Why I'm a Grass Fed Rancher by Bill Kurtis

Why I’m a Grass-Fed Beef Rancher

America’s cattle have been fed grain for so long, generations of people believe that’s how they evolved. Marbled, corn-fed steaks have been marketed into our consciousness as the best we could eat.

Then I learned that Mother Nature didn’t plan it that way. Grass is their natural diet. Corn makes them fatter faster. The fat makes them tasty.

The price we pay is in nutrition.

It seemed like a good time to return the modern bovine to its rightful home—the pasture.
No one was brave enough to tell me it wasn’t going to be easy. Many ranchers had tried to go back to the old ways of finishing their cattle on grass, but they failed because the meat was tough or they couldn’t figure out a way to fatten the animals when winter turned the grass brown. Or they couldn’t find a market. Ranchers raise cattle; they’re not, as a rule, salesmen, promoters and advertising executives.
The grassy road to success was littered with broken cowboy dreams.

Still, as the sun came up over the big blue stem east of my ranch house a year ago, I felt the entrepreneur’s ghostly spirit set my skin to tingling. And I knew instinctively—times had changed.
The first sign was Dr. Allen Williams and his partner Dr. Matt Cravey. Like explorers Stanley and Livingstone, they had ‘found each other’ during a mutual quest to locate the perfect grass-fed animal, one with genes that made it tender, tasty and able to fatten quickly on nothing but grass, just the way those first English breeds from the Mayflower did.

Most of those original genetic profiles had been scrambled out of existence when the corn tsunami swept away those lovely, salad-bar days in the pasture sixty years ago.
But Williams and Cravey were relentless, searching herd after herd for beef’s holy grail. Lesser men would have folded, discouraged by too many bad rib-eyes in the small, dusty watering holes of Montana.
But not this duo. They were following a vision, dreaming that a few of those genetically perfect grass-feeders had survived and were actually grazing on little islands of forage dotting the American pasture where they had been stranded by the giant wave of corn.

But how would they know? There was no bovine DNA databank to find a match. Still, modern science would provide the Eureka moment.

Backing his pick-up into the corral, Dr. Williams lowers the tailgate and pulls out an ordinary looking computer attached to a long cable that connects to a…wand. Yes, an ultrasound machine.
That in itself is nothing to raise an eyebrow. It’s what comes on the screen that drops the jaw of any leather-faced old-timer in the yard.

There, in its digital-age glory, is a picture of a rib-eye muscle on a living animal. Filtered through the carefully programmed brain of Drs. Williams and Cravey, the process produces a consistent judgment of tenderness. Every time.

Like Alexander slicing through the Gordian knot, it cut the primary obstacle standing in the way of the grass-fed beef revolution—how to consistently deliver quality.

With the right genetic heritage it was clear that pure grass-fed and grass-finished cattle could be as tender as the best prime beef.

It was enough to begin planning a start-up, the Tallgrass Beef Company. To our surprise, everyone we talked with said "what took you so long?"

But there was another unknown that had to be answered before full launch; the matter of taste.
We gathered some potential investors at one of Chicago’s premier steakhouses, Harry Caray’s. Out came a tray of tasting samples: a filet, rib-eye, hamburger and New York strip, carefully cut into small portions so that the eight people sitting around the table could taste each piece of meat. Just like a Napa wine tasting.

The hush was agonizing. They chewed slowly as if savoring the body of a smooth burgundy.
Then, from the other side of the table came a comment. “I’ve traded cattle on the Mercantile for 40 years, and this is the best steak I’ve ever tasted.”

Everyone concurred. And everyone invested based on tenderness and taste as pure as the prairie.
We decided then and there that we didn’t have to make any apologies because our meat was “grass-fed." We now put it up against prime as an alternative on the beef menu offering the original taste of deep beef flavor, a steak that you want to spend time with.

To be truly “grass-fed and grass-finished”, we knew we’d have to be all-natural. Eliminating artificial hormones and antibiotics to create a healthier product was not a hard decision. From all the uproar about them—even a ban by Europe on our hormone-injected meat—their banishment seemed inevitable anyway.

Although we knew that a rising tide of consumers were searching for natural items, we were surprised at how many consumers were already choosing products with labels promoting Omega-3 fatty acids and CLAs, something unheard of just a few years prior.
Silently, they were seeking out healthy alternatives and driving a brand new trend. Organic sections in super-markets were increasing at a rate of 20% a year and rising. The Boomers had entered the food revolution.

Our timing was accidentally…perfect. But there’s more.

In addition to catching the wave of the natural food movement, I was making other discoveries about grass-fed beef that were truly amazing.

Grass-fed and finished beef transforms the much-maligned “red meat” that doctors take off their heart patient’s plates into a health food. As we say, “Imagine your doctor saying, eat more beef!”

As an investigative reporter, I put on the old green eye shade and plunged into the worlds of medical research and molecular biology with a properly skeptical eye.
The first thing I learned is that essential fatty acids (EFAs) have become the darling of the health food business.

Paul Stitt, a biochemist, told a Canadian conference in 1988 that 200 studies are published per month on fatty acids and to date, more than 350,000 have been catalogued on lipids and fats. Two fatty acids in particular have become celebrities, Omega-3 and Omega-6. They function down at the cellular level to regulate what goes in and what is kept out of cells. They help keep cell membranes fluid and flexible.
In 1982, Dr. J.R. Vane shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work in showing how the metabolism of Omega-3 fatty acids helped to prevent heart problems.

