TriCities.com
By Mac McLean -Bristol Herald Courier
Saltville, VA. — About 250 head of cattle followed Will Clark as he drove an old white pickup truck across a 1,300-acre farm his family owns between Saltville and Hungry Mother State Park.
“I’m the fifth generation of Clark to be here,” he said before stepping out of his truck and rolling back an electrified fence so the bulk of his herd could get to a fresh patch of grass that after a month of growth towered up above his waist.
The country’s cattle-producing industry has changed a lot in the five generations that Clark and his family members have run Rich Valley Grazers, which raises cattle and hogs on land in Smyth and Washington counties.
The biggest change involves a switch from raising cattle on a pasture for their entire lives to raising cattle on a pasture for part of the animals’ lives and then taking them to a feedlot where they are fed a diet of corn and grains.
But many cattle farmers have returned to that traditional method, producing something known as grass-fed beef, as part of a push that started three years ago and is based on studies showing the meat is healthier and better for the environment.
“This is natural meat production right here,” said Clark, who in 2006 decided to throw everything he had toward a long-term goal of raising an entire herd’s worth of grass-fed cattle. Currently, only a third of Clark’s herd is in his farm’s grass-fed program.
Clark’s company, Rich Valley Grazers, has quickly moved toward that goal by catering to a growing base of people in the Mountain Empire and the Asheville, N.C., area who are seeking grass-fed beef for the same reasons that farmers have been producing it.
The farm’s customer base now includes two restaurants — the Harvest Table in Meadowview and the House on Main in Abingdon — where one chef has been buying from Clark since the very beginning and another can’t seem to get enough of his product.
“It’s a different type of meat,” Harvest Table Chef Philip Newton said. “It’s more nutritious, and it’s better tasting, not to mention it supports the local people right here.”
A different type of meat
Farmers operating in the 13 Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia counties that make up the Mountain Empire raised $133 million worth of cattle during 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2007 Census of Agriculture.
Those animals accounted for roughly 64 percent of the region’s total agricultural production that year, according to the census, which the USDA conducts every five years to keep track of the country’s agricultural production.
“Most of the people here are in the cow-calf or stocker business,” Clark said, explaining a practice he is turning away from as he builds his grass-fed beef herd.
Farmers raising animals for the cow-calf and stocker business feed their animals on pastures for about a year, or until the animals reach a weight of 500 to 800 pounds. Then, they sell the cattle to a commercial feedlot, where the livestock is finished, or fed corn and other grains until it reaches a slaughter-ready weight of 1,200 to 1,500 pounds.
Clark plans to sell about half his current herd to feed lots through the cow-calf and stocker market this year. He’s keeping about a fourth of the herd to use as breeding stock for the next generation of cows, and has set aside 78 animals for this year’s grass-fed beef program. Cattle in Rich Valley Grazers’ grass-fed program are kept on the pasture for another three seasons, or until they reach a weight of 1,200 to 1,300 pounds.
While raising grass-fed beef might seem like a relatively new farming technique catering to a niche market, Clark said it is the way cattle were raised for centuries. Sending the cattle to feedlots, where they’re feed corn and grains, is relatively more recent, he said.
“After World War II, we had a grain surplus and that was a great way to deal with it,” Clark said, referring to the practice of using excess corn and grain stores to feed cattle and other ruminant or grass-eating animals at the end of their lives.
The creation of farm subsidies, which pay farmers to grow only certain items, further fueled the practice of finishing cattle with corn and grains, Clark said. The new subsidies also made it more difficult for small farms to grow fruits and vegetables and instead forced them to use it for cattle they could sell to feedlots.
By 2007, the U.S. cattle industry was producing about 26.4 billion pounds of cattle a year — enough to feed the average American 93.4 pounds of beef that year and export another 1.43 billion pounds to such countries as Mexico, Canada, South Korea and Japan.
Almost all of this meat was raised using the feedlot system.
But that same year, Clark’s method of raising beef was thrust into the spotlight when the USDA decided to re-evaluate one of its policies, and scientists and environmentalists were prompted to take a serious look at the consequences of the feedlot system, which had dominated the industry for 60 years.
The standard and the study
In 2002, the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service published a series of standards for meat marketing claims that detailed the processes farmers must follow if they wanted to say their meat or poultry was: “antibiotic-free,” “free-range,” “hormone-free,” and that differentiated claims of where an animal was raised versus where it was finished.
