About the flavor of my beef...

I get asked why it is so good

I have gotten comments from time to time that the flavor of North Pasture Farms beef is way better than other beef the questioner has been able to find.

The question is some version of: Why is your beef so good?

Here is my reply:

Hi Philomena (NOT the person’s name)

I am going to reply at length here and then maybe turn it into a Substack post because I get that question about the flavor from time to time. Often enough to write something about it at least.

I could go into how it’s the water or something in the soil. This MIGHT be the fact but I don’t think so. If it were my water, then why is not Northern Wisconsin Beef as famous as that special ham you can get from Spain, Jamon?

I think it is mostly because of the way I 'finish' the cattle. This is what I THINK, but don't have any real data like studies or anything like that to back it up. So this is just my opinion backed up by a bunch of years of experience. Take it with a large boulder of salt.

It is well known that as cattle get older, they get more flavor. In fact, I have people tell me they don't want grass fed beef because they don't like the flavor. In my opinion, that is just because the beef actually HAS some flavor. Grass Fed Beef is definitely NOT the same flavor as McDonalds hamburgers. Some would say that Grass Fed is an acquired taste. I don’t know, I think McDonalds and restaurant beef is pretty bland but then I was raised on Grass Fed Beef so home made beef is what I think beef should taste like.

A store-bought piece of beef if it is a steak or roast almost certainly comes from an animal that was processed at about 18 months of age. They got big enough to harvest because someone fed them a diet of grain and little else. You would be huge too if all you ate were candy bars and ice cream. You would be sick too, just like the cattle that are fed that way get if they are kept on that diet for too long. They get sick with 'rumen acidosis'. You will have to look that up, it is too much data to insert here. My definition of rumen acidosis is constant, continuous and continual bad heartburn.

Ground Beef in a regular grocery store is probably about half the young fat beef mentioned above and the other half from old ‘spent cattle’, a good share of the spent ones are dairy cattle who have spent their life producing milk and are now beyond the age where they can lactate any more.

A grass fed steer is usually not processed until he is about 24 to 30 months old. He goes through 2 winters instead of the usual beef cattle's one winter. I get some of those 2 year old cattle but I don't make a big deal out looking for and getting the younger ones.

I like to get cattle that are cows that didn't have a calf for some reason. Their boss (the farmer) can't afford to keep them around. Like if you were supposed to be making 12 widgets per day and you didn't make any, you would find yourself doing some other kind of work. In this case, the cow's other work is what I supply.

It is also thought that younger cattle are more tender and in my opinion that is true. Up to a point.

Most of the tenderness comes from the way the cow is finished. Finishing means basically the final six to eight months of the cow's life. when they are putting on weight and getting fat and juicy.

The finishing can either happen in a feed lot with the cow getting full time grain as much as they can eat or out on pasture getting as much grass as they can eat.

A cow that hasn't had a calf probably didn’t get that way because she was willfully staying away from the bull. She got that way because she didn't quite have enough oomph any more to make the grade.

It is HARD for an animal to produce a 70-100 pound calf every year and feed it a huge amount of very protein rich food (milk). A beef cow can produce at a GUESS up to 3 gallons of milk per day though I would guess most do about 2 gallons. I know from bottle feeding calves as a kid that a calf can go through an astonishing amount of milk. Milk replacer isn't cheap so we would always try to get the calf onto some grain as soon as possible and then get them onto grass as soon as possible after that. The farmer has to kind of ‘train’ the calf’s gut to be able to transition from milk replacer grain and then to grass.

We did it that way back then because grain is a high energy diet and a good transition to grass. We also weren't into grass fed back then. If I get a bottle-fed calf nowadays, it mostly goes to town in a few days or weeks. I don’t have the time to be their mama.

A dairy cow produces 6-7 gallons per day depending on the time of year and her lactation stage. That is about 50 POUNDS per day. She has had a lot of generations of genetic selection to get to that point of production. Still, that is a LOT. Just in weight, a 1500 pound cow producing 50 pounds of milk per day is producing a bit over 3% of her body weight in milk per day. No wonder they get run down so quickly.

Back to the story. The beef cow didn't have a calf. The farmer says: You're fired and calls me to see if I want her. I probably do. This can happen to a younger cow or an older cow. Younger ones because they ‘put too much into the calf’ and didn’t save very much of their energy intake for their own survival and growth then they didn’t have the body condition to get pregnant again. Older ones because they just got old enough to not be able to replace the energy taken out of them by their last calf.

In order to stay in the first farmers herd, she has to do this every year:

• Produce a calf.

• Feed that calf so that it grows big QUICKLY.

• Eat enough so that she gains weight and body condition again so that she can get pregnant again sometime in early summer.

All three of these at once is NOT an easy trick.

