Bavette Steaks from Carman Ranch

Cory Carman grew up in the Wallowa valley in eastern Oregon, the fourth generation on her family’s cattle ranch. On the wall in her office, she has a map of the surrounding land. She can point out which plots were purchased by her great-grandfather a century ago, and chart how the land was later split between uncles and cousins. Her grandmother, who lived ninety years on the ranch, probably knew the area better than anyone. As Cory describes it, “She had a profound knowledge of our land; where the water pooled when it rained, when the elk moved down, the hidden draws where the cows hid.”

Cory didn’t intend to follow in her grandmother’s footsteps and become a rancher.

Instead she left home, got a degree in environmental policy at Stanford, then spent a few years working on Capitol Hill and in LA. But fifteen years ago, she came home for a summer and saw that the ranch was struggling. She had always thought of the ranch as a sort of retirement project, but she saw that if she didn’t step up then, it might soon go under.

When she took the reins, Carman Ranch, like practically every other cattle ranch in Wallowa county (and in the US), relied on conventional methods. That included treating the grasses the cattle ate with plenty of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. When the calves were weaned—at about nine months old—they’d be sold at auction, then trucked off to feedlots. As Cory took stock of the situation, it was clear to her that those systems were unsustainable. The prairie grasses on the ranch were receding, and every year it was getting harder to support the herd of 300 cattle. At college Cory had done a work-study project on grass-fed beef; at the time, she only found 50 ranches attempting it in the US. Nevertheless, she felt passionately enough about it to convince her family to give it a shot.

Producing grass-fed beef is first and foremost about producing great grass.

The new system would use no fertilizers, limited irrigation, and regular, methodical movement of the herd onto small patches of grass, grazing the animals the way grasslands evolved with herds of elk or buffalo.

“When I first moved back and started changing the way we raised cattle on the ranch, my grandmother was really disappointed. She had grown up in pre-industrialized agriculture, and she saw a lot of the changes that happened during her life as a sign of progress. When I stopped using fertilizer and chemicals, she felt like we were going backwards,” Cory says. But before too long under Cory’s management, the grass bounced back, lush and bountiful.

The grass was only one part of the equation. The point of growing great grasses is to harness their nutrients via great beef. Doing so requires a deep knowledge of both grass and cattle. Cory can tell you all about the various components of grasses, and which parts contain more proteins or more carbohydrates, and how those components change as the grass grows. She uses that knowledge to put the right cattle on the right pastures. Younger cattle need more protein to build bones and muscle, so they benefit from grazing on younger grasses. As grass grows older and taller the proteins tend to die away, making those grasses better for older cattle that need more carbohydrates to help them put on fat. And all cattle do best on the richer, more varied grasses of the summer. When grass-fed cows are brought to market while the grass has little nutritional value, the beef is much tougher and chewier. Cory’s cattle spend their whole lives outdoors on Carman Ranch, eating the lush, bountiful prairie grasses. She only brings them to market between May and November, when the grasses are at their richest and the beef is at its most flavorful.

The results speak for themselves.

The beef is tender and juicy. The flavor tends to be a little earthier and more mineral, with a huge, robust beefiness. And it’s won over even the toughest of critics. “After I’d been back on the ranch for several years,” Cory remembers, “my grandmother finally looked at me and said, ‘you know, you’re doing it the way my mom did it.’ That was the best compliment she could have ever given us.”

There’s a growing demand for meat from animals raised in better conditions. What hasn’t necessarily grown is our knowledge about what exactly makes those conditions “better” and how we can find the information to make informed buying decisions. Here are my top recommendations for what to look for.

My number one question is: Do the animals have enough space?

Confined animals get sick more easily because diseases spread quickly when animals are kept close together, so the solution is to pump them full of antibiotics. Confined animals fight with each other, so the solution is to physically alter them by doing something like clipping their teeth or beaks and docking their tails – they’re still going to fight, but now they’ll do less damage to each other. I could go on – the problems of packing too many animals in too little space are many.

You could ask about antibiotics and physical alterations and a bunch of other details. Or, you could ask if the animals have enough space to live as they please – ideally, outdoors on pasture. In some parts of the U.S., that may not be possible year round – harsh Michigan winters, for instance, aren’t the best for many animals. But asking “are the animals raised on pasture?” is a great place to start a conversation.

One note of caution: watch out for answers that dodge the question, like “Our animals have access to pasture” (translation: they live indoors and likely never go outside).

What labels are useful?

When you can’t ask your farmer or retailer directly, what should you look for on the label? A lot of claims sound good. However, many labeling terms don’t actually mean much for animal welfare, including common ones like Farm Fresh, All Natural, Hormone Free for poultry and pork, Cage Free, and Free Range. Even Organic means less than you might assume: it requires animals get organic-certified feed and prohibits antibiotics, but specifies little about how the animals are raised.

A few certifications that do indicate high welfare standards are the Global Animal Partnership (GAP), Certified Humane, and Animal Welfare Approved (AWA). For an in-depth look into dozens of labeling terms, check out the Resources section of agreenerworld.org.

