A Midwest Journal » beef http://robertworstell.com Rural Living, Raising Grass Fed Beef Cattle, De-Mystifying Personal Improvement. Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:12:06 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Eat your own cooking, drink your own Kool-Aid: part 3 http://robertworstell.com/grass-fed-beef-cattle/eat-cooking-drink-kool-aid-part-3/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://robertworstell.com/grass-fed-beef-cattle/eat-cooking-drink-kool-aid-part-3/#comments Mon, 31 May 2010 11:56:54 +0000 Robert Worstell http://robertworstell.com/?p=702 grass fed beef cattle Eat your own cooking, drink your own Kool Aid: part 3

(For part one, part two – visit those links. Meanwhile, we join our author after he just explained how he figured out how to make more money doing less on his grass fed beef farm…)

Now, this all doesn’t look like much money for having to go out and check our beef cattle twice a day, every day. Certainly wouldn’t pay your expenses if you think you have to make $50K per year to make a living. Practically, the Feds say you are below “poverty level” if you make less than $24K for a family of four (which is something like $16K if you are an individual – but they still take taxes out of almost every paycheck and hold it for you until the end of the year. Such nice folks we have in government.)

Means that most rural families are “poor” according to the government and are so eligible for massive handouts from the rest of the country which are comparatively “rich” and can afford to pay for everything we “need.”

But when you look at a lifestyle where you can raise everything you eat and if you don’t buy the hype that you have to have a color TV and a boat to take to the lake on summer weekends – or a 3,000 square foot house and all the latest gizmo’s which make life easier. When you look at life as a very simple operation (if you leave Madison Avenue and the Government out of the equation), then your actual cost of living is very small.

Once I got my credit card bills paid off and started working as a contracted laborer (freelance web design), I found out that I didn’t have the commuting expense to work and back so many times a week. I quit watching TV and suddenly didn’t feel “compelled” to buy this or that – or even see the latest movies which were coming out.

I started having more time to myself, and felt more at ease and secure and healthier.

No, I don’t “make” anywhere near the $50K slot. But I don’t have to work for someone else except every now and then – and I don’t have to leave home to do it. The quality of my food is completely under my own control. What vegetables and beef and fruit I eat are how industrious and efficient I am with my time and the resources around me.

True, my parents bought and paid for this farm with their own jobs and I am simply reaping this harvest based on their work. But I also keep the farm running and my Mother live a comfortable retired life, not having to fix things or simply rent out the farm because she can’t manage it.

My income is also taken out in non-taxable ways – such as barter and payment in other “currencies” than money. Working for my room and board is one example.

I then spend the bulk of my time on stuff I want to do, and am not taxed for thinking or writing or blogging. I give tons of stuff away that is really useful.

So I don’t really feel I need a lot to live on. My health is excellent and I don’t carry insurance. Don’t really need to. Isn’t insurance something a little counter-productive, since you are hedging a bet against yourself?  The taxes I do pay whenever I buy something or license something – all these go toward supporting the schools and hospitals and roads. Even though I mostly don’t use them.

I don’t need a lot of income, so don’t need to pay tax on it.

The result is that I can say that a farm which makes $16,000 a year from raising beef cattle is sustainable and outrageously profitable. At that rate, I could buy a used tractor every year. Or get a loan for more land and pay it off in a decade or so.  Or simply stockpile some savings instead of giving it away to insurance companies – so if I did have to get medical treatment, I could simply pay the bill that way. (Like I do with my dentist – I was paying more for insurance and the deductible than I was in just paying for the treatment when I needed it.)

That’s the Kool-Aid I make. Look at the incredible prosperity you are already surrounded with. And quit listening to people who say you have to buy this and that. Quit figuring that you need approval from others, or inflated ideas of security, or that you need to be controlled or control others. These three points – approval, control, security – Levenson’s Sedona Method says are the base for all the chronic thinking we have floating around our heads. Get rid of those base considerations and the thought can simply be let go, released. Keep doing that consistently or intensively, and your mind quiets right down. You aren’t habitually thinking so much – and can actually quit having to “think your way” through life.

