What about our Carbon Hoofprint?



A cow in Hawaii
Notice the Pacific in the background

Animal Agriculture and the Environment

As a meat producer and a mom, I hear a lot of information about animal agriculture and the environment. Some groups claim that meat production is one of the main driving forces hurting the environment. They claim that we need to go ‘back to the start’ in food production, insinuating that we should go back to producing food the way we did decades ago.

Earlier this month, I wrote a post about the enormity of the meat industry, and the massive numbers of animals and people it takes to keep 313 million Americans fed meat each and every day. We can’t go back to the food systems of 1950 and expect to be able to feed everyone that we have to feed today. Not only would food be much more expensive, taking our food production systems backwards would be bad for the environment.


Do you want to go back to the 1950's way of communicating?

This week I had a wonderful opportunity to attend an agriculture symposium hosted by Alltech, a Kentucky-based company that makes a wide variety of products used in different aspects of food production. They are a very innovative company and it’s exciting to learn about all the new possibilities in agriculture. (but, more about Alltech in a future post).


One meeting I attended at the symposium focused on the Carbon footprint of animal agriculture. There are several animal scientists and agriculturalists who have focused their research on limiting the impact that food animals have on the environment.

It’s true that producing food from animals results in the production of green house gasses. All animals breathe out carbon dioxide and cows produce methane in their stomach when they digest their food. It’s just how their systems work. Regardless of the way a farmer produces food (grass fed, organic, antibiotic free, or conventional), some green house gasses are going to be produced.

I was excited to learn one of the speakers at the symposium was my friend, Dr. Jude Capper, author of the Bovidiva blog. But, unfortunately, the storms early in the week delayed her plane and she wasn’t able to make it to the symposium. She sent me a link to her slides and I’ve seen her speak before. I’ve even discussed her research in my post about the beef industry.


Dr. Jude Capper

According to Dr. Capper, animal agriculture contributes to 3.1% of the total US carbon footprint. I love the analogy she uses to explain the environmental impact of animal agriculture. She compares two vehicles; the first gets 5 miles per gallon, the second gets 35 miles per gallon. You automatically think that the first vehicle is an environmental nightmare and the second is a much more environmentally-friendly choice. But wait… the first vehicle is a bus carrying 50 passengers and the second is a car carrying 4. That means, that for a 350 mile trip, the bus can carry 50 passengers, getting 250 people miles per gallon, whereas the car only carries 4 and gets 140 people miles per gallon. Now, which one is better for the environment?

The same rules need to be applied to animal agriculture. The more productive an animal is, the smaller its impact on the environment.

Dr. Capper goes on to compare animal agriculture of today (her data is based on numbers from 2007) to that of 30 years ago (1977). One cow of today produces 131% of the beef that one cow would have produced 30 years ago, and each pound of beef produced requires only 81% of the feed, 86% of the water, and 66% of the land a pound of beef required thirty years ago. Using our modern practices, farmers today are producing more beef and using fewer animals and less natural resources. She goes on to say that a pound of beef today results in 80% of the manure, 80% of the methane, 89% of the nitrous oxide and has 82% of the carbon footprint that a pound of beef had in 1977.

The carbon footprint of animal agriculture will decrease when animals breed and have babies as often as possible, when they are healthy and free of disease, and they will produce much more food with improved genetics. (In animal agriculture, when we talk about improving genetics, we are not talking about creating GMO animals. We are simply talking about breeding the best to the best and getting babies that are even better. Some scientists can use the animal’s DNA to tell them which animals carry the best genes and use them to decide which animals to use for breeding.)

Dr. Capper is a big proponent of using technologies to increase the amount of food each animal produces, including feeding animals in feedlots as well as utilizing antibiotics, hormones, and beta agonists. These have such a positive impact on productivity that one cow raised using them would produce enough extra beef to feed seven children with school lunches for a whole year! Some of these technologies are banned in Europe, but that decision results in 244 million metric tons of extra beef that must be imported to European countries each year.

