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Future Prospects for the Grass-fed Market

It will be years before enough grass-finished beef can be produced to satisfy this new market, but serious efforts are under way to significantly boost production. Meanwhile, shoppers can find grass-finished meat right now if they know where to look and what to ask. (See “Consumer Advice & Cooking Tips.”)

According to Allan Nation, editor since 1977 of the grass-fed industry publication The Stockman GrassFarmer, although the latest round of consumer interest was triggered by the confirmation of the second U.S. mad cow, it was the December 2003 documentation of the first U.S. mad cow, coupled with the publication of Michael Pollan’s New York Times article on the beef industry (see “Cattle Futures,” April/May 2004), that, overnight, turned the grass-finished business sector into an industry.

For centuries, cattle have been raised on pasture. But in the United States today, “we have no collective memory of how to produce a quality grass-fed animal,” he says. “The whole current system is devised to add value to grain production. It shows the difference between the United States and Europe; farmers there produced food for their villages. When we got to North America, where it was 1,000 miles to the major population centers, you had to have a very high value product to absorb the transportation costs.”

Feedlot beef did that for a while, but the flaws finally are catching up with the system and helping move the sustainable grass-fed model forward. “Six years ago,” Nation says, “Jo Robinson and I could only find 40 grass-fed marketers in the whole United States and Canada. Today, there’s way over 1,000, and many of these are people who are selling meat from a dozen producers.”

The year 1999 was significant in terms of the grass-fed sector’s development, Nation says. At The Stockman GrassFarmers’ annual producers conference in Dallas that year, Robinson first detailed two “good” fats found in grass-fed beef — omega-3s and CLA (conjugated linoleic acid) — and their implications for human health. “She came with her little booklet Why Grassfed is Best and she started a riot,” he says. “She had 40 booklets and there were 500 people there. Today, we can track back almost everybody who is anybody in this industry to that meeting. They were the early pioneers.” (The updated edition of Robinson’s book is Pasture Perfect. To order, see Mother Earth Shopping.)

Before that time, grass-fed producers worked within the conventional arena — maintaining cow-calf herds, growing the calves up to about 850 pounds and then selling them to feedlots for grain finishing. After Robinson’s revelations, the concept turned to ‘Let’s go ahead and finish them on pasture.’

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