And you can come up with ideas about how you don’t need to “make a lot of money” to be abundantly prosperous and fulfilled.

There’s also the benefits of going through the pasture, checking your cows, scratching them where they seem to like it – and getting the satisfaction from those simple actions. Raising calves and watching them grow – like any crop, but more mobile.

The point is that all your “pay” for living in this universe isn’t coming to you in a check or through an electronic account somewhere. And it doesn’t need some government approval or license. Take a walk in the early morning or at sunset and see if you are getting paid very amply for the little time you invest.

That’s the meal I cook, the Kool-Aid I drink . Join me.

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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.

Or – buy a book from my “Go Thunk Yourself” bookstore.

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


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There's profit in them thar grasses… http://robertworstell.com/grass-fed-beef-cattle/profit-thar-grasses/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://robertworstell.com/grass-fed-beef-cattle/profit-thar-grasses/#comments Sun, 04 Apr 2010 03:47:08 +0000 Robert Worstell http://robertworstell.com/?p=729 grass fed beef cattle Eat your own cooking, drink your own Kool Aid: part 3

(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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Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
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Upset Commodity Farmers could Chill with 100-Mile Diet http://robertworstell.com/lifestyle-choice/upset-commodity-farmers-could-chill-with-100-mile-diet/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://robertworstell.com/lifestyle-choice/upset-commodity-farmers-could-chill-with-100-mile-diet/#comments Mon, 22 Mar 2010 05:07:14 +0000 Robert Worstell http://robertworstell.com/?p=1923 grass fed beef cattle Eat your own cooking, drink your own Kool Aid: part 3

(For part one, part two – visit those links. Meanwhile, we join our author after he just explained how he figured out how to make more money doing less on his grass fed beef farm…)

Now, this all doesn’t look like much money for having to go out and check our beef cattle twice a day, every day. Certainly wouldn’t pay your expenses if you think you have to make $50K per year to make a living. Practically, the Feds say you are below “poverty level” if you make less than $24K for a family of four (which is something like $16K if you are an individual – but they still take taxes out of almost every paycheck and hold it for you until the end of the year. Such nice folks we have in government.)

Means that most rural families are “poor” according to the government and are so eligible for massive handouts from the rest of the country which are comparatively “rich” and can afford to pay for everything we “need.”

But when you look at a lifestyle where you can raise everything you eat and if you don’t buy the hype that you have to have a color TV and a boat to take to the lake on summer weekends – or a 3,000 square foot house and all the latest gizmo’s which make life easier. When you look at life as a very simple operation (if you leave Madison Avenue and the Government out of the equation), then your actual cost of living is very small.

Once I got my credit card bills paid off and started working as a contracted laborer (freelance web design), I found out that I didn’t have the commuting expense to work and back so many times a week. I quit watching TV and suddenly didn’t feel “compelled” to buy this or that – or even see the latest movies which were coming out.

I started having more time to myself, and felt more at ease and secure and healthier.

No, I don’t “make” anywhere near the $50K slot. But I don’t have to work for someone else except every now and then – and I don’t have to leave home to do it. The quality of my food is completely under my own control. What vegetables and beef and fruit I eat are how industrious and efficient I am with my time and the resources around me.

True, my parents bought and paid for this farm with their own jobs and I am simply reaping this harvest based on their work. But I also keep the farm running and my Mother live a comfortable retired life, not having to fix things or simply rent out the farm because she can’t manage it.

My income is also taken out in non-taxable ways – such as barter and payment in other “currencies” than money. Working for my room and board is one example.

I then spend the bulk of my time on stuff I want to do, and am not taxed for thinking or writing or blogging. I give tons of stuff away that is really useful.

So I don’t really feel I need a lot to live on. My health is excellent and I don’t carry insurance. Don’t really need to. Isn’t insurance something a little counter-productive, since you are hedging a bet against yourself?  The taxes I do pay whenever I buy something or license something – all these go toward supporting the schools and hospitals and roads. Even though I mostly don’t use them.