Many people think that producing animals using all grass systems would be better for the environment, but that is terribly inefficient. Animals fed only grass need about 7 more months of growing time to be ready for harvest and they are about 175 pounds lighter than those fed grain. If all US beef was produced on grass, we would need 131 million more acres of land (75% of the size of Texas) and 468 billion more gallons of water (equivalent to that used by 53.1 million US households).

When you consider how large the global food supply is and how diverse the farming practices are, it’s easy to see how small changes to improve productivity can make huge differences in the amount of total food produced. Just controlling parasites in a small, 35-cow herd can result in enough extra beef to supply 19 families with their annual beef demand. Worldwide, disease in animals causes a 20% loss.

The next speaker at the symposium (really the first speaker since Jude couldn’t make it) was Dr. Frank Mitloehner. It was great to see Dr. Mitloehner at Alltech. He was a graduate student at Texas Tech when I was an undergraduate and was the teaching assistant in some of my classes. Dr. Mitloehner is now a leading researcher in animal agriculture and its impact on the environment. He uses the term ‘sustainable intensification’ when he discusses improving the impact of animal agriculture on the environment. 


Dr. Frank Mitloehner

He told us that the global population will triple in his lifetime and most of the human population growth will occur in the developing world. Farmers will have to produce enough food to feed 9 billion people by 2050 and they will have about the same or maybe a little less land than they have today. So efficiency is key. In the US, we have the most efficient food system in the world, meaning that our farmers produce the most meat, milk and eggs using fewer natural resources than anywhere else in the world. It takes 5 cows in Mexico to make the same amount of milk that one cow can produce in the US. That’s 4 more cows eating feed and hay, drinking water and pooping.

Developing countries are really far behind in animal husbandry, and that’s understandable. Dr. Mitloehner stated that the best way to improve the environmental impact of animal agriculture worldwide would be to help these developing countries produce food more efficiently. In the developed world, he says that the environmental impact could be improved by learning ways to utilize animal waste to produce energy. (Some farmers already capture the gasses from their manure to produce electricity.)

Now, we know that being more productive and producing more food is good for farmers, but some countries even take it one step further. The next speaker was Aidan Cotter from the Irish Food Board. He told us about a program in Ireland, called Origin Green that measures the carbon footprint of individual farms in Ireland and allows them to compare themselves to other farmers.



They measure the inputs and outputs of each farm and grant sustainable accreditation to farmers that are producing efficiently. Their accreditation focuses not only on carbon produced, but also measures efficiency of production, like how often the cows calve, how young they are when they have their first calf, how heavy the calves are at weaning, and how efficiently they gain. If a farmer needs a boost in efficiency, the program works with them to help them improve their farm. This accreditation is quite lucrative because beef factories pay a premium for cattle from farms that are certified as sustainable. The supermarkets that sell the beef in Europe demand beef that is produced sustainably.

During the question and answer period, Dr. Mitloehner brought up a point that I think is very important. In developed countries like the USA, 1/3 of the food we produce goes into a landfill. All the food that is wasted contributes to greenhouse gas production and the national carbon footprint, but it isn’t used. That is such a travesty. Both Dr. Capper and I have since written blog posts about food waste.

I hope this post was helpful. I really think that the impact of animal agriculture on the environment is something that is largely misunderstood. Please comment if you have any questions. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll find someone who does.

Both Dr. Capper and Dr. Mitloehner have been interviewed in the Meat Mythcrusher video series and their videos have some great insight into their research.

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Its a HUGE HUGE HUGE industry!

In my job, I have lots of great opportunities to see the inside of food processing facilities and farms that most people don’t get to see. That’s part of the fun of being a meat nerd. I am always amazed by the sheer size and scope of the industry when I get to see these facilities in action.



Mound of bacon.

 

For example, I was in a pork processing plant last summer and I was standing in the middle of the bacon slicing room. The slicers are these huge machines with circular blades like 4 feet across. They move so fast you can’t see them. They sliced pieces of bacon faster than I could count. I found a really cool  bacon slicing video on youtube.

