Two magazines this month have articles on grass fed beef, Countryside and Mother Earth News. Why grass fed is better than corn fed. We have been doing grass fed for years because I didn't want the fat and I heard it was more like eating buffalo meat.(for the fat content) They say to bake grass fed beef 25* lower and it takes a little longer. We sell our extra beef and have steady customers. Even raising chickens, you don't have to use just corn. We used mixed grains with great sucess.

-- Jo in Central Wa. (countryjo16@hotmail.com), April 12, 2002

Answers

There was an excellent article in the 3/31/02 edition of The New York Times Magazine entitled, "Power Steer." The author, Michael Pollan, purchased a steer and then paid for its upkeep until it went to market. He wanted to write a story on how the modern steak is produced from beginning to end.

Basically, the profit margin on beef is so small for ranchers that they have to figure out a way to decrease their costs . . . the longer it takes for a steer to go to market, the more it costs the rancher due to upkeep. According to the author, cows raised on grass take longer to get to market. It used to be that it took steers 4 to 5 years to be ready for slaughter--now, the age is 14 to 16 months. "What gets a beef calf from 80 to 1,200 pounds in 14 months are enormous quantities of corn, protein supplements--and drugs, including growth hormones."

Corn is fed to steers because it's inexpensive and, compared to grass or hay, easy to transport. The author talks about how we have come to associate "cornfed" as some kind of old-fashioned virtue, but the author maintains that that's far from the truth . . .

"Granted, a cornfed cow develops well-marbled flesh, giving it a taste and texture American consumers have learned to like. Yet this meat is demonstrably less healthy to eat, since it contains more saturated fat. A recent study in The European Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that the meat of grass-fed livestock not only had substantially less fat than grain-fed meat but that the type of fats found in grass-fed meat were much healthier . . . . A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with cornfed beef."

Cows don't naturally eat corn and it's terrible for their system.

"Perhaps the most serious thing that can go wrong with a ruminant on corn is feedlot bloat. The rumen is always producing copious amounts of gas, which is normally expelled by belching during rumination. But when the diet contains too much starch and too little roughage, rumination all but stops, and a layer of foamy slime that can trap gas forms in the rumen. The rumen inflates like a balloon, pressing against the animal's lungs. Unless action is promptly taken to relieve the pressure (usually by forcing a hose down the animal's esophagus), the cow suffocates.

"A corn diet can also give a cow acidosis. Unlike that in our own highly acidic stomachs, the normal pH of a rumen is neutral. Corn makes it naturally acidic, however, causing a kind of bovine heartburn, which in some cases can kill the animal but usually just makes it sick. Acidotic animals go off their feed, pant and salivate excessively, paw at their bellies and eat dirt. The condition can lead to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, liver disease and a general weakening of the immune system that leaves the animal vulnerable to everything from pneumonia to feedlot polio."

To keep the animals relatively healthy, they are administered antibiotics. "Cows rarely live on feedlot diets for more than six months, which may be about as much as their digestive systems can tolerate."

"Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food get killed off by the acids in our stomachs, since they originally adapted to live in a neutral-pH environment. But the digestive tract of the modern feedlot cow is closer in acidity to our own, and in this new, manmade environment acid-resistant strains of E. coli have developed that can survive our stomach acids--and go on to kill us. By acidifying a cow's gut with corn, we have broken down one of our food chain's barrier's to infection."

Very interesting article if you can get ahold of it.

-- Julie Woessner (jwoessner@rtmx.net), April 12, 2002.