I don’t need a lot of income, so don’t need to pay tax on it.

The result is that I can say that a farm which makes $16,000 a year from raising beef cattle is sustainable and outrageously profitable. At that rate, I could buy a used tractor every year. Or get a loan for more land and pay it off in a decade or so.  Or simply stockpile some savings instead of giving it away to insurance companies – so if I did have to get medical treatment, I could simply pay the bill that way. (Like I do with my dentist – I was paying more for insurance and the deductible than I was in just paying for the treatment when I needed it.)

That’s the Kool-Aid I make. Look at the incredible prosperity you are already surrounded with. And quit listening to people who say you have to buy this and that. Quit figuring that you need approval from others, or inflated ideas of security, or that you need to be controlled or control others. These three points – approval, control, security – Levenson’s Sedona Method says are the base for all the chronic thinking we have floating around our heads. Get rid of those base considerations and the thought can simply be let go, released. Keep doing that consistently or intensively, and your mind quiets right down. You aren’t habitually thinking so much – and can actually quit having to “think your way” through life.

And you can come up with ideas about how you don’t need to “make a lot of money” to be abundantly prosperous and fulfilled.

There’s also the benefits of going through the pasture, checking your cows, scratching them where they seem to like it – and getting the satisfaction from those simple actions. Raising calves and watching them grow – like any crop, but more mobile.

The point is that all your “pay” for living in this universe isn’t coming to you in a check or through an electronic account somewhere. And it doesn’t need some government approval or license. Take a walk in the early morning or at sunset and see if you are getting paid very amply for the little time you invest.

That’s the meal I cook, the Kool-Aid I drink . Join me.

Related Articles



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.

Or – buy a book from my “Go Thunk Yourself” bookstore.

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


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Mob Grazing Reveals Inconvenient Stupidities http://robertworstell.com/grass-fed-beef-cattle/mob-grazing-inconvenient-stupidity/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://robertworstell.com/grass-fed-beef-cattle/mob-grazing-inconvenient-stupidity/#comments Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:26:00 +0000 Robert Worstell http://robertworstell.com/?p=1663 grass fed beef cattle Eat your own cooking, drink your own Kool Aid: part 3

If Al Gore’s histrionics and his data-massaging chronies at the Climate Academia weren’t enough, we actually find out that they are missing the boat entirely. Not that they are wrong, but they are only looking at a small part of the problem.

The reason? Money fixation.

Al Gore is personally profiting from his doom scenario – funneling government funds (read: our taxes) into his own pocket. And those Climate Gate scientists are riding a cash cow, since foreign governments and petro-chemical companies are pouring money into this area. So it pays to keep a controversy growing.

**update** Climate-data-related scandals list keeps growing…

The problem is – they are shouting down the wrong rain barrel. So-called “greenhouse gases” are the symptom, not the cause. They factually are not even the real problem, but a relatively minor distraction.

Yesterday, I ran across a couple of links to some fascinating data.

When you view these together, you’ll see that we have been being lead in the wrong direction. Too narrow a view.

The Situation: Government-Sponsored Commodity Bankruptcy

The problem has been that we’ve been steadily moving away from our own land as it ceased to provide a viable  living for the families involved. Instead, these generations flocked to the cities for “jobs” and our culture started living off petroleum- and mining-based products, both exhaustible resources.

Our current president has been funneling billions into “green energy” jobs and payola – but the problem is that this is again the narrow view. According to the capitalist/free market explanation, we’ll start recycling when it’s profitable to do so. And our environmental activists (read: Alinsky radicals) would take all the power they can get, even if it means destroying any ability to fix the actual problem.

The core problem is that the land has quit producing a viable living for the families on it. Two factors in this: commoditization of produce, and increasing advertising dominance.

Farm produce has been cheapened by creating a few product lines of commercial value. All corn is yellow. All beef is black. All sheep are white. And what the farmer pays isn’t enough to keep them farming – unless they also manage to carry substantial debt. So profits are sucked into bankers’ salaries, bonuses and benefits. Meanwhile, they use corporate and government-backed university research to use a pesticide/herbicide/fertilizer cocktail to genericize the produce so it can fit into an assembly-line model.