At the plant I was visiting, I think there were six lines slicing bacon all running at the same time, at least 16 hours a day, 5 days a week. That is an incredible about of bacon. That plant harvested 19,000 pigs per day in 2011. Processors get about 15.4 lbs of cured bacon out of every hog, that’s 292,600 lbs of bacon, PER DAY, in one plant! The daily hog slaughter in the US in 2011 was 438,630 PER DAY, that’s 6.7 million pounds of bacon, PER DAY!!!  
Of course, there are 313 million people in the US and they usually eat three times a day, seven days a week. Not to even mention exports.

(See how I can get lost in the enormity of our food system! I’m just a meat head.)




A few of the 80,000 chicks on the Munyon Farm

We went on a tour of farms with some ladies a few weeks ago called Moms on the Farm Tour. Some local chicken farmers, Jared and Anita Munyon were nice enough to allow our group to tour their farm on a Saturday morning. They have four chicken houses where they raise broilers for a company called Simmons. Each of their chicken houses hold about 20,000 chickens. That’s 80,000 chickens on their farm! They will get about 5 sets of chickens each year, so this one farm produces 400,000 chickens each year. There are about 30,000 farms that raise chickens in the US, and 95% of them are family-owned like the Munyon’s Farm. Americans eat, on average about 83 pounds of chicken each year, so we need lots of them to keep us supplied in chicken nuggets, breasts, and chicken wings, over 37 billion pounds of chicken meat.




One of Vallie's beef cows. She has 13.

The beef industry is even more amazing to me because the cattle come from so many different farms in so many different places in the US. There were over 34 million calves born in 2012 and the US produced over 26 billion pounds of beef, but 90% of the beef farms in the US have fewer than 100 head and the average herd size is 44 head. That means a whole lot of people have input in the beef industry; from folks like my dad with 8 cows to the Deseret Cattle Co. in Florida with 42,000 cows. That’s right; the largest cattle ranch in the US sits between Disney World and Cape Canaveral.




Some students learning to make hotdogs.
A little slower than the commercial plants.

Then there are the hotdog numbers: It’s hard to know exactly how many hotdogs are consumed in this country, but it is estimated that Americans consume 20 billion hotdogs each year, which works out to about 70 hotdogs per person. On Memorial Day alone, US consumers will enjoy over 150 million hotdogs. That’s enough hotdogs to stretch from Washington DC to Los Angeles five times!!! During the summer time, US consumers will eat 7 billion hotdogs, or 818 each second.

 

All of this meat has to be produced by somebody. According to industry stats, the meat and poultry industries employ over 2 million workers paying them over $68 billion in wages. See what I mean about a HUGE industry?!?

When we buy our 2 or 3 pounds of meat at the grocery store or a steak a restaurant, it’s easy to forget that there are 313 million people in the US who are buying their few pounds of meat for this week, too. Our food system is huge! It’s really amazing to me that we can produce and distribute so much food each day.

It’s also sad to know that so much food is wasted each day, but that’s another day’s post.

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EUROPEAN Horse meat Scandal

Last week, a friend posted a question on facebook about horse meat found in food, and I have had a few questions asked about the horse meat scandal in Europe.

So, I’m sure lots of people are worried about horse meat and all the stories about horse meat in the news.

First, you need to know that this is a European issue. No meat in the US has been found to have horse meat in it. Ever. The chances of that happening here in the US is pretty much zero. My friend, Dr. Davey Griffin, from Texas A&M summed up why horses could never contaminate beef in the US. Here are his main reasons:

1. Horses are not slaughtered in the US. We used to slaughter them here, and all of the meat went to export markets. Even then, we never had a problem with horse meat ending up in beef, pork, or any other products.

2. The level of oversight in the US meat industry is greater than any other country. The USDA employs over 9,000 inspectors in meat, poultry, and egg processing plants all over the country. These inspectors have access to all operations in any plant that produces meat for sale.

3. The US has very strict labeling laws. Even the tiniest mislabeling violation will result in a very costly recall that could bankrupt a company. It’s not worth the risk.

4. The US doesn’t import meat from Europe or horse meat at all. We have no market for horse meat, so there is no economical reason for it to come into the country.

5. It just doesn’t make economic sense. It just wouldn’t make sense to sneak it in to a plant and mix it in beef or pork. The risk is too great.

