washingtonpost.com/mighty-appetite/2008/07/a_day_at_polyface_farm.html> of Polyface Inc., a high-profile farmer thanks to his role in Michael Pollan’s book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” He had relied on T&E to process the cattle and pigs he raises on his farm near Staunton, but it became clear several years ago that the owners would soon retire. “It was absolutely our weakest link,” Salatin said. He paraded many potential buyers through the 70-year-old plant, but said “it took a lot of hooks in the water before I got a bite.”

Cloud was a good prospect because love of food and wine runs in his family. His brother Roy Cloud runs Vintage ’59 Imports <http://www.vintage59.com/home.php> , a French wine importer in the District. After his father’s plans to start a vineyard on farmland near Staunton were thwarted by an accident, Cloud began helping his mother manage the farm. Soon, he was wondering whether to trade his office in Seattle for a herd of cattle in Virginia.

Salatin, who was leasing a few of their fields, proposed that Cloud buy the slaughterhouse instead. “You certainly don’t have the allure of the country life in a slaughterhouse, the kind of thing sought out by the weekend farmer,” said Salatin. “But processing plants and distribution are the two biggest hurdles in the local food movement.” Cloud eventually agreed, sinking 40 percent of his retirement savings into the deal and signing up his mother, Helen, and Salatin as partners. They bought the plant in July 2008, and Cloud has been pulling 50- to 60-hour weeks ever since, managing a workforce of 20 and fielding calls from restaurants and farmers.

T&E now processes meat for more than 100 farms, up from just a handful before the sale. The number of animals he slaughters has shot up 70 percent — during the worst recession since the 1930s. Cloud sells local beef, pork, lamb and poultry out of T&E Meats’ store, but unlike Blue Ridge, he can’t make the business work without buying some beef from the Midwest and pigs from Pennsylvania.

He can’t get enough locally, nor can he sell it at a price his longtime customers are used to paying. “For 40 years it was the cheapest place in town,” says Salatin. “Now we’re trying to make it the best.” T&E, for example, sells conventional ground beef for $2.67 a pound. The local ground beef, from animals without antibiotics or hormones, goes for $3.50 a pound, and local grass-fed beef runs $3.99 a pound.

Cloud is putting every dollar he makes back into the business, expanding into poultry processing this year and hoping to grow again in 2011.

Now, I’ve got a lot more on this, as I just finished a whitepaper on the subject, entitled “Feed More By Farming Less. And you are invited to digest all 56 pages of it.

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Some grassfed beef links:

Family raises, produces grass-fed beef | savannahnow.com

Savannah Morning News
Names: Debra and Del FergusonJobs: Owners and cattle farmers, Hunter Cattle Co. in Brooklet What they do: As owners and cattle farmers with their business, Hunter Cattle Co., the Fergusons make it their mission to …

More Ohio Producers Exploring Grass-Fed Beef Production

GILEAD, Ohio – Ohio livestock producers are exploring grass-fed beef production to meet market demands for what many consider to be a healthful and ecologically sustainable product. However, the production side of the system can be …

Is Grassfed Beef Too Pricey? | Free The Animal

by Richard Nikoley
I recently got an email from a reader asking that if grassfed beef was out of the question budget wise, whether a paleo dietary style still ought to include meat. Of course, a resounding yes. I think that most people will gravitate to …

Trader Joes Fan : Recipes and Favorite Product Reviews – Grass Fed …

I highly recommend this if you enjoy beef but may be avoiding it because of saturated fat worries. If you search online you will discover grass fed beef is lower in saturated fat 35-65% to its grain fed counterparts and …

Jim Fiedler: Raising Grass-Fed Beef On Green Acres | Earth Eats …

by Annie Corrigan
Earth Eats’ Annie Corrigan talks with Jim Fiedler, the man behind Fiedler Farms, about grass-fed beef and his return to Indiana after 20 years in New York City.

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PS. Here’s the recipe that goes with our Flickr image above:

Red-braised Beef with bamboo

1.1 – 1.3 kg beef for stewing
5 cm piece of fresh ginger
2 spring onions
3 T peanut oil
6 T chili bean paste (from pixian)
1 litre beef/game stock
4 T Shaoxing ricewine
2 t dark soy sauce
2 t whole Sichuan pepper
1 star anise
1 cao guo
salt, to taste

Blanch the beef in boiling water for a minute or two until scum has risen to the surface, then remove the meat and rinse it under the tap. Cut the beef into 3-4 cm chunks. Crush the ginger slightly. Cut the spring onions into 2 or 3 sections.