Advertising, meanwhile, has been used to base our society on instant gratification and subconscious desires instead of working to educate and raise the sights of people to attain their best qualities.  TV and media are advertising supported, so their quality (and trustworthiness) also goes into the tank — along with the culture. Why? because advertising is based on psychological profiles (as Cialdini covers in “Influence”) which take advantage of subconscious desires, rather than pragmatic wants and actual needs. (Just look at what’s happening to the credit card industry in this recession to see what happens when people wise up…)

Look, it’s really simple. There is no need to continually centralize any industry. Or locate them on the coasts. Consider Wal-Mart’s hub-and-spoke model. Rural cities are tending to fall over each other to give tax credits in order to lure factories and warehouses for their jobs. (Of course, some companies simply pick up and move when the tax credits run out…) But the point is that there, again, are people who want and need jobs in rural areas because the farms don’t produce enough income to support everyone – despite agriculture being the leading industy for the area. (Remember that high-debt overhead farmers are carrying? It’s invested in monster machinery which is able to handle massive acres in days. A handful of people with thousands of acres – compared to a building which doesn’t even cover a quarter acre that pays several hundred people to unload, sort, store, find, pick, and ship boxes. Do the math: which one pays more taxes?)

And so you see how the government scam we are under has a vested interest in making sure we all live in big cities, bunched up together – like cattle in a feed lot. “Economies of scale – subsidized.”

Solution: Farm Your Way Out

Naturalists such as Alan Savory have been studying this particular situation for years. And they have been looking to the historical evidence of our earlier civilizations going the exact same route we are currently going – only they did it just for local empires, not globally as we are currently doing.

The trick is in rebuilding the soil through restoring the natural intensive grazing of heavy hoofed animals. The government policy has been to remove more and more animals from the land, which actually results in top soil loss through erosion – and ultimately creates deserts, as Savory reports in the above MP3.

For me as a cattle farmer, the fascinating point is that it’s far more profitable to raise grass-fed beef than it is to raise it through “conventional” (commodity-style) means.  Inputs drop dramatically, while a premium is paid to enterprising farmers who market directly to environmentally-responsible consumers. The beef produced is healthier, higher in nutrients and omega-3′s.

The bottom line, however it that by improving the soil through proper intensive grazing, you increase the density of plant life, which actually increases carbon sequestration. So instead of using fossil fuels to raise grain, ship it to central feedlots, feed it to masses of cattle who stand and live in their own manure (creating more methane meanwhile, which is released to the atmosphere instead of being absorbed by nearby plants) – grass fed beef simply add pounds of beef while being part of the ecosystem.

The land improves and adds topsoil which in turn sequesters more carbon. It is possible to have agriculture be a net sequestor of carbon instead of the contributor.

Now, as you add topsoil with permanent pastures, the increased density of plants require more animals added to continue the process. You have to add more cattle to “keep up” with the improved growth. Several different studies show that this tops out at about 400% of the earlier stocking density.

Back-of-the-envelope calculations shows that where you earlier could keep only one cow per 2.5 acres, this increases to an average of one cow per .8 acres. Same land, same water supply (which improves, BTW).  At an average commodity auction level of $800 per animal, this gives you a potential income of selling four yearing calves off that same acreage, or $3200 for the same land area. After paying off inputs for fencing only (don’t need other supplements, and even vet bills can disappear), and subtracting winter hay (which isn’t needed in a true mob grazing/ultra-high density grazing scenario) – where some local farmers get $60 profit per head, grass fed beef gets around $600 per head.

10x profit potential. You don’t have to raise corn, just shift pastures every day. Leave the tractor in the barn, sell the combine and grain silos. Invest in more fencing.

Go from grain-fed beef to grass-fed and see 4000% increase in profitability. At least on the back of that envelope.