I want to clarify that horse meat is a safe food to eat. I’ve never tried it myself, but it is regularly eaten in countries all over the world. I would probably try it, given the chance.

So, don’t worry.


Vallie loves Trigger, but she knows he's not in her hamburger.

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Aloha from the Mom at the Meat Counter




Our family recently returned from a trip to Hawaii. That’s right, Hawaii, the Big Island. I want to go back so bad that I dream about flowers and lava rocks. In fact, I’d really like to just move there. We loved it!

My sister married a guy from Hilo, HI, and we went over for a reception with his family and friends. Then, we stayed for 10 days.

Ask anyone in the meat business and they will probably tell you that one of our favorite things to explore on vacation is local food. We head to markets or grocery stores, take pictures of meals, and ask anyone that will answer us about their food. I love to check out what people eat, especially meat, and where they buy it, and how they prepare it, and what they eat with it. Anything about local food interests me.

So, needless to say, that’s what I did in Hawaii. I thought I would share some of my Hawaiian food adventures on my blog.

At the wedding reception, my new brother-in-law wanted us to experience authentic Hawaiian cuisine. We were served octopus, a tomato and raw salmon salad, and poke, which contained slightly-cooked tuna. I wasn’t very brave that day, I only tried the poke, but the pork on the main dish was very good. I became braver later and even tried Sashimi, which is uncooked Tuna. It was very good!




As a side we had these Hawaiian sweet potatoes. They are white until you cook them, and they turn purple.


After church in Arkansas, we have refreshments of banana bread or cookies. After church in Hawaii, they served sushi. I had never had sushi, but felt it would be rude to refuse, so I tried it and I was so glad I did. I really liked it!

Asian culture is very strong in Hawaii. Mark’s family is Japanese and Korean. We had many meals with them. Such wonderful people! At my parents’ house, we have silverware in a little canister like this. My new brother-in-law’s parents also had chop sticks.






Ed had coconut pancakes with Portuguese sausage at the World Famous Ken’s Pancake House. They even had coconut syrup (the white one). I tried the Guava syrup, but it was not for me.

 

We had L&L Hawaiian barbeque in Honolulu the day we went to Pearl Harbor. Hawaiian barbeque is not slow cooked like on the mainland. It was heavily seasoned, thin sliced and cooked in a skillet. We had chicken, beef ribs and beef steak. It was served with a heaping helping of rice and either garden salad or macaroni salad. So much food!

We went to a Noni fruit and cattle farm. I’ve done research with Noni fruit in ground beef. I took more pictures of Noni fruit and Noni trees than anything. More about that in another blog post.

 

Mixed-breed cattle in Hawaii, like these, are called Poi dogs
These cattle eat grass and the Noni fruit from the trees. The Noni farmer loves it because the cows keep the trees pruned so it’s easier to harvest the fruit.

At the Noni farm, we also learned about Korean Natural Farming. I am going to do some more research on the subject. It was very intriguing.

 

I am not normally a big grass-fed beef gal, but this was delicious!

 

Our new friends from the Noni farm shared home-grown avocados, papaya, and tangelos (a cross of an orange and a tangerine). And, of course, a Noni fruit.

We always visit the grocery store when we travel. We head right to the meat case and see how things look.

Paniolo’s are Hawaiian cowboys. This store was up in the cattle-ranching area of the Big Island, near the Parker Ranch which is the fifth largest ranch in the US.

Hawaiian meat counters look a lot like those on the mainland, but remember that most of the red meat has traveled thousands of miles.

A more local choice was Big Island Beef that is raised right on the island.

Chicken feet are very popular in Asian cultures. I had never seen them in the meat case, though.

Beef casing. I guess for making sausage. 

Pigs feet. I have seen these on the mainland.





Chop Sui!

Beef tongue. I’ve seen this one on the mainland, too.



Pork tails.

 



Pork intestine. I had never seen it quite like this before.

Of course, loads and loads of fish.

  

It's not a great picture, but, yes, that is an octopus… in the grocery store.

 

 

We went fishing and Dad caught a Mahi Mahi. We gave most of the meat to the boat crew, but we tried some. It was really good!

