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All beef is not created equal. The image of the giant, double-muscled, super cow brings a sense of pride and fondness to those who love all things bulky and massive. Aside from the joy and brotherhood that arises from the images of this cow’s yoke, the mass just isn’t practical.
The grass fed steer is the weakling little brother of the super cow, but it has numerous benefits versus typical beef. The movement towards grass fed beef is growing in popularity as people see the benefits of grass fed meat versus industrialized agriculture-produced beef. Lower fat content, no hormones, two to four times richer in heart healthy omega 3 fatty acids, higher in “good” unsaturated fats and lower in “bad” saturated fats, three to five times higher in CLA (Conjugated Linoleic Acid) content and a much higher level of vitamins A and E, are some of the major benefits.
A hefty price tag comes along with the benefits of grass fed beef. At $6 a pound and higher, it becomes very difficult for a strength athlete to commit to eating grass fed beef on a regular basis. In order to take control of our finances, maximize our dollars and control our food supply, we have been raising our own cows over the past few years. The health benefits have been secondary to us. Even if you do not own your own pasture, it is possible to raise a grass fed cow fairly economically.
The first step is to buy a cow. Easier said than done. Find your local livestock auction and figure out the going rates per pound for a steer. Your typical “beef” cattle (Angus, Hereford, etc) are pretty expensive per pound at $1.63 per pound. Jersey Steer are considered dairy cows, but are far cheaper than the Angus at only $.81 per pound. To put the increasing cost of beef in perspective, last year we paid $0.41 per pound for our Jersey at auction weight. The prices continue to climb, as do the costs are the store. There are also people selling cattle on Craigslist if you’d prefer to pay a little more and bypass the auction.
When you buy cattle, it should be in the 400-pound range. By this time the cow can do much better on the pasture and is able to eat only grass, no longer relying on the mother. There are services available to help you transport the cattle to its destination if you do not have the capabilities.
Now that you have the cow, you should already have a plan on where you’re putting it. If you do not own your own land, you need to be creative. There are many property owners out there who don’t want the hassle of mowing and caring for their property. It is possible to rent out pasture land on a monthly basis. The trick is finding these people. Craigslist, word of mouth, or driving around looking for a pasture are options. As more properties are foreclosed upon, real estate companies are assuming the up keep on these properties. Approach them and inquire if they have any pasture land available for rent. We have been able to rent pasture land for $5 per month per animal from an elderly land owner. It is possible; you just need to be creative with your resources. Generally speaking, you will need about an acre of land per head of cattle. This can vary depending on the land. A water source is important so that you do not need to monitor the animal regularly.
A steer typically eats the equivalent of their body weight per month. The last few months we provide a small amount of grain daily in order to fatten the steer up a little bit and to kill some of the odor common in grass fed beef. We go to the local mill and just buy the cheapest grain at the time (oats, barley, corn or a mix). That is just our personal preference.
Once the steer reaches the 1200 pound range, it is time for slaughter. There are mobile butchers who will come to the property, kill and dispose of the steer for you. The local rate for us is $75 for this service. The most important point is that it is clean and the butcher does not leave any blood or gore behind. The mobile butcher also transports the carcass to the butcher for you.
The next step is to work with the butcher to determine how you want your meat cut up. Hanging weight is a term used to describe the weight of a side of beef as it hangs up in a meat cooler with the usable cuts intact. Our butcher charges $0.51 per hanging weight pound in order to cut and wrap the meat. I tend to get a lot of ground beef because it’s easier to season and disguise some of the odor from the grass fed meat. Your live weight does not equate to take home meat. The general break downs are:
- Live weight to hanging weight is 58%
- Hanging weight to take home is 75%
- Live to take home is 43.5%
So basically a 1200 pound steer will yield 500 pounds take home weight, cut and wrapped. From the start of the process to cut and wrapped in our freezer, we average $1.50 per pound of beef. This cost includes a mixture of t-bone steaks, roasts, ground beef and everything in between. Each time we go through this process, we learn something new. Despite the health benefits of grass fed beef, I prefer the taste of grain fed beef. This time we are investigating costs of sending the cattle to a feed lot for the last few months. Bringing enough grain in to the current property where the steer is located presents some challenges. So, a feed lot seems to be the solution at this time. Who knows how this process will go and if it’s even something we decide to do.