Practical results? Better quality beef, improved quality of rural living, less dependence on foriegn fossil fuels. And you get to enjoy the pleasures a life surrounded by Nature’s environment for the rest of your life. (And it only takes a few hours a day to do this – looking for a part time job that pays 4x what you’re making now?)

It’s not that money is bad. But if you look at the broader picture, you can improve your life quality and have all you want. Just have to get smart and take the blinders off to see the whole picture.

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Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
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How grass fed beef with mob grazing cut greenhouse gases http://robertworstell.com/grass-fed-beef-cattle/grass-fed-beef-mob-grazing-cut-greenhouse-gases/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://robertworstell.com/grass-fed-beef-cattle/grass-fed-beef-mob-grazing-cut-greenhouse-gases/#comments Fri, 12 Feb 2010 12:59:18 +0000 Robert Worstell http://robertworstell.com/?p=1649 grass fed beef cattle Eat your own cooking, drink your own Kool Aid: part 3Now, this takes into account the paradigm that you believe (or tolerate) the idea that some gases can create a “greenhouse effect” and add or detract from global temperatures. Jury is still out – and has been for some time. Another discussion, another time…

But Time Magazine recently did an article covering how some “greenies” on the East Coastal have decided to get into raising beef in order to save the environment. Not just any of these academic megalopolis types, but real bona-fide environmentally-resonsible authors who walk their talk:

None of this would be remarkable if it weren’t for the fact that [these] …are two of the most highly regarded organic-vegetable farmers in the country: Eliot Coleman wrote the bible of organic farming, The New Organic Grower, and Barbara Damrosch is the Washington Post’s gardening columnist. At a time when a growing number of environmental activists are calling for an end to eating meat, this veggie-centric power couple is beginning to raise it.

Turns out that the studies these radical activists are quoting (and I have a great deal more on how bogus thse are in a later post) are actually missing part of the data.

When you spend all that fuel raising corn or other grains, and then all that fuel transporting this grain to feedlots, then coop up animals in unhealthy conditions where their manure ferments and creates more gases – guess what? You’ve just made a ton of all sorts of these gasses to get your beef.

Now, grass fed beef, especially in mob grazing, takes a different approach. Perennial grass consumes these gasses. Beef, when rotated in a managed grazing program (especially in high-density mob grazing) actually stimulate this growth by cropping, fertilizing, aerating, and cultivating that pasture so that it actually gets healthier and lusher – making it grow more and consume more of these “greenhouse gasses”. The article covers this:

“Much of the carbon footprint of beef comes from growing grain to feed the animals, which requires fossil-fuel-based fertilizers, pesticides, transportation,” says Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. “Grass-fed beef has a much lighter carbon footprint.” Indeed, although grass-fed cattle may produce more methane than conventional ones, their net emissions are lower because they help the soil sequester carbon.

When you add that in with local processing (not trucked hundreds of miles), you then cut the net gas level enormously.

You also have to take into account that a lot of the studies producing this data are very, very flawed. But I’ll go into that later.

Some interesting quotes out of this article :

By many standards, pastured beef is healthier. That’s certainly the case for the animals involved; grass feeding obviates the antibiotics that feedlots are forced to administer in order to prevent the acidosis that occurs when cows are fed grain. But it also appears to be true for people who eat cows. Compared with conventional beef, grass-fed is lower in saturated fat and higher in omega-3s, the heart-healthy fatty acids found in salmon.

But the activist radical vegans will argue that if you don’t eat meat, it will save you eating those hormones and so the greenhouse gasses as well. Time rebuts this:

To Allan Savory, the economies-of-scale mentality ignores the role that grass-fed herbivores can play in fighting climate change. A former wildlife conservationist in Zimbabwe, Savory once blamed overgrazing for desertification. “I was prepared to shoot every bloody rancher in the country,” he recalls. But through rotational grazing of large herds of ruminants, he found he could reverse land degradation, turning dead soil into thriving grassland. (See TIME’s special report on the environment.)