This is the captain cleaning our fish. He and the other crew members were taking little bites of the raw fish right there. We were not that brave.

I know this post has been quite different from most my previous posts, but I really enjoyed our trip. We learned so much and had such a wonderful time. I am planning a trip to Florida in a few weeks. I’m sure I’ll have some pictures of food from that trip, too.

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Pig housing: gestation stalls

What if I told you that twice a day, I tie my four-year-old to a chair and leave her there for an hour?

 

No matter how she pleads or cries or protests, she has to be tied down. Some days I strap her to a chair for 9 hours or more.

 

Before you call Child Protective Services, think about a car seat. It is against the law for me to transport my small child anywhere without strapping her into a car seat. She may not like it, but its best for her.

 

Everyone understands the dangers of not using car seats. No one will argue that they are not needed to keep our children safe. People understand how dangerous car wrecks can be. We haven’t always used them (my parents weren’t strapped in car seats), but people now agree that they are needed to keep kids safe.




Happy kid... tied to a chair



People don’t know much about pig farming. 

 

Most people think of Wilbur or Babe when they think of pigs on farms. Cute little pink pigs that make smart-alecky remarks to the sheep. But, that’s not reality. Real pigs are much different.

 

• Did you know that grown sows (momma pigs) can weigh as much as 500 pounds?
• They are huge animals. They may stand 4 feet tall.
• They can be very dangerous animals. Pig farmers can tell very scary stories about a pig hurting or even killing someone.

There has been a lot of news in social media and on the internet about gestation stalls, or maternity pens, used in the pork industry. Several food companies and restaurants have declared that they will be phased out in the next few years and some states have even passed legislation banning them.

Most people know very little about pork production and why gestation stalls are used. People see pictures and hear terrible stories about farmers ‘abusing’ pigs and think, “Wow, how can we let this happen?” The problem is that we are not hearing the whole story. So, I decided to write a post about them, to help explain.

What are gestation stalls?

Gestation stalls are small pens that farmers put sows (momma pigs) in while they are pregnant. They provide each pig with a specific amount of food and all the water she wants, but there is not a lot of room for her to move around. They can lie down, but not turn around. They are artificially inseminated (bred to the boar) in those pens and stay there until they are about to have their babies. Then they move to a different type of pen.




Photo courtesy of Standing Oaks Enterprises.



A friend of mine who is a pig farmer in Ohio sent me these pictures of pigs in gestation stalls on his farm, Standing Oaks Enterprises. You can check out his blog at Acorns for Thought.

Why do farmers use them?

First, they use them to protect the pigs from each other. Just like people, pigs pick on each other. If you have a group of pigs together in a pen, they will fight to establish a hierarchy, to determine who is the boss. In the case of sows, some will become ‘bully sows’ and will literally fight and pick on inferior sows until they are physically separated or one dies. These pigs stand waist-high and may weigh as much as 400 or even 500 pounds. A 200-lb man is no match for them. Fighting sows are very dangerous.

Second, farmers must control how much feed the pigs eat. Also like people, pregnant sows are very hungry. But, unlike most people, they don’t know to control how much they eat to keep from getting obese. If allowed to eat all they wanted, the pigs would be morbidly obese, they would shorten their lifespan, and it would be wasteful. If the sows were mixed, some sows would hog (no pun intended) all the feed and overeat, while others would starve. So keeping them separate allows the farmer to feed each pig exactly what she needs.

  




Photo courtesy of Standing Oaks Enterprises.


Another pic from Standing Oaks. You can see the pigs feed in bins above their stalls.

Since I've been working on this post, I participated in a radio show with a pig farmer from Missouri, Chris Chinn. She was asked about gestation stalls and had a couple of points I wanted to share. She said that her farm used to use group housing and that the bully sows ate too much and had big babies and trouble in labor. She also said that the weaker sows had small, unthrifty babies. When they switched to gestation stalls, they found that they used less medicine because the sows didn't injure one another fighting.

Right before the sow has her babies, the farmer will move her into a farrowing crate. These are pens that are large enough for the sow to stand up and lie down, but she has to do it slowly. Remember these sows can weigh as much as 500 pounds. Their piglets may only weigh 3 or 4 pounds. They can walk soon after they are born, but not very well. If the momma pig lies down too quickly, she could squish her babies.



