There are a lot of terms in the cattle business to refer to cattle that have been raised on grass. Grass-finished beef means cattle that have only eaten grass and forage their entire life. Grass-fed means cattle that have started out on grass but may have had supplemental grain or an entire grain based diet.
Grass-Finished and Grass-Fed Are Confusing
It’s crazy that the term grass-finished is the one that means eating grass their entire life. The word finished makes a person believe that it’s just the last part of the cows life. Then grass-fed is the one that means it may have been fed grain during the latter part of its life. How weird.
How can someone that is not familiar with these terms know what they’re getting. I’m sure if I wasn’t raising cattle for consumption that I would think grass-fed meant they have only had grass to eat. We need better terms to make sure people know what they’re getting.
Local Grass-Finished Beef
We recommend that you look for a local grass-finished beef rancher that specializes in grass-finished beef. Go visit their ranch so you know what you are feeding your family. So much of our grass-fed/grass-finished beef comes from Mexico or somewhere outside the United States.
If eating humanly raised beef that has only eaten grass it’s entire life, has never been given hormones to help increase its weight, never given antibiotics to keep it alive while eating grain you should check out our ranch at KCGRASSFEDBEEF.com. We would love to have you visit our ranch and see how we take care of our cattle.
Why pay for a subpar product that has so many middle men passing the meat back and forth. Get your grass-finished beef directly from the ranch it was raised on.
Helping Local Grass-Finished Beef Ranchers
When you purchase your beef directly from the rancher you are allowing that rancher to make a little more money and thus helping them stay in business. In 2019 there were 595 farms that went bankrupt.
Farmers that raise cattle and sell them to the sale barns are just barely getting by. It doesn’t make sense when as the writing of this article, beef prices in the store at all-time highs yet cattle prices at the sale barn are down 16%, why? The spread, the profit large producers make from the cost of the cow to the amount the consumer pays is growing considerably while the rancher is going out of business.
Ranchers sell to the sale barn, which sells to someone that fattens the cows on grain and adds hormones for growth. They in turn sell them to feed lots that put them in tight quarters and only feed them grain. They don’t want the cows to move because they loose weight. They have to give them antibiotic shots to keep them alive because cows were not meant to eat grain. The cows are standing in cow manure up to the knees in some cases (another reason for the antibiotic shots).
KC Grass-Fed Beef – It’s the Little Things That Matter
We have been certified by the USDA for providing grass-fed and grass-finished beef direct to the consumer. We raise our beef humanly and try to maintain a holistic environment at our ranch.
We add bird houses in our pastures to increase the population of barn swallows because they eat thousands of flies a day. Eliminating flies helps keep our cattle healthier. We also have a chicken trailer where we move our chickens with our cows so they can eat the fly larva that gets laid in the cow manure.
We rotate our cattle every day. Their natural instinct is to move and graze on grass. Moving them every day mimics this natural instinct and puts them on new fresh grass every day. This rotation also improves our pastures and provides even more thick green grass with more nutrients.
Water is a large part of what a cow intakes every day. The average cow will consume 20 gallons of water a day in the summer. The quality of that water is very important to their health as well as the taste of the end product. Half of our pastures are on rural water. The same water we drink our cows drink. The other half comes from a pond. Most ranchers don’t do this but we keep our cows out of the pond. Cows pee and poop in ponds. Then they drink the water, oh no. We fence off our ponds and pull the water out the back of the pond damn. This provides the cattle with fresh clean drinking water. Another reason our cattle are so healthy and great tasting.
We do a lot of special stuff because we believe that’s the way things should be. Not everyone puts in the extra work we do to make our meat taste better and to keep our cows healthier. When families purchase our grass-finished beef, they are trusting us with the health of their family. We take that very seriously and that’s why we do what we do everyday.