Like him, Coleman now scoffs at the environmentalist vogue for vilifying meat eating. “The idea that giving up meat is the solution for the world’s ills is ridiculous,” he says at his Maine farm. “A vegetarian eating tofu made in a factory from soybeans grown in Brazil is responsible for a lot more CO2 than I am.” A lifetime raising vegetables year-round has taught him to value the elegance of natural systems. Once he and Damrosch have brought in their livestock, they’ll “be able to use the manure to feed the plants, and the plant waste to feed the animals,” he says. “And even though we can’t eat the grass, we’ll be turning it into something we can.”

As I’ve said, there’s a lot more to bring to light in this area. I hope to do more this week on this, as the research has been stacking up and needs an outlet.

For now, check out the Time article and decide for yourself.

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Grass Fed Beef tastes better and is more healthy – unless it's been inspected in a Federal packing plant http://robertworstell.com/lifestyle-choice/grass-fed-beef-tastes-better-and-is-more-healthy-unless-its-been-inspected-in-a-federal-packing-plant/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://robertworstell.com/lifestyle-choice/grass-fed-beef-tastes-better-and-is-more-healthy-unless-its-been-inspected-in-a-federal-packing-plant/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:17:26 +0000 Robert Worstell http://robertworstell.com/lifestyle-choice/grass-fed-beef-tastes-better-and-is-more-healthy-unless-its-been-inspected-in-a-federal-packing-plant/ grass fed beef cattle Eat your own cooking, drink your own Kool Aid: part 3

Choice cuts of Grass Fed Beef taste better and are healthier for you – unless it’s Federally inspected, and then even Obama can’t keep you safe, despite all his bail-outs.

I’ve been assembling my notes on mob grazing and grassfed beef in order to get this all lined up for work this winter.

Some salient points:

  • It appears our e coli problems with beef were first noticed as coming from a corn-raised feedlot setup and has since been also noticed in grassfed beef.
  • But the trick is in how it’s processed, not what’s in that animal.
  • All the infections we’ve had in this country (as far as current research shows) were each USDA inspected.

One interesting quote comes from a NYT article, which tells about a person surviving the e coli infection to live a partially-paralyzed existence:

The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties.” Yet confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.

Four states and two countries. Nice work. All USDA inspected to begin with – but that infected manure found it’s way into the beef somehow.  Not to mention that the “fatty trimmings” are treated with ammonia before you get a chance to eat it…

Look: know your farmer and know your processor. Your safest route is to trace your own beef.

And also, it’s actually cheaper to buy it direct from the farmer. Ask Joel Salatin.

This week’s articles are pretty interesting along this line:

Grass Fed Beef Still Has E. Coli Danger : Eat. Drink. Better. by John Chappell The benefits of organic and grass fed beef have been well documented. Numerous studies have shown that organic and grass fed beef has significantly higher levels of Omega 3s and lower levels of saturated fats than conventionally …

A Myth of Grass-Fed Beef « by Phil Reid This claim, which has become a mantra in sustainable agriculture, is more often than not dispatched to rally support for grass-fed beef—a supposedly healthier and more environmentally sound way to feed cattle—which is to say, …

Grass Fed Beef Education Week by Annette This weeks postings will be about grass fed beef. We have grass fed beef for sale. We tried the hamburgers tonight and they are Tasty! The meat is very lean and has a great beef flavor. We’ve been told that grass fed beef needs to be …

What Ever Happened to the Venerable Hamburger? Huffington Post (blog) – ?2 hours ago? Choose organic meat, or grass fed beef and you’ll be glad you learned to make your own chopped meat, because while the flavor is flawless, this meat can be …

Choice cuts: Dungeness farm putting grass-fed beef on local market Peninsula Daily – Diane Urbani de la Paz – ?Jan 31, 2010? Photo by Diane Urbani de la Paz/Peninsula Daily News LOCALLY RAISED GRASS-FED beef is available from the Clark family farm, 322 Clark Road, Sequim, …