This photo is from Flikr, used with permission

This is a picture of a sow with her babies in a farrowing crate. See how little they are.

Research shows that there are advantages and disadvantages of using gestation stalls. One study gave pigs the choice of remaining in a group pen or in a gestation stall and found that the pigs preferred to stay in the stalls most of the time. In a video of a farm in Indiana, the farmer has European-style gestation crates, where the pigs can choose to go in or out of the stalls. He says they stay in their stall over 90% of the time.

In response to all the pressure from food companies, some farmers have removed their gestation stalls and changed their barns to group housing. Others have installed European-style pens that give pigs a choice of where they can be.

Big changes in animal housing need to happen slowly. Don’t think that we can just ban stalls and walk away feeling good about our animal welfare practices. Pigs and people will suffer if we don’t find acceptable alternatives.


The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) put together a task force to address sow housing that included several vets and a representative from HSUS. The task force concluded that any sow housing systems had advantages and disadvantages, and that farmers and animal scientists should work together to retain the advantages of the current systems and improve on them.

I hope that veterinarians, farmers and food companies can work together to determine what is truly best for pigs. I don’t think anyone has an easy answer right now. Even the animal welfare experts say that there are no easy answers when it comes to housing pigs.

I think this quote from Dr. Temple Grandin is very meaningful, “Nature is cruel, but we don’t have to be.” She said it many times. Animals are cruel to each other. Farmers do their best to keep animals happy and healthy. Just like parents with car seats.

Here are a few more resources about gestation stalls and pig housing.

· A good Q and A about gestation stalls and their history.
· A nice video about modern hog farming, including gestation stalls.
· A good video from Humane Watch about pigs and maternity pens.
· The report from the AVMA task force on sow housing.

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More about beef farming



 This is me on the bus on our
Moms on the Farm tour.

A few weeks ago, I worked with a group of ladies in agriculture to host the Moms on the Farm tour. About 30 ladies attended a tour of a dairy and a beef farm, and then returned to campus for some cooking demonstrations by the Arkansas Cattlewomen. We plan to repeat the event in the springtime and improve it. There were lots of great questions and the ladies were really interested to learn about where their food comes from. All the questions and interest have become a great resource for my blog posts.




 Mrs. Marsha Hedge talking to the ladies about
her beef farm during Moms on the Farm tour.

We visited a single-mom, beef farmer, Mrs. Marsha Hedge, who has about 40 cows. She used to have over 100 cows, but because of the drought this past summer, she had to sell about 60% of her herd. So, now she is working off the farm part-time and going to school part-time to get her teaching certificate. Most beef farms have circumstances similar to hers. Ninety percent of beef farms in the US have fewer than 100 cows, and the average size of a US beef farm is about 44 cows. Most beef farmers have to work off the farm or have some other type of income to make a living, or their spouses do.

Anyway, Marsha raises the calves from her cows until they are weaned and she sells them to another farmer who will either take them to grow some more on green pasture or to a feedlot to eat grain. This seemed to surprise the ladies on the tour that the beef cattle from the farms around Northwest Arkansas don’t go directly to slaughter. One lady wanted to buy a calf from Marsha to slaughter and another asked if she sold her beef to WalMart. Marsha doesn’t have any calves that are the right age or size for slaughter.

As a host, I should have done a better job explaining that the beef industry is segmented. Cattle sold for beef production may have several owners in their lifetime. I wrote a whole post about the beef industry in February with lots of facts and figures, but I didn’t talk about the different kinds of beef farms in the US.


What are these different types of farms?

1. First, you have beef farms that raise calves to be sold as bulls and heifers (young females) to other farmers. These are called seedstock or purebred farms. Their cows and bulls may cost crazy amounts of money, but they hope to raise animals that will be in demand by other farmers to buy to improve their herds. Most of the time, they only have one or two breeds (like Angus or Simmental), and they specialize in genetic traits that other farmers want. They may have really lean animals or cattle that raise calves with lots of tasty marbling. Other traits are important to farmers, too, like growing fast and having small calves so the cows don’t have trouble in labor. There are books and websites full of numbers reporting these traits of purebred cattle. A knowledgeable farmer can evaluate these figures to buy a bull or a heifer that will improve traits in his or her herd.