Heat the oil in a flat-bottomed saucepan over a medium heat. When it is hot, add the chili bean paste and stir-fry for about 30 seconds until the oil is red and richly fragrant. Add the stock, the beef, the wine, the ginger, the spring onions, the soy sauce, and the spices. Bring the liquid to the boil, skim if necessary, then turn the heat down and simmer gently until the beef is beautifully tender. This will depend on which cut of beef you are using, but it should be at least 2 hours. (if using a crockpot, longer)

This time I added this special kind of fresh bamboo shoots that needs some time to cook. I’ve sliced them up and added them half an hour before the end of the cooking time.

Although I liked it, I was also a little bit disappointed. It wasn’t that spicy and I couldn’t taste much of the sichuan peppercorns. Maybe I was expecting it to taste more like the “water boiled beef”. But once you’ve accepted that is still is a very nice stew and I actually think it would be served best with mash potatoes!

What I would do differently next time: not use the pixian douban jiang but the one from Lee Kum Kee. I would increase the other ingredients like ginger, sichuan peppercorns, etc. And I would leave out the cao guo. I just don’t think I like that taste. Maybe I need to get used to it, but for now I give up.

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Many thanks to Fotoos VanRobin

Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

Our latest upcoming release, “Freedom Is — (period.)”

We had our second “genetic crossbreed” calf today. And the promise is exciting, since he’s a new line of improved grassfed, high-quality beef that we’ve been working on for years.

The problem with most beef is that it’s been genetically selected to gain weight on grain. But not only are grain prices higher, but the extra fat (weight) these animals put on is bad for your health. That type of fat gives you the “bad” cholesterol – mainly because the omega 3/6 ratios are off. You see, cows (and fish) produce omega 3 fatty acids from the forage they eat.

Grass fed beef used to take years to mature, so using an abundant (and underpriced) grain to fatten them up seemed to make sense for our growing population.

But the whole trick is to understand how to raise grass to feed the cattle. Modern methods which have developed by a South African conservationist-turned-rancher, Allan Savory, have shown that ultra-high-density managed grazing (also called mob grazing) will actually improve the density and diversity of the perennial forage so that the cattle will improve their diet and fatten nearly as fast as their corn-fed counterparts.

One of the trick with this is to get the fast-growing larger animals, but also improve their foraging ability.

We are crossing our existing all-black Angus herd with a belted Galloway breed (broad white stripe down the middle). The Belted Galloway (or “Beltie) was originally bred in Southern Scotland for ability to survive harsh winters, eating a wide variety of forage. Angus is also a Scottish breed, but our American version has been crossed with Continental and African breeds to get a larger frame size. They tend to put on weight rather quickly.

The combination of the two is reported to keep the larger size, but also be able to fatten on a wider variety of forage. So the result is a more efficient grazer who produces medium-large frame for beef production.

The other advantage is that Belties are far more docile than American Angus. And docile animals put on weight more quickly.

Combined with mob grazing, this is designed to give us the highest possible efficiency while also eliminating the vast bulk of greenhouse gas production associated with corn-fed beef production.

While it’s been a couple of years now, we are still excited about our new calf. His mother (dam) is a white-faced Hereford/Angus cross, so he looks a bit like a panda from one side. But with all the Angus only distinguishable by their ear tags, any markings for us are welcome.

Our one earlier result in this cross-breeding is known as our “little goat” – since she is found to be eating on the fence lines and uncommon areas usually. We expect this new calf to do the same for us. While heifers are kept back for rebreeding, bull calves are generally made into steers so that they fatten faster and aren’t a problem mixing with cows and heifers when they come of age. So this new belted cross will be one of our first “to market” tests for size and quality of beef.

Maybe too cute right now, but when he gets big enough to butt you around the pasture in a little less than two years, you’ll see that he’ll be better off for all concerned when he goes to market.

It’s just as good that the little cusses are cute to begin with, since it just gives another reason to keep raising them.

Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

Our latest upcoming release, “Freedom Is — (period.)”