Home Grown Beef

Prairie soil before Europeans arrived on the scene was around 8% organic matter—rich, fertile soil. After years of continuous tillage and cropping, the organic matter has typically dropped under 2%, and is often 2-4 % under continuously grazed land. These numbers may seem small and differences meaningless, but the effect is large and important. The original soil’s root zone could store 2-3 times as much water as today’s soils, and the organic matter acted as a huge buffer, absorbing, releasing, or orchestrating the dance between plants and nutrients.

I get a lot of malice type requests to the blog, so if I don't recognise you, please email me. ccmillsapps@yahoo.com thanks cliff

I finally read the book Steak by Mark Schatzker cover to cover this past month. It has a lot of interesting history and trivia about beef, as well as unfolding the whole story about how we ended up with flavorless beef. Schartzker had a few memorable steaks early in his life and was driven to find out why he couldn't manage to find another. He does a lot of research and distills a lot of information gleaned from all the different segments of the meat business.

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.

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.