Without the proper balance of these two fatty acids, cells can become stiff, unhealthy, and full of problems. Since so many diseases, like cancer, start at the cellular level, researchers have targeted EFAs for extreme study.

Omega-3 fatty acids are found primarily in green leafy vegetables, flax and oils extracted from cold-water fish like mackerel, salmon, tuna or cod. It is also found in animals that graze in green pastures, just like the wild game Early Man ate millions of years ago.
Iceland is currently marketing its population’s longevity as the oldest in the world, thanks to a diet of

Omega-3 that comes from cold water fish caught off its shoreline. Like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz who locked up from a lack of oil, the Omega-3 fatty acids keep the fish from stiffening up in the frigid waters. And they do the same for our cells.

And of course, you may have heard about the headline-making 2002 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association which concluded that eating fish (with Omega-3s) once per month or more can reduce the risk of ischemic stroke in men.

One final example. Dr. Barry Sears, who wrote The Zone, believes homo sapiens avoided extinction and became a more cognitive being, able to conquer the world, by finding a food source high in Omega-3s. It was shellfish along the shores of Lake Turkana in the East African Rift Valley. The shellfish ate algae and accumulated algae-derived fats in higher concentrations that were, in turn, full of Omega 3s. These fats supplied the brain with blood glucose, and they laid the foundation for a new species: modern humans.

Today, everyone agrees that these fatty acids are called “essential” for a reason. They are absolutely necessary for a body to function properly. They concur on something else. We can’t create EFAs inside our bodies, on our own. The only way we can get this ‘stuff of life’ is from what we eat. Water and air are good examples. If we don’t get enough of those ‘essentials,’ we know what happens pretty fast.
Researchers are suspicious of what is happening by not getting enough fatty acids. Because over the last hundred years, EFAs, like Omega-3, have disappeared from the typical American diet.
If these essential fatty acids (EFAs) are absolutely necessary, and if they are no longer found in our diet or are far out of balance, then aren’t we killing ourselves?

Let’s face it: our diet has changed. Industrialized mass food production, ocean pollution, and refining of supermarket food has caused a severe deficiency in Omega-3 fatty acids in our diet while increasing the fatty acid Omega-6, the Darth Vader among the EFAs.

Dr. Donald Rudin, in his book Omega-3 Oils, compared the Omega-3 deficiency to the B-vitamin deficiency diseases of pellagra and beriberi of the early 1900s.
Human beings evolved with Omega-6 and Omega-3 in a 1:1 ratio, eating a diet of nuts, plants and wild game. The modern ratio can often be 10:1, even 20:1 Omega-6 to Omega-3. That's a bad balance, considering that Omega-6 can cause tumors, chronic inflammation, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, arthritis and auto-immunity when not held in check by the Omega-3 fatty acid.

A good case study is the American beef industry.

I suppose we should have figured it out. Corn is as unnatural for cattle as fast food is for humans. Cows are ruminants that have evolved multi-chambered stomachs to break down cellulose from grass, not corn. Grain-based feeds create different bacteria within the cow’s rumen. It’s UN-natural.
We can’t put just anything we want into our mouths, or into those of the animals we eat, and expect them to magically change it into something healthy—or can we?

The out-of-balance ratio—Omega 6 to Omega 3—changes back to normal when the cattle eat grass.
An Irish study published in the Journal of Animal Science in 2000 proved that when steers are fed grass, they have a lower Omega-6 to Omega-3 ratio than steers fed concentrates.

The Irish grass-fed animals also showed a higher concentration of conjugated linoleic acid, or CLA, than grain-fed steers.

CLA? Don’t tell me it’s another miracle ingredient. Although it’s still at an early stage of research, there are indications that it may have remarkable curative properties.
Chemist Darshan S. Kelley, at the University of California, Davis says of CLA, “It has stimulated animals' immune systems, reduced body fat, protected against certain kinds of cancer, and improved cardiovascular health.” To be fair, he also says that those were animal studies and recommends that human studies should proceed.

I liken this period to Jacques Cousteau’s invention of scuba that opened the world of underwater exploration.

Molecular biology has allowed us to explore the smallest units of life, and we’re just beginning to learn how they work.

Big, juicy, corn-fed prime steaks won’t go out of style. The grain-fed model has been all America could get for the last sixty years, and steak lovers have developed a taste for it.
But as boomers swell into the meat sections of supermarkets, as young mothers read the labels before they serve their children, and as young people, armed with the knowledge coming from the wealth of new nutritional discoveries, search for a change in the food they eat, they will find grass-fed and finished beef.

In creating the Tallgrass Beef Company we felt our consumers should know what we are trying to do and what we stand for.

We let our cattle do the talking.
I am Tallgrass Beef.
I am the future of America’s Beef.
I am a pure, natural product of the Great American Prairie; the best, healthiest and most delicious brand of grass fed raised beef you can buy.
I come from rare genetic stock whose historic origins are verified and fully traceable. Insuring that you always enjoy delicious, healthy beef.
I come from cattle that spent their lives on open range or improved pastures eating only natural forages. No synthetic growth hormones, animal by-products or antibiotics were ever involved in my production.
I come from cattle that were never forced to eat grain, nor spend any part of their life in a feed lot.
I come from ranchers and farmers who treat all their animals in a humane manner from birth to harvest.
I come from good stewards of the land—independent ranchers and farmers who raise cattle in a time-honored manner that sustains and enriches the environment.
I taste as good as the best prime beef, but I am better for your health.
I am Tallgrass Beef.
As for me, that’s why I’m a grass-fed rancher.

Bill Kurtis