Here is our latest Jersey along with other sources of home grown protein we enjoy.
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Amy Wattles is a seasoned strongwoman and highland games competitor. Amy has been competing in strongman competitions for six years and highland games for two. In 2010 Amy won the North American Highlander Association (NAHA) National Championship in Omaha, NE. Amy is the Idaho State Chair for NAHA. In 2008 Amy competed in World Strongwoman Championship (formerly World’s Strongest Woman) in Poland.
View Amy’s Training Log 
Sending the cattle to a feed lot for the last few months kind of negates the whole idea of grass fed beef.
i like that song
I doubt that only a few months of grain feeding would affect the meat that much. Besides, she said that they are simply going to experiment with it and I think that it’s a fine idea.
I’m from Iowa. I know cows.
Increasing the content of omega 3 can be done a number of ways. One way it is done for eggs is feeding the hens flax. Here’s the biggest issue in my mind. US ag policy makes corn and other grain crops more profitable than they otherwise would be. I’d be willing to bet you’d see a lot more grassfed beef without those policies.
Belgian Blue bulls are that large because of a myostatin deficiency, not because of what they are fed.
“Despite the health benefits of grass fed beef, I prefer the taste of grain fed beef.” and “The health benefits have been secondary to us”
yum.
Are you guys serious here? Ok I’m gonna go buy a cow and toss my nitro tech in the garbage lmao….
Some other considerations:
Initial up front cost could also be higher, if you don’t have a place to store all that meat. You’ll need something like a 20 cubic foot (minimum) chest freezer to store it all.
If you can find a local butcher (instead of the grocery store meat department) talk with them about options. They may be able to find you sources or just provide you with exactly what you’re wanting, without all the wait and work of buying and feeding the critter to size. Nothing wrong with that of course, but if you wanted to get going “now”, obviously buying a calf and letting it grow doesn’t give you instant dinner.
Finally, due to drought here in Texas, I know a lot of ranchers are culling their herds because of the sheer cost of keeping them around. Poke around… due to circumstances you may be able to find a good eater for a lower price.
Great article, I was wondering about the different ways to buy a cow and save per pound. The live to take home weight is handy to know too,Thanks!
@Michael- If sending the cattle to a feed lot for a few months defeated the purpose, then sending ‘industrialized agriculture-produced beef’ to eat grass for the last few months would solve all these issues….
Is this serious?
lot of contradicting going on here….
The fact is cows are not meant to eat corn. This is why all cows eat grass exclusively the first 6 months of their lives; they wouldn’t survive on corn that early. The reason why is corn ruins the pH of their stomach, turning their neutral stomachs acidic and causing ulcers and other problems. In order to keep them alive long enough to reach proper weight, they are given antibiotics. Not only are all these antibiotics bad, but the cow’s acidic stomachs cause other problems.
With a cow’s normally neutral stomach, any bacteria that remains on the meat from the stomach will not survive in our (acidic) stomachs. However, once the cow’s stomachs become acidic the new bacteria can survive in our stomachs, increasing the incidence of food poisoning.
Grain finished is certainly better than industrialized feed-lot beef. But the taste of grain fed beef comes from the overfat marbled meat that is a characteristic of pushing a cow to it’s biological limit and slaughtering it right before it would die from it’s diet.
This is a broader discussion, but I think if we’re talking about “cheap” we need to recognize that cheap meat doesn’t necessarily mean good for health or environment. I applaud the author’s efforts, but I think everyone should be aware of what these choices actually mean.