This is a picture of my husband,
 Ed, exhibiting one of our
purebred heifers at a fair

If you go to the fair, the farmers that you see exhibiting are usually purebred farmers. They bring their animals to the fairs to show them off to other breeders and to potential buyers.

Most of the 'fluffy cows' you see on the internet are actually very expensive purebred bulls.

2. Second, you have cow-calf farmers. Marsha, the farmer we visited on our tour, is in this category. She bought bulls from a purebred farmer and bred them to her cows. She keeps the best of her heifers (girl calves) to go back to the cow herd, but she castrates her bull calves to become steers, and the steers and most of her heifers go to market to become beef.




 These are some of Marsha's cows.
Her bull is the solid red one on the left.
He is from a purebred breeder.
He actually looks a lot like our bull.

Like most cow-calf producers, Marsha’s cows are cross-bred, or a mix of several different breeds. In the industry, we call them 'commercial' cows. Also like most cow-calf farmers, Marsha uses grass growing in her pastures to feed her cows. She buys them hay and some other nutritional supplements, when the grass isn’t enough for them, but she wants them to eat grass as much as they can. Cattle are great at using grass to grow and make protein.


Marsha weans her calves off their mothers at about 500-600 pounds, which is about 6 to 7 months of age. Then she sells them to one of the next two types of beef operations.

3. The third type of beef farm is a stocker farm. These farmers buy weaned calves and let them grow. Sometimes they eat grass and sometimes they feed them grain, whichever is most economical for them at the time. The Peterson Brothers of I’m Farming and I Grow It fame, have a stocker cattle farm. They buy cattle that weigh 400-500 pounds and feed them until they weigh 800 to 900 pounds.

4. The fourth type of farm is the feeder or the feedlot, like the one owned by Anne and her family over at Feedyard Foodie. Here, cattle are fed grain in addition to hay or other forage and supplements. Feedlots will feed cattle until they are fat enough to harvest. They are usually only there for about 4 to 6 months. In the meat business, when cattle are fat, we say that they are ‘finished,’ meaning that they are ready to go to the processing plant. Finished cattle may weigh anywhere from 1000 to 1400 pounds, some even more.


In the US, people like to eat grain-finished beef. We prefer the taste and tenderness associated with it. I know that not everyone likes it, and there is beef from cattle that have only been fed grass available to buy for those who prefer it that way.





 Cattle in a covered feedlot in Michigan.
Notice that they are eating a
chopped-up mix of grain and hay.

In the western US, feedlots are huge, outdoor facilities, but I visited a cattle covered feeding operation in Michigan on a trip with students a couple of years ago. You can see the cattle are eating a chopped up mixture of grain and forage.


The meat processors send buyers to the feedlots to buy the cattle once they are ready. Then the cattle are sent to the processing plant for harvesting.

Now, lots of farms may be any combination of these segments. For instance, our family has some purebred cattle that we raise bulls and heifers for sale, and we have some commercial cows that just raise calves for market. So we are kind of a mix of the first two. Some farmers may have cows that raise calves and have a stocker section of the farm, too, especially if they have lots of green grass. Farmers have to figure out what works best for them considering the nutrients available and the market for cattle.

So, these calves that we saw at Marsha’s grazing in the fields with their mothers in Northwest Arkansas will probably be sold soon. Then, they may spend a few months grazing and growing on a stocker farm in Oklahoma, and then be sold to a feedlot in the panhandle of Texas. Once they are fat, they may be sold to a processing plant in Kansas and their beef may go to any and all parts of the US. Not only do the calves have several owners throughout their lifetime, they have also probably traveled several hundred miles.

I hope that you understand a little more about the beef industry, and the next time you are buying beef at the store or eating a juicy steak, that you will know that a little more about the path that got the beef to your plate. 

Please feel free to ask any other questions you may have about beef or cattle.

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