The agency’s grass-fed beef standard said that any animal could be considered grass-fed if it was fed a diet that was 80 percent grass or forage and 20 percent any other product.
But after significant complaints from the general public, the Agricultural Marketing Service announced in May 2006 that it would abandon this standard for one that required cattle to be fed a diet of 99 percent grass in order to be considered “grass-fed.”
The agency published the new 99-percent-grass diet standard with an entry in the October 2007 Federal Register and noted it received 19,811 mostly supportive comments from consumer groups, farmers, trade associations and environmental groups.
One of the most outspoken groups involved in this debate was Kate Clancy, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Conventional corn-based diets can sicken cattle,” Clancy wrote in a July 2006 letter to the USDA and a supporter of the new standard. “Because corn is low in fiber and high in starch, a corn-based diet allows fermentation acids to build up in the cow’s stomach.”
The acid buildup created by a corn-based diet can cause ulcers to form in the animals’ stomachs. These ulcers let bacteria such as E. coli enter the animal’s digestive tract and infect people who eat or come into contact with the meat.
As part of her letter, Clancy included a March 2006 study that scientists with her organization’s Food and Environment Program conducted and which compared the fat content of grass-fed beef with that of conventionally raised beef.
Compared to its conventional counterpart, the grass-fed beef had higher concentrations of four key chemicals important to human health — three of which were Omega III fatty acids that have been shown to help fight cancer, heart disease and certain mental conditions.
Ground beef and steaks from grass-fed cattle “are almost always” lower in their total fat content than the meat that comes from conventionally raised cattle, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ study found.
One year after Clancy sent her letter supporting the new grass-fed standard to the USDA, the link between corn and cattle hit just about every American where it counts.
A cow’s carbon footprint
When the U.S. Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, it required the environmental Protection Agency to come up with ways it could work with other government agencies to increase the use of alternative fuels such as ethanol.
One of those strategies was a requirement that all gasoline producers, refiners, importers and blenders include ethanol in their fuels by 2007. Meeting this demand, the USDA predicted, would require 3.2 billion bushels of that year’s corn crop.
“Our food was competing with the food for our cattle and then with the fuel for our cars,” Clark said as he looked back on the results of that demand while tending to his herd.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average price for a gallon of milk went from $3.06 a gallon to $3.90 a gallon from January 2007 to November 2007; the price for a pound of cheese went from $4.09 to $4.47.
That inflation, which trickled down to several other food products, sent the average American’s grocery bill up by $47 from July 2006 to May 2007, according to a study released that month from the University of Iowa.
But during a time when gas prices were competing with food prices, Clark started reducing the amount of fuel he consumed on his farm as he and his father focused their efforts on producing grass-fed animals.
“We traded in a fleet of tractors for a couple tractors and a Gator,” the farmer said, referring to a six-wheeled utility vehicle manufactured by John Deere.
Clark pared down his farm’s fleet of vehicles because he no longer needed to run hay out to his animals — part of their diet includes keeping them on grass throughout the winter.
The farm’s carbon footprint is further reduced because rather than load the grass-fed cows on trucks that take them to a commercial feedlot, he takes the animals to one of three small processing plants within a two-hour drive of the farm.
There’s a final benefit to the techniques Clark uses on his farm: “Well-managed pasture will absorb more methane in a day than a cow will produce in a year,” he said.
A 1995 report by the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service found that soil on grazing land in the Great Plains can contain 40 tons of carbon per acre. That’s because the grasses, in the growing process, pull carbon dioxide out of the air, consume it and then deposit into the ground. The report further found that one acre of cultivated grassland that’s been allowed to return to grazing land can consume as much as 1,000 pounds of carbon each year over a five-year period.
During the year and a half that started when the USDA decided to revise its standards for “grass-fed beef” and ended with the ethanol-fueled food price spike, Clark said, he and his father “decided we were going to go all in” with the grass-fed program. After 10 years of breeding a type of cow that was best suited to the farm’s grass-fed diet, Rich Valley Grazers set aside 18 cows for its grass-fed program — three times the number of cows it put in this program before the 2005-06 cattle season.
“The biggest thing for most farmers is filling up the pipe,” Clark said, adding that this program involved mixing Red Angus and Devon cattle into his Black Angus herd and using only heifers that could make it through the winter on a grass diet and still nurse.
One year after introducing