Standing Stones Family Farms exists to produce the most tender, healthful meat possible while maximizing the use of green growing forages.
The practices that set us apart from our competitors, be they other grass finished meat producers or your local corner grocery store:
Why do we limit ourselves to using only forage?
Because God made cattle to eat forage, not grain. Think about it. Cattle have naturally grazed on forages throughout history. Only in the last century did man figure out that he could put weight on cattle faster and cheaper by feeding them corn. However, in the last decade or two man has begun to figure out that converting cattle to an all grain finishing diet is not as healthy as finishing them on an all green forage diet. We now know that there are certain beneficial fatty acids in meats that have been finished using high quality forages instead of corn.
Science has recently learned that a couple of these fatty acids, Omega 3 and Omega 6 fatty acids occur in beef. Omega 6 fatty acids are undesirable and unhealthful. They cause high cholesterol and its attendant unfavorable heart health effects. On the other hand, Omega 3 fatty acids are desired.
Cattle that have been fed grain have an Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio of approximately 25 to 1. Cattle that have lived their whole life on a forage diet have an Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio of 2 to 1. It’s very difficult to get much Omega 3 into your diet naturally. Natural Omega 3 fatty acids are far more healthy and effective than taking Omega 3 in the form of a pill. Grass finished beef is a good source of natural Omega 3 fatty acids.
Lean vs. Fat
You have heard all your life that lean meat is more healthy than meat filled with fat. That is true when you are talking about grain finished meat. Don’t let all this discussion about fatty acids fool you. Grass finished beef is far leaner than the leanest cut of grain finished beef. To test this fact, buy a grain fed ribeye and fry it in a pan on the stove like your great grandmother used to do. Fry a grass finished rib eye in the pan next to it. See which one has the most grease, drippings, etc.
Grass fed or grass finished beef beats organic
Grass finished beef is more healthful than organic. Beef can be designated organic as long as it has only been fed organic food. In other words, organic beef can be finished on organic corn, which will result in high levels of unhealthy Omega 6 fatty acids. According to research performed at Utah State University, grass finished beef has 400% more Vitamin A, 300% more Vitamin E and 78% more Beta-carotene than grain fed beef. All natural grass finished beef is the way to go.
Another health benefit of well finished grass fed beef is a higher concentration of Conjugated Linoleic Acid or CLA. Lean beef and grain finished beef has almost no CLA. In animal studies, study after study has found that CLA decreases cancer, decreases body fat, decreases heart disease, increases bone density, decreases adult diabetes and increases immunity to disease.
The Hormone & Anitbiotics Debate
Why we won't use them.
While we’re on the subject of health, let’s take this opportunity to compare our techniques to those of the commercial beef industry. Virtually every steer, heifer, pig, turkey, chicken, etc. destined for a commercial feed lot will receive one or two doses of growth hormones during its life. We are told that these hormones somehow disappear before the meat gets to your plate. Now ask yourself why does each succeeding generation of our human race seem to be bigger than the last generation? On average most Americans are bigger than their parents. And their parents were bigger than their parents before them. Do you think traces of these growth hormones are getting through to us? At Standing Stones Family Farms, we never give our animals growth hormones. When God created cattle, He didn’t intend for their growth to be artificially accelerated using synthetic growth hormones.
Another treatment we never administer to our grass finished beef animals is antibiotics. You have probably read or heard that our human species is beginning to confront certain “super bugs” that do not respond to antibiotics. The reason for that is because of the excess use of antibiotics, not just in the treatment of humans but also in the treatment of animals. In many cases the antibiotics used to treat humans are only a little more refined version of the antibiotics used to treat animals. Again, if traces of those antibiotics get through to your plate, those antibiotics might not be quite as effective if later administered to you because you have been unknowingly exposed to them all your life in small doses at mealtime.
The vast majority of our animals never get sick. However, in the interest of the humane treatment of our animals, if one does get sick, we give it antibiotics if that is appropriate. However, that animal is also given a special ear tag to mark it so that its meat will never be marketed as all natural. If one of our animals receives a shot of antibiotics, it will eventually be sold through the local cattle auction barn and end up in a feedlot somewhere. Its meat will probably end up in some local grocery store meat counter.
Incidentally, most cattlemen are either in the “cow-calf” side of the cattle business or the “stocker” side of the cattle business. The cow-calf guys grow a crop of 500 pound calves once per year and then sell them at the local auction barn to another cattle man who buys weaned calves, called “stockers” and puts them out to pasture and tries to grow them as quickly as possible to 800 or 900 pounds. Then he sells them to a feedlot where they are crammed full of corn for another 90 days and then slaughtered. This leads us to discuss another difference in our operation.
Are happy cows, better cows?
We minimize the stress our animals experience. The process of jerking a calf away from his mother and taking him to a strange, loud auction barn with gates banging, people yelling, cattle bawling, etc. is a terrifying, stressful experience. Cattle lose approximately 2-5% of their weight during this experience. Anytime cattle lose weight, their meat becomes irreparably tougher than it would have been if they had not lost weight.
Cattle are much more susceptible to disease when they are stressed. Cattle are also like people in that they build up immunity to pathogens as they get older. A young calf jerked off of his mother does not have much immunity yet. When he hits that auction barn, he is hungry, thirsty, tired, scared, and lonely for his momma and stressed to the max.