You are what you eat. Your mom told you that. Turns out it’s true for farm animals, too. When animals live on pasture, they eat a more varied diet of different grasses, herbs, and flowers. The diet has an enormous impact on the flavor of meat it produces.

Perhaps the most famous example is Ibérico de Bellota pork. Black Ibérico hogs root and roam in the oak forests of southern Spain. All year, they chow down on the roots and twigs and grubs on the forest floor. In the autumn, when acorns (“bellotas” in Spanish) fall, they gobble them up like crazy. A pig will eat as much as twenty pounds of acorns a day. Ibérico pork is always delicious, but the nut-heavy diet has an incredible effect on the meat: the flavor is deep, rich, earthy, intensely savory. And the texture is luscious. The fat practically melts into a silky, savory puddle on your tongue. Nearly all of the Ibérico de bellota pork you find on the market is cured—ham is what you’ll find most often. But once in a blue moon you may find fresh Ibérico de bellota. Either way, it’s an exceptional eating experience.

Of course, acorns aren’t the only food that give flavor to meat.

Just the opposite. Everything that is fed to an animal impacts its flavor. So, when the meat industry took chickens and pigs and packed them into enormous barns and started feeding them a standardized diet of corn and soy and antibiotics, that bland, homogenized feed had its impact on the flavor of the meat. It dumbed it down, flattening the rainbow of flavors to a monotone. The same of true of beef: whether the animal finished its life eating grass on the range or corn in a feedlot makes a huge difference in the flavor.

All beef cattle start their lives eating grass.

For the first seven or eight months of its life, a calf will live out on pasture with its mother, drinking milk and eating grass. It’s what happens next that determines whether a cow is “grass fed” or not. Grass fed cattle will spend their entire lives out on pasture eating grass. That accounts for only a tiny percentage of the cattle out there. Nearly all of them are trucked to crowded feedlots. At the feedlot they’ll spend another half a year or so fattening up. In the best case, like with organic beef (which is usually feedlot finished), they’ll be given their fill of certified organic grains like corn and soy. However, the norm for most feedlots is to dole out a diet of corn, growth hormones, antibiotics, and whatever agricultural byproducts the Big Agriculture industry can get away with, like chicken poop (really). But don’t worry, you can rest easy because at least the FDA has put bans on feeding cattle the really bad stuff, like byproducts of other cattle. (Until 1997, feedlot cattle were routinely fed things like blood meal, a high-protein powder made of dried animal—including cow—blood. Then somebody figured out that feeding cow byproducts to cows was a primo way to spread Mad Cow Disease. Incidentally, there’s no rule against feeding cow byproducts to chickens. When cows are then fed chicken poop, they may still indirectly be eating cow leftovers.)

A hundred years ago, no one would have dreamed of feeding grain to cattle. If left to themselves they don’t touch the stuff; cattle don’t graze in corn fields. Besides, grass grew in abundance and it was free for the grazing. But around the middle of the 20th century, a few factors conspired to make grain finishing an enticing option. One was the new subsidies from the federal government given to grow corn, which inspired a glut of corn on the market and drove down prices, making it economical to compete with “free” grass. Another was the increasing demand from new fast food restaurants for a steady, year-round supply of beef.

Grass fed beef is as seasonal as a summer tomato.

A century ago, fresh beef was a seasonal product. With a regulated diet of corn, the cows receive the same nutrition all year round, making the quality of the beef more uniform all year round. But when cows eat grass the quality of the beef is dependent upon the quality of the grass. During the winter or the dry season when the grass isn’t doing so well, the cows don’t do so well, either. When grass-fed cows are brought to market while the grass has little nutritional value, the beef is much tougher and chewier. One key to finding consistently good grass fed beef is finding a rancher who will only take their cattle to slaughter when the grass is in season. That’s exactly what Cory Carman of Carman Ranch in Oregon does. Between about December and May when the grasses aren’t great, she doesn’t produce any fresh beef. When she does produce beef in the summer, it is hugely flavorful.

Knowing that a cow was grain or grass fed isn’t by itself enough to know that the beef will taste better. In either scenario, the beef can end up being mediocre or very, very good. It depends on the work done by the rancher to manage the cattle. That said, grain fed beef is likely to be more consistent all year round, because the farmer can decide exactly what to feed the cattle any day of the year. It tends to be a bit sweeter, and it has a richness from all of the fat that the animal puts on. Sometimes that fat can be enough to feel like it coats the inside of your mouth. Grass fed beef will vary more across the year depending on the quality of the grass. When a rancher manages their pastures carefully and only sends their cattle to market when the grass (and thus the cow) is in peak condition, the beef is tender and juicy, and the flavor tends to be a little earthier and more mineral, with a huge, robust beefiness. That flavor will vary a bit depending on the season: spring beef tends to be a bit lighter, while autumn beef will be a bit more rich. The more diverse the grasses, the more complex the flavor.