The Amazing Benefits of Grass-fed Meat
(Page 3 of 8)
April/May 2009
By Richard Manning
For thousands of years, the dominant big grazer of North America was the American bison. It is the rule of co-evolution that when species evolve together they come to thrive on each other’s presence, and this is true of bison and the grasses, forbs and shrubs of the American landscape. But great herds of migrating bison grazed very differently than the way cattle graze on pasture today.
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This has led graziers to develop a system that has many names but is often called “managed intensive rotational grazing.” Many people think of intensive grazing as negative, because we’re so accustomed to seeing the erosion that results from destructive overgrazing. But, intensive grazing is actually beneficial for grassland. It works this way: Graziers use the temporary electric fences to confine a herd of perhaps 50 calves or steers to an area the size of a small suburban front lawn for a short period, often as short as a half a day. Then the grazier arranges the easily movable fence to surround an adjacent small plot, on through a series of paddocks in a cycle of maybe 30 days, depending on conditions.
The result is the cattle graze all the plants down to a few inches, and then are moved to fresh grass. Each paddock is allowed to rest until the grass fully recovers. This roughly simulates the tactics of bison and in turn stimulates sweet, highly nutritious and palatable new growth, controls weeds and promotes biodiversity. In short, intensive grazing forces cattle to graze grassland the way bison used to.
Go With Grass, Not Grain
Churchill’s producers are raising cattle this way on converted corn and soybean land in Minnesota, which is a bit like building a mosque at the Vatican. They take this plowed-up landscape and plant it to permanent pasture — permaculture modeled on the tallgrass prairie that was the native cover. Many of Churchill’s producers, in fact, don’t own tractors; they don’t need them. It takes a couple of years for the land to recover sufficiently to produce high-quality beef, but it does recover. And after that initial setup, his producers begin showing a profit; in fact, more profit than the corn and soybeans yielded before. Part of this is a result of lower or no costs for inputs such as fertilizer, fuel, pesticides and machinery. This profit is one of the factors that will allow this system to scale up.
Churchill says that on properly recovered land, he can finish about two steers per acre. That is almost precisely the acreage it takes to grow the grain to finish those same steers in a feedlot. This whole system makes economic sense, acre by acre. More than half of our total grain crop goes to feed livestock, so it follows that we can convert half of the 150 million acres used to grow corn and soy to permanent pasture and lose not one ounce of meat production. At the same time, we can produce healthier meat and shift the massive federal subsidies for corn and soybean production to a better use.
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