Really 6$ a pound? 4$ and up is what I pay, which really isn’t much more than grain fed beef. Check your local farmers market(if you have one). Stop buying grassfed beef at a supermarket(unless it your only option), try slankers or US wellness meats and buy in bulk. Although it sounds like a great idea to buy your own cow, is it really practical for most of us to do? I barely have enough backyard for my dogs let aone a cow. So think of it like this, you go to a burger joint and get a triple(which is a biweekly thing for me) which costs me about 8 bucks, I can get a pound of beef and make my own burgers for less than that with better beef and probably an extra 1/4 pound of beef. I switched to grass fed a couple years back an have never been able to tell the difference with taste. And yes a couple of months of grain feeding significantly lowers the Omega 3′s and CLA in beef. But I’m not from Iowa so I don’t know cows, so here’s someone who knows better than me (J Animal Sci (1993) 71(8):2079-88)
I’m a farmer. A few kg of grain mix for 8 weeks before slaughter will increase the kill-out percentage and give a better fat cover to the animal. I have never heard of this grass odour, but are you fasting the steer before slaughter? Most catlle are grass fed here in Ireland but often are put on an ad-lib grain diet to finish them for slaughter. As long as there is roughage available they thrive very well on it without antibiotics which if used would eliminate them from the food chain here. I don’t know about US feedlots but no antibiotics are routinely fed here.
If you bought a beef cross sire you would have far more of the better cuts of meats. That’s what the muscles are for on the beef breeds. Jersey’s should be really, really cheap as their yellow fat isn’t popular with the beef retailers.
Thanks so much for the information Amy! This has been very informative. Now just need to find all these people to do the things you mentioned locally.
Yeah, let me check with my HOA.
Michael… You are full of crap and have no clue what you are talking about. I grew up on a dairy farm, where we fed out cattle corn, and silage all winter long, and they would get grass in the summer time. We never gave antibiotics unless a cow was sick (which they rarely were… we had a vet out maybe once/year), and we never had cows die prematurely due to diet… you hippies need to live on a farm, and learn what your talking about before you spout off your propaganda you heard from PETA.
Mrs. Wattles,
Despite all the arguing, thank you for the article. I would be interested to hear your process for the other home grown protein sources.
Yeah Jeff, I don’t know what I’m talking about since I never lived on a farm… so let’s look at the Angus Journal to see what they recommend about corn and cows’ digestive systems.
http://www.angusjournal.com/ArticlePDF/1002aj_CornforCows.pdf
Or Scientific American to talk about antibiotic use:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=most-us-antibiotics-fed-t
Just because things work one way on a dairy farm doesn’t mean that’s how they work in industrial feedlots. The biology of cows’ stomachs I described is correct, and I didn’t hear about any of it from PETA. Look in the Angus Journal link, or search for yourself.
We usually buy a few calf and raise them for slaughter each fall. Angus calf, grass feeding (on our land in WI) along with cost of slaughter, which we outsource puts us under $2.50 per pound by the time it hits my freezer with about 450-550lbs of steaks, roasts, and ground beef. All hormone and antibiotic free and grass fed. The idea is healthier, natural state of food. Adding grains to fatten them up at the end probably won’t alter the meat make up that late in the development, but other than making it more expensive for fat I’m not planning to eat anyway seems foolish.
Michael drank the Kool Aid
Michael… read your links. The one from the Angus journal simply states that it MAY not be optimal to digestion to feed corn, but it is often more economical, which means cheaper meat for me and you. Nowhere does it say it will kill the animals prematurely.
As for the antibiotic link, It seems to be just unsubstantiated claims just like you made. It says right in the article that they had no government data to go off of, and they were basically guessing. Answer me this why would a farmer waste the money on antibiotics on a healthy animal? The article claims it helps them grow… perhaps you could explain to me how an antibiotic would increase growth of a healthy animal… Clue, it wouldn’t.