If I could make a human comparison I would say she is trying to be a NFL Lineman or maybe a weight lifter. NFL Linemen quite often have to eat 6 meals per day to keep their weight up (the more mass, the more you can shove around and the less you can BE shoved around). You also have to have the strength and energy to move that huge mass around FAST and HARD. A lot of retired linemen go from 300 lbs down to about 240 in their first year off football. Of course, some don't, but that is a different story.

Anyway, being a calf producing cow takes a lot of energy. That energy comes from the grass she eats. In the winter, that grass is hay and the usual amount of hay for a cow to eat is about 3% of their body weight. She has to have good teeth, good guts, and not give TOO much to her calf.

The cow comes to my place, usually in the spring or fall. Fall because that is when cows are pregnancy checked and either found as pregnant or not. Spring because that is when they show up as not having the calf they 'said' they were going to have last fall.

Most of the cows I want show up at my place in the spring. The cow has been eating hay all winter and hay is not as nutritious as green grass, so the cow is somewhat racy looking. Skinny or svelte in other words. She doesn't have a lot of meat on her bones. She has very little fat on her bones either.

I put her on pasture and move her and her sisters to fresh grass every day. I make sure she has plenty of shade and minerals and doesn't get rousted by the coyotes or neighbor dogs, etc. I watch her and if she gets sick enough I doctor her. Minerals might make a huge difference in flavor also, but I think that is secondary.

If she doesn't have to do those three things mentioned above but has nothing to do but lie around and work on her own health and grow her own body, she can bloom just like a rose. I have had cows gain 2 and 3 pounds per DAY after they get going.

It usually takes them about a month to get over just being tired and worn down. After that their coat gets all smooth and shiny. Then they start to fill out. Their ribs start to disappear, their brisket starts to fill out. When they are about done (usually about October or early November), their tail head gets all plump and they look more like a sausage than the ragged looking race-cow they looked like when they got here in the spring.

Now here's the real thing: My Pa told me when I was a kid that over in Europe, they didn't eat their cattle when they were young. They would turn their steer into an Ox and work the bleep out of him until he was old and ragged. He would be skinny and used up. They would then stick him out in the pasture with absolutely nothing to do but have a vacation until fall time when he would have to pay for that vacation with his life.

The skinny ox spent his entire life growing his frame out. He spent a lot of time getting his gut mature and able to produce the energy he needed to pull the plow or wagon or whatever. In our case, the cow is doing the same thing by raising her calf every year.

That cow/ox then gets time off for good behavior and spends their time eating and laying in the shade chewing their cud. Almost ALL of the growth they do in that final summer is new flesh. New muscle, new fat, it is all new tender stuff. If you look at a ribeye section on a skinny old cow it is pretty small. There is no marbling and no fat around the edges. The cow that has been on grass and lazy all summer has a much bigger ribeye, lots of marbling and a ring of fat around the outside.

That is the secret as far as I know. Those old guys in Europe back in the day knew what they were doing. Their grandpa probably told them that was the way to do it so they didn't even think about it, they just did it that way.

Then shortly after WWII with the advent of chemical fertilizers, mechanized farming and all the rest of it, it became much easier to just pen the cattle up and feed the bleep out of them so that they got big enough to eat with one winter instead of two winters or multiple winters. The cow went from being a multi purpose beast to being one that was forced into the mold to produce just meat and do it fast.

Note that you can't take a 12 - 15 year old cow and expect them to bloom. They have truly given their all and are tough and ready to be turned into ground beef. They are thanked for their service and then quickly turned into ground beef instead of letting the coyotes or wolves eat them which would happen in the wild. If there are no coyotes or wolves, they usually get sick or get a twisted gut or something and die in pain. Just like humans, there is no such thing as 'natural causes'. There is always something that takes them out even if it is only a common cold on an old and enfeebled body.

I have also noticed a few things with the farmers I have been working with for a few years. I want their cows so I push them to not tolerate ANYTHING bad in a cow. I pay them well for the cattle so they are more willing to listen to me. If she looks at them cross-eyed, she goes to me. If she has trouble calving, she goes to me. If she doesn't have a calf, she goes to me. If she is hard to handle, she goes to me. If she has a bad udder, she goes to me. The list is long and I am trying to make it longer. I read somewhere that 'you can cull for ANYTHING'. Want only short eared cattle? Cull for it. Want good feet? Cull for it. Deer quit feeding their babies in the fall, why can't cows? Cull for it.

The result of this is that I have been getting fewer cows from the guys I started with. They don't have nearly the calving problems they used to have. Their cattle are much more docile and easier to handle. Their udders are better. Cows do get worn down and come to me but the happy time of getting a bunch of cows from a few famers is now becoming getting a few cows from more farmers. Having some place (me) that pays well for their 'cull cows' means they are more willing to cull and that means their herds increase in quality. An unintended consequence.

Hope that helps.

No worries.

SV