The auction barn is a clearinghouse for cattle. It’s where the cattlemen take sick cattle that they don’t want any more. The auction barn is teeming with pathogens, viruses, bacteria and the like. It is a filthy, dusty place. Those little, stressed calves tend to get sick after they have been through the auction barn. It is very common for calves to get pneumonia and die after going through the auction barn. A dead or sick calf is a money loser for a stocker operator.
Believe it or not, most calves destined for your local grocery store meat counter receive a prophylactic dose of powerful antibiotics twice in their life, even though they aren’t sick. They get a preventive dose of antibiotics when they are sold off their mommas and then again when the stocker operator sells them and they get shipped to the feed yard. All of this unnecessary use of antibiotics in the human food chain has consequences. This is one of the reasons that we turned to grass finished beef for our family.
We make every effort to eliminate stress when we handle our cattle. We never yell or make sudden movements around them. We try to build our gates and corrals to minimize or eliminate clanging metal on metal. We try to never use a cattle prod to shock our animals to make them move faster.
When we wean our calves, we put the mother cows directly across the fence from the calves so that mother and calf can see each other and be near to each other as the mother’s milk is drying out and the calf is learning that he doesn’t need her milk anymore. When we are moving our cattle to a new pasture, we occasionally move them through the corrals and chute so that they learn that there is no reason to be afraid because most of the time nothing happens when they cycle through the corral.
By avoiding stress, our cattle never lose weight. If cattle lose weight, their meat will be tougher. We want tender, healthful meat for us and we want tender, healthful meat for you.
How do we do grow tender meat?
The forage "chain."
Let’s start with our forages. In order to produce the tenderest meat possible while eating only grass, the animal must be gaining weight for its entire life, preferably two pounds or more per day after he is weaned. Tender steaks and roasts require the animal to be naturally fattened on grass. Yes, notwithstanding what you have heard your entire life that all fat is bad, this may be the one time when we actually want the animal to be fat. Not morbidly obese, just naturally fat, the way God intended. A skinny, lean steer will be very tough eating.
Animals are like people in that they will only eat enough to get fat if they find the food they are eating tastes really good. Cattle spend their whole life grazing. As you might expect, they get pretty good at grazing. They look for grasses, legumes and forbs that are actively growing.
Each annual or perennial plant has a growth cycle that is keyed to the season. For example, there are winter annuals like the rye grass that some people like to overseed in their yard so that they will have a green lawn all winter and they won’t have to look at the frost killed Bermuda grass. Rye grass is an excellent cool season forage for cattle. It grows in the winter and dies in the summer. In the summer time, the Bermuda grass in your lawn is growing and the rye grass is dead. So each species of forage has a growth curve; a time of year when it is actively growing and a time of year when it is dead or dormant.
The trick to growing tender meat is to have a “forage chain” of different forages. We want to be able to move the animals we are trying to finish to a new field of a particular species of forage which is coming into its prime growth season just as the prior forage is beginning to fade past its prime time of production. At our ranch, we use a combination of Bermuda grass, fescue, rye grass, winter annuals such as wheat, barley or oats (grazing only, not to mature and harvest as grain) and native warm season prairie grasses such as Big Blue stem, Little Blue stem, Indian grass and Switch grass.
We have several fields of Max Q Tall Fescue which grows best from early October through December. By January, our fields of rye grass and winter annuals can carry the grazing requirements. By early March, the fescue, rye grass and winter annuals are all growing. By the way we have clover seeded into these fields as well. In May, the Bermuda and native warm season prairie grasses start to grow and they carry through until September and then the seasons start all over again. We have all of these pastures fenced off into separate paddocks so that we can control when and how long the cattle graze each paddock. Altogether, we have about 250 acres fenced into paddocks of 3 to 10 acres each.
Cattle love living at Standing Stones Family Farms
The cattle love living here. It is quiet, uncrowded and lush. They come galloping to us when they see us enter the field because they know that we are often about to open a gate and let them into a new, fresh pasture of lush green grass. It is a much more healthful unstressful environment than a loud, dusty, smelly feed yard crowded with cattle. Our cattle are allowed to grow naturally at their own pace on natural green growing forages.
Have you ever eaten a tough, tasteless, dry grass finished steak and been disappointed? We have, too. Probably the primary practice that sets our meat apart from that of our grass fed meat competitors is that we let our animals mature before they are harvested. Many of our competitors harvest their animals at 700 to 900 pounds when they are still calves. When a young animal has not been allowed to mature, his meat is extremely lean. The meat has not marbled. The process of marbleing takes place only after an animal has matured at over 18 months of age and over 1100 pounds of weight on the hoof. An animal’s meat marbles when the beneficial fats interlace throughout the meat. In order to be tender, juicy and flavorful, the meat has to marble. Remember, most of the beneficial nutrients in grass finished beef are in the Omega 3 fatty acids and the Conjugated Linoleic Acid. So the animal must be allowed to marble in order to result in a tasty and healthful eating experience.
So why don’t our competitors allow the animal to mature? Because it is less profitable to carry that animal the extra year it takes to allow him to mature and marble. It is much more profitable to harvest that calf in one year rather than feeding him grass for another year. Each farmer has only a finite quantity of grass to sell. A second year animal will eat over twice as much grass during his lifetime as a first year animal. Yet the second year animal will definitely not sell for twice as much as the first year animal. Therein lies the temptation to harvest the animal after only a year of life as opposed to allowing him to mature into a much finer and more healthful eating experience.