As for those complaining about hormones in their animal products… know that there is no difference in the hormone levels in treated or untreated animals. And you certainly better not be using AAS or GH, then complaining about hormones in your meat (that aren’t even detectable)…
Sorry to hijack the thread Amy… good article, and helpful information for those interested in undergoing such a venture.
i gotta agree with michaels first post. the idea of sending a cow to a feedlot or finishing on grain negates the whole idea of an entirely grass fed cow. you will lose the benefits of the ‘grass fed’ meat to begin with. the high CLA, omega 3 to omega 6 ration, etc. im also not familiar with the grass fed smell mentioned in the article.
it might be good for the discussion to distinguish between grass finished and grass fed. most cows are grass fed until a 8 weeks before slaughter. many people say they like grain finished beef better, but my taste buds arent advanced enough to tell that much of a difference.
there are countless stories of people switching from store bought beef and store bought eggs to grass finished beef, pastured eggs and wild game and astonishing the doctors at how low their cholesterol levels drop. in fact EFS published an article detailing this not to long ago.
overall great article and might get some people thinking about reducing their protein costs by raising their own
PS i open carry a .45 every day, so im definitely not a hippy.
Jeff,
From Michael Pollan’s article in the NYT Magazine:
“Cows rarely live on feedlot diets for more than six months, which might be about as much as their digestive systems can tolerate. ”I don’t know how long you could feed this ration before you’d see problems,” Metzen said; another vet said that a sustained feedlot diet would eventually ”blow out their livers” and kill them. As the acids eat away at the rumen wall, bacteria enter the bloodstream and collect in the liver. More than 13 percent of feedlot cattle are found at slaughter to have abscessed livers.
What keeps a feedlot animal healthy — or healthy enough — are antibiotics. Rumensin inhibits gas production in the rumen, helping to prevent bloat; tylosin reduces the incidence of liver infection. Most of the antibiotics sold in America end up in animal feed — a practice that, it is now generally acknowledged, leads directly to the evolution of new antibiotic-resistant ”superbugs.” In the debate over the use of antibiotics in agriculture, a distinction is usually made between clinical and nonclinical uses. Public-health advocates don’t object to treating sick animals with antibiotics; they just don’t want to see the drugs lose their efficacy because factory farms are feeding them to healthy animals to promote growth. But the use of antibiotics in feedlot cattle confounds this distinction. Here the drugs are plainly being used to treat sick animals, yet the animals probably wouldn’t be sick if not for what we feed them.
I asked Metzen what would happen if antibiotics were banned from cattle feed. ”We just couldn’t feed them as hard,” he said. ”Or we’d have a higher death loss.” (Less than 3 percent of cattle die on the feedlot.) The price of beef would rise, he said, since the whole system would have to slow down.
”Hell, if you gave them lots of grass and space,” he concluded dryly, ”I wouldn’t have a job.”
The author of this article talks about the health benefits of grass-fed beef and about the cost advantages of raising your own cow. There is a tension here. It is undeniable that raising a cow on corn makes it grow faster and it’s cheaper (that’s why they do it this way). It’s also pretty clear that this practice is less healthy for the cow and the meat produced has more fat and less Omega 3 and 6. If the author really wanted cheap beef she’d buy a whole cow from a farm and freeze it. If she wanted the health benefits she’d gravitate towards grass fed beef (or eating less beef in general).
I’d love to raise my own cow, because then I would know what was happening to it the entire time before I ate it. In that case, I’m pretty sure I would prefer for the cow to eat what cows naturally eat, grass.
As others have noted, cattle that have spent the last few months of their lives eating grain do not really qualify as “grass-fed”. Neither the USDA, the American Grassfed Association, nor the Food Alliance’s certified grassfed standards allow any grain to be used “in order to fatten the steer up”, as Amy wrote.
