Home Grown Beef

I was bundled up and still not as comfortable as the cattle looked today. They were half dozing, dreamily chewing their cud splayed out indifferent to the rock hard ground. They are getting more and more hay, but the livestock got a lot of their feed from stockpiled (set aside and saved) grass late this fall. Often we get wet weather in the fall and the big cloven hooves squish and beat up the sod but not this year. The flip side of the coin is that we need to get moisture by next May to launch the grass and other plants once again.

Robert Burns’ poem about plowing up a mouse nest. I edited out enough 1600s Scottish brogue to get you through it. Most of “Ode to a Mouse”:

I truly sorrow man’s dominion, has broken nature’s social union, and justifies the ill opinion that makes thee startle, at me thy poor earth born companion and fellow mortal.

Thou saw the fields lay bare and waste, and weary winter coming fast, and cozy here beneith the blast, thou thought to dwell; Till crash, the cruel colter past, throw out thy cell.

Back in the early years of ranching in the U.S., longhorn cattle were raised to 3-5 years old and then brought east to places like Chicago for processing. After the introduction and spread of the “British breeds” like Shorthorn, Angus, and Hereford, and through managing for better grasses, the cattle would finish on grass at about two years old. Then, in the 1950s and ‘60s most cattle started getting a regimen of grain fed the last 30 to 60 days of finishing, and cattle finished at about 18 months old.

I'm writing this near the autumn equinox where day length is getting short fast. We are loosing about a minute every morning, and loosing about two minutes every evening. At the spring equinox it will be just the opposite, we will be gaining a few minutes of day light every morning, and gaining only a minute in the evening. The uneven gains and loses are due to the 24 hour clock day only matching the solar day on average through the year. A solar day is the time from the sun at its zenith one day until the zenith the next day.

OMEGA-3 is a group of fatty acids. Man was designed to maintain healthy with a diet that had a near balance of Omega-3’s, with another group of fatty acids, the Omega-6’s. Modern grain based, highly processed diets, high in cooking oils and fast foods, often have about 20 times more Omega-6, then Omega–3 in them. The Omega-3 that historically was especially well balanced in meat, and milk, which is now out of whack, because milk and beef cattle are all raised on grain.

The SOILS here in South Dakota are geologically young, being from the most recent Wisconsin glacial advance. They are still rich in many of the trace minerals that today have been leached out of older more weathered soils. The cattle get supplemental salt and minerals, but much is provided to the plants by the soil and of course from the plants to the animals. This method worked for several thousand years before commercial feedlots and we feel that it is still the best way.

There has been a large portion of all beef breeds in the U.S. that have been selected for high performance on hot high grain rations. I use cattle that are moderate framed older style genetics, that do well on just forages. Small groups that have survived the shift to mass-produced feed lot beef during the past 50 years. Typical cattle today have been bred to produce the most dollars in an industrial system. The ideal feedlot type beef animal is not the best grassfed animal.