Spring Grass Fed Beef

 

Is spring grass fed beef the best beef? Caryl was perusing a paleo forum yesterday when she read a thread about how a grass fed milk producer was charging 2x as much for their spring milk.

And people were buying it.

Many forum participants were authoritatively stating that it was indeed the most nutritionally dense time of year for milk, and was likely to have the highest concentrations of vitamin K, among other things.

Is spring milk the best milk? Or, more germane to us, is spring beef the best beef?

To a rancher like us, it certainly feels like the best because we’re finally able to quit that expensive hay pile. It is always more economical to have the beeves harvesting their own forage rather than cutting hay, baling it, stacking it, unstacking it, un-baling it, and scattering it back on the ground from which it came so the beeves can enjoy it.

Employing steers to harvest hay is much cheaper. But for the first three weeks of putting the cattle on green spring grass, they can actually lose weight, in spite of abundant, lush forage. What’s going on?

Twenty years ago, I couldn’t believe it when Ron, the old cowpoke that we bought our first ranch from, told me about it. I had our horses turned out on the range after they didn’t want to eat hay anymore, and let them head for the rocky hills behind the ranch that were covered with a smidgeon of green.

“They’re gonna lose weight, Glenn. Might wanna lock them up and make them eat hay.”

“But that hay is money, Ron! They’ve been eating me outta house and home for 6 months! They don’t call ’em hayburners for nothin! Besides”¦green grass has gotta pack some better groceries than that old hay pile.”

“It’s all water. It’s only colored green. It’s soft feed, Glenn. There will be good hard feed in another 3 weeks or so.”

Hard feed. Other old timers I’d worked for called it that. It was the grass that made a steer gain the legendary weight gains our high altitude valleys were known for. But it didn’t show up until late June or July.

If those beeves are losing weight, they are not eating nutritious grass. It is just like us humans when we lose weight; we call it malnourishment. Or malnutrition. Mal equals bad. Bad nutrition for them means that their flesh is nutritionally poor. And that’s where we come in.

We test flavor and tenderness from a NY strip from every beef we sell online. We have always noted a slight tenderness fall-down in spring beef, probably because a loss of a little bit of marbling resulting from slight weight loss. I was thinking the other day about our testing over the past 2 months and noted that from early to mid July, we hit a slight flavor depression. Caryl noted it too. We never had consistent testing to note this before. Next year, we have plans to try something a little different to avoid the almost imperceptible decline. (Never done tweaking stuff!)

Why July? Subtract 3 weeks of aging and another one that includes travel back to the ranch, flash freezing, and inventory before we pull the testers, and that puts you smack dab in the middle of early June.

The time of washy, “soft” grass.

Hmmmm. The steaks were still really good (after all, we have a pretty high bar that we won’t sell below), but now, a month later, they are great again. Flavor is spot on, and tenderness too; both are moving into the high 8s.

This leads us into another concept”¦and possibly a future blogpost. Does flavor mean healthy? In this context, the two are certainly positively correlated, as nutrionally dense grass means healthy beeves and that likely means healthy eaters of beef.

Spring milk couldn’t be different. Given what we have observed on the ranch, Caryl’s interest was piqued, and as she typically does, she went digging for research. She found lots of people saying that spring milk was best, but only found one peer-reviewed published paper (see reference below), and it showed that spring milk was less nutritive than July milk. This actually makes sense if you think about when most native grazing animals naturally give birth- early summer, not spring. So people may be wasting their money on the “spring” milk and butter.

We couldn’t find a paper likewise about beef, though, so we’ll just have to be “authoritative” for now: If your beef doesn’t taste good, you’re probably missing the boat on wellness.

Happy Trails.

Fournier, B., et al. “Variations of phylloquinone concentration in human milk at various stages of lactation and in cow’s milk at various seasons.” The American journal of clinical nutrition 45.3 (1987): 551-558.   You can find a pdf of this study HERE.