The reason for this is the loss of a statistically significant degree of the fatty-acid benefits of keeping a steer on grass and forage throughout its life. Representative analyses that I have read showed that the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids in pure grass-fed beef samples was about 2:1. But the ratio in grain-fed beef samples was at best about 4:1, if grain was used for only a matter of weeks, and up to 10:1, if grain was used for months.
Of course, the absolute amounts of omega-3 and CLA in grass-fed beef still are not large, though their percentages of increase can seem impressive. People will refer to 500% increases in CLA and 250% increases in omega-3, but these are computed from very small starting numbers. In addition, pure grass-fed beef generally has 20-22% less fat content than grain-fed beef to begin with, thus the total amount of omega-3 and CLA will not be all that much.
A standard 4-ounce serving of ground grass/grain beef contains about 150 mg of omega-3 and 85 mg of CLA, according to the analyses that I referred to, while the highest end of the pure grass-fed analyses showed about 240 mg of omega-3 and 190 mg of CLA in four ounces of beef. These numbers certainly can contribute to overall daily totals, but they are still quite small.
You all missed the point… she doesn’t care about the health benefits that much… just cheap meat.
pretty sure that the belgian blue (super cow) has less fat than any grass fed beef regardless of what you feed it. This is the advantage of the myostatin deficiency. They are tough and difficult to eat though due to the double striated muscles. (nit picky I know, cause noone raises belgians). You can also finish with milo rather than corn and it gets rid of the grass flavor. No matter what you get though try to get it rolled or else the cow wont digest it.
Except that it isn’t all that cheap, when you factor in the going rates in many US regions for cattle, pasture rental, butcher services, grain feed, bigger freezer, transportation, etc. In most urban places, this idea would be more expensive than simply buying generic grain-fed beef at the store. Thus, the possible health benefits of pure grass-fed beef would be the only point that justifies the cost, unless raising cattle is a preferred hobby. For grain-finished beef, such as Amy’s, this health aspect—which is not huge, anyway, as I noted above—is diminished.
Yes, grass fed beef starts at $6 a pound for ground beef at the very places Jay mentioned.
@Markus – I completely disagree. “From the start of the process to cut and wrapped in our freezer, we average $1.50 per pound of beef.” When you’re factoring in t-bones, roasts, etc that is a significant savings. I grew up in Chicago and the “country” was only about 70 miles away so I am not sure how living in an urban area would tack on unreasonable costs. The point was be creative and use your resources. Read the section on renting pasture land. $5 a month per head out here. The only thing cheaper is free. Other comments had some great ideas as well. It’s not like you need to hire a baby sitter to be with the cow. It’s a farm animal.
You guys over analyze stuff. People asked for the article and share my experiences. That is exactly what I did. Love it, hate it or want to argue fine points to death, this is the process that we follow and IT WORKS. The steer ended up the freezer at the end of the vid cuz the butcher came not because his stomach exploded.
As I pointed out, Amy, it depends on local market conditions as to whether your approach is actually going to be cheaper than buying traditional beef. Where I live in California, for example, your method would be more expensive. This is because of local butchering facilities, local grazing fees, local animal prices, etc. This does not negate your successful experience, but it means that not everyone will get the same result.
The discussion about true grass-fed beef is not an attempt to “over analyze”, since the whole premise of your article is that the time and costs are worth the effort because of the comparison with grass-fed beef in the store. But you are not getting true grass-fed beef, since you are using months of grain feeding now, and are thinking of sending your cattle to feedlots in the future. As I explained, this reduces the already-small health benefits that are found in true grass-fed animals.
I think your contribution is a good one, since I have done the same thing in the past. People also can buy a “share” in animals that will be butchered. This can deliver true grass-fed lamb, beef, pork, and goat at reasonable costs, depending on the farm. I know people who do this simply because of the more humane raising conditions, and they consider the extra grass-fed benefits a bonus.
Oh at last I can comment! Very interesting talk by DeBotton.