Pasture to plate | Area consumers’ desire for local foods spurs an entrepreneur. The Register-Guard – Tim Christie – ?Jan 30, 2010? Mike Wooley, owner of Long’s, said the grain-fed beef from Oregon Natural Meats will complement the grass-fed beef he carries. …

Beware the Myth of Grass-Fed BeefCows raised at pasture are not immune to … Slate – James E. McWilliams – ?Jan 22, 2010? Grass-fed beef should account for 10 percent of America’s beef consumption overall by 2016, she says—a more than threefold increase from 2006. …

When a mob is profitable – grazing because they like it that way. I’ve been doing my homework lately on mob grazing and Missouri grass fed beef cattle – so thought to let you know what I’ve come up with. Here’s some PDF’s for you…

Not just a board game: Live for Others in order to Improve Your Own Life Some rules to moving your lifestyle choice pieces – you only help yourself by helping others. Any success you look for, find for others first – and then yours arrives faster…

More about moving to Mob Grazing from conventional farming Still working to improve the profits on my grass fed beef cattle. Here’s a post about moving to mob grazing from conventional practices, some tips and results…

Eat your own cooking, drink your own Kool-Aid: part 3 How the government has it wrong – everything valuable isn’t always taxable. Why the poor in pocket aren’t necessarily poor in spirit. Living affluent cheaply…

Making Missouri Mob Grazing pay – a laundry list Some pointers from a 2000 mob grazing presentation by Greg Judy of Columbia, Missouri – how to raise grass-fed beef cattle simply and cheaply.

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Whatchadoin? Oh, I dunno — stuff. http://robertworstell.com/lifestyle-choice/freedom-sedona-levenson-mob-grazing/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://robertworstell.com/lifestyle-choice/freedom-sedona-levenson-mob-grazing/#comments Sun, 31 Jan 2010 03:06:59 +0000 Robert Worstell http://robertworstell.com/?p=1556 grass fed beef cattle Eat your own cooking, drink your own Kool Aid: part 3

So what am I up to?

Oh, other than saving the world, I check my cows every day. Run the farm, which right now is checking on loggers who are hell-bent on making ruts and then apologizing and filling them in as best they can. And people who want firewood who come every now and then, but not effectively removing the tree tops the loggers left.

And chuckling with myself when I take everything so seriously and being critical of others.

I’m in the middle, or mostly done, with promoting “Get Your Self Scam Free” and having someone edit “Freedom Is – (period)” for me. More of a collaboration.

But next on my list after that promotion is to write up what I’ve researched on mob grazing and grass fed beef.

Of course, my day job in designing web pages goes on apace. Slow over the holidays, but at least I’m working and getting paid for it.

When that Freedom book is finished, it will be published to Amazon and maybe I’ll start giving talks on it or something. Lots of promotion to do on it, both online and otherwise.

After that, I’m done with writing about self-help, which has taken most of my lifetime so far. Once I made that trip and discovered Levenson and his Sedona Method, everything was over. That was the base that actually then explained and dissolved all the stuff above it.

I’m just going to let others write about it and move on to comics – which has been my real bent all the time. Amusing to myself and others.

Sure, I’ll footnote what I’m talking about and there will be the occasional “heavy” blog post here to keep everthing rolling. But most of it will show up in comics as parody of what is happening around us.

And I think that this will keep us all amused as long as this body lasts. Entertaining, Educational, and Enlightening. Should be fun, too.

So, I’m writing this perfectly non-SEO’d post just to give you fair warning. Oh – it won’t be happening for probably a month or so, since I have some work to do on the above to wrap it all up, plus my comic blog to ramp up.

Lots of stuff to do.

Cheers.

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Sorry for this political interlude… http://robertworstell.com/scam/sorry-for-this-political-interlude/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://robertworstell.com/scam/sorry-for-this-political-interlude/#comments Sat, 09 Jan 2010 16:51:46 +0000 Robert Worstell http://robertworstell.com/?p=1394 Just saw this well-produced video on YouTube and thought it good enough to promote.

For those of you who are hear to find out about Sedona releasing or Bert Goldman scam, I apologize.Of course, this just gives us some stuff to release, doesn’t it?

