Merit Badge Post: What’s Your Beef?

Mary Jane's Farm is a awesome magazine on organic country living. Mary Jane Butter's started the magazine and then started a chat room for like minded women to exchange ideas on living a more simple life. What grew out of all that was the the Farm Girl Sisterhood. My mom and I joined the sisterhood for kicks and we are starting our own chapter too.

The sisterhood is like Girl Scouts for grown ups. You even get to earn merit badges! Okay it sounds a little hokey, but it is fun. I earned my first merit badge in "Horse Dreams." I got a little merit badge to sew on my jacket or purse or whatever. Other merit badges include "Know Your Food," "In the Garden," and "knitting."

This post is for: What's your Beef?
To earn this badge I need to write about grass fed beef. Most of my information comes from the website: Eat Wild.

I remember the first time I visited a farm owned by some of my relatives. They raised beef cattle. We walked up to a small pen that was stuffed full of brown and white cows. They were all standing about ankle deep in manure. I was rather disgusted. The rest of my family took the view that that was where our food came from and that was that. They didn't seem troubled that our meat was standing in muck. I was just a kid, but even I knew that really could not be healthy for the animals. I loved horses at the time and knew about things such as thrush and parasites. Was this really the best way to raise beef?

As the years have past and I continued learning about farm animals I became increasingly upset with the way those animals are treated. They are fed odd things that cows would never normally eat, such as: candy, chicken feathers, and by products. Some of which originally came from cows, that lead to Mad Cow Disease. They also are not allowed to be cows. The steers are kept in tiny, over crowed feed lots. Talk about stressed. All that stress leads to disease, that disease is treated with antibiotics. We have all heard about what happens with the over use of antibiotics. They become worthless. Well I could go on and on but a lot of that information is on the Eat Wild website.

Most distressing is what happened after I read all of this. I went to work, I teach, one of my students raises steers for 4H. She loves to talk about her steers and was telling me all about them. I asked her if she grass fed her steers and she looked at me as if I had grown a second head. "Oh no," she explained, "we need to feed corn to get the best growth." The organization that is helping our young rural kids grow up to become the next set of farmers still prizes the fastest growth over quality.

Quality you may ask, yes quality. Grass fed beef is higher in vitamin E, a natural preservative that prolongs shelf life as well as give us more vitamin E in our diet. Grass fed beef is higher in omega 3 fatty acids, vitamin C, and beta carotenes. Not to mention it is lower in total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and calories. Red meat is not bad for us, red meat that is raised on corn is bad for us.

Believe it or not pasture raised animals are better for the environment as well. Think of all that manure, which is often wasted by putting it in a treatment facility. More energy has to be expended to deal with it. In pasture raise animals. Those animals poop as they more across the land. They spread it out and fertilize as they go so to speak. Not to mention that studies show that cows on pasture produce less greenhouse gases. Also if that land was used instead to grow corn to feed the cattle there is more soil erosion.

Of course it is more labor intensive, requires more knowledge, and the cattle grows at a slower pace. Really though, is that such a bad thing? Right now the price for grass fed beef is higher than for factory raised beef. The benefits far out weight the difficulties.

So give grass fed beef a try. It's tasty too! To find some in your area check here.