A California rancher introduces you to a healthier and better-tasting type of steak
My family and I raise 500 head of cattle on nothing but grass. Ranchers like myself call the meat that you see in most grocery stores “commodity beef.” Even if it’s labeled USDA Prime, I don’t touch the stuff. It comes from cattle that have spent most of their short lives in vast feedlots, hip-deep in their own feces, pumped with antibiotics so that the filth won’t kill them, eating a diet of growth hormones, slaughterhouse waste, and corn—food they didn’t evolve to digest. The conditions would actually kill the livestock if they weren’t slaughtered first.***image1***
My cattle spend their entire lives the way they’re supposed to: They live in pastures and eat a wide variety of native grasses. We raise our cows on a 3,500-acre ranch in the Point Reyes National Seashore just north of San Francisco, along with chickens, goats, and sheep. I use management-intensive ranching that harnesses the synergy of the sun, grassland, and herd animals. By working with the land instead of against it, I can produce a superpremium sustainable food that not only tastes better (pasture-raised beef has a complex natural flavor that varies based on which grasses the cattle have eaten) but also is much healthier to eat. In fact, grass-fed beef is so much more nutritious than commodity beef that it’s almost a different food. The optimal ratio of healthy omega-3 fats to less-healthy omega-6 fats in our foods should be around 1:2, and the
European Journal of Clinical Nutrition says that pasture-raised beef measures about 1:3, which is comparable to most fish. Commodity beef? Try 1:20.
No cut of steak accentuates the grass-fed flavor more than the
bavette, which is the traditional French cut for steak frites. It’s a long, thick-fibered abdominal muscle that, like the flank steak, comes from the cow’s lower belly. Even though it’s sometimes called sirloin flap, you don’t often see it on American menus because our butchers disassemble cattle in the fastest, most efficient way possible, and the bavette requires careful seam cutting. Find a sustainable rancher near you at eatwild.com and request the bavette.***image5***
Here’s a look at how my farm works.
THE CYCLE
Why grass-fed beef is better for the environment
1
Grass
***image2***“The grass that fills my pastures is a diverse array of mostly native
perennials and legumes, such as rye grass and clover. The grass stores
the sun’s energy and converts it into carbon, which my cows will
eventually convert into protein. Grassland can sequester as much carbon
as a forest, which is a claim no factory farm can make. Grass and soil
need a break from grazing to recover and regenerate, and I use electric
fences to divide the land into paddocks as large as 100 acres and as
small as two acres to restrict animals’ access. I change my
pasture-management strategy almost daily, but typically the grass will
measure about six inches tall when the cattle enter a paddock. I’ll
lead them into a new paddock once the grass is half that length.”
2
Cattle
***image4***“When cows eat grass, an organ called the rumen—something we humans
don’t have, which is why we don’t eat grass—converts the sun’s energy
into high-quality protein. As the cattle move throughout the pasture,
their hooves help spread and plant grass seed while their feces acts as
fertilizer. And because they don’t stand in the same place all day,
covered in their own dung, I don’t need to pump them full of
antibiotics, the way factory farmers do.”