Should be back to more interesting releasing technique fare shortly. Though it might be about mob grazing grass fed beef cattle…

Anyway – enjoy:

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How to get common laws from a comparative religion study. http://robertworstell.com/sedona-method/comparative-world-religions/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://robertworstell.com/sedona-method/comparative-world-religions/#comments Thu, 07 Jan 2010 01:56:39 +0000 Robert Worstell http://robertworstell.com/?p=1386 grass fed beef cattle Eat your own cooking, drink your own Kool Aid: part 3

I’ve been one to cross compare data constantly in order to find commonality. So I go back to the area of my PhD in order to get the commonalities of world religions.

On the surface, they have various similarities. This is quite despite the work of various vested interests which say there can be only one “Way”.

So to start off, I’ve been studying and comparing the original Jesus sayings with the Tao and Levenson. Sure enough, they are essentially saying exactly the same points over and over.

To beat this, I’ve gotten a DVD full  of around 3 GB of data from The Internet Sacred Text Archive. So now this makes all my studies much, much easier. There’s incredible cross-overs here, like Buddhism with the Tao to form Zen Buddhism and influence Bushido as well as Kung Fu.

So there’s a wide approach to a huge tent here. When I can just casually see how all these tend to cross and reaffirm each other, then there’s even more to learn here. And I haven’t touched Huna or Islam or Swedenborg. But when you see the Golden Rule and concepts like Huna’s “There are not limits” telling us what  our Quantum Physicists are just now finding out — well, you can see how this just fuels this fire of research all the more.

- – - -

Now, just so you don’t think I went off the deep end, I’m about to take a hiatus back over into grass fed beef. I’ve accumulated a lot of part-time research on mob grazing and other data and want to put this all together so it’s ready for use this spring when I’ll be deciding what beef to keep and fatten up to full size. And since how you raise this beef also determines your cost, profits, and sustainability – it will be a good time to do this now that I’m spending a great deal of time inside.

So expect more on Levenson, my Freedom Is book (as well as my Go Thunk Yourself series) and all that metaphysical scene. But after I finish up working out the business plan for grass fed and finished beef cattle.

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Getting your life in order – cleaning your room http://robertworstell.com/sedona-method/getting-your-life-in-order-sedona-method/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://robertworstell.com/sedona-method/getting-your-life-in-order-sedona-method/#comments Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:57:28 +0000 Robert Worstell http://robertworstell.com/?p=1162 grass fed beef cattle Eat your own cooking, drink your own Kool Aid: part 3

All life revolves around order, prediction, simplicity.

And while I’ve started revolving my own life around the Sedona Method – amalgamating this into the earlier studies I started so long ago with “Go Thunk Yourself” – there are always so many lessons to find just in living.

The most recent one is that you really want to rid your life of things you are wanting to control, needing to approve, or that require your security. It isn’t enough just to release on how these are affecting you – there’s also where you are still working to do these on/for others.

These type of scenes are just holding you back.

Of course, this goes back to that 7th step of releasing - living your life as a Master would (which just brings out your own native Master abilities, doesn’t it?)

So you can take any of the historical Masters who have lived among us (and some say still do) – or just look within yourself to see how you would like to be treated.

It’s that simple. If you are involved in some sort of continuing mess where you feel you have to control someone else’s actions or activities, then maybe it’s time to let that go. It might mean you don’t have to deal with those people any more.

But it will mean that your life gets simpler.

And, like cleaning your room, if you start doing this on a regular basis (as I advise getting your releasing going on a continuous basis), then your life becomes simpler and simpler. You live with far less effort. Which then means that magic and miracles become more and more commonplace.

There’s far more about what Lester wrote that needs study and reflection. And I’m sure I’ll be continuing this as I simplify my blogging to comics and grass-fed beef. For me, those are easy subjects to talk about, much more rewarding than other areas.

But try this out for yourself and see if these make sense. See if you can’t work at getting your own life simpler by seeing what complicated subjects you can simply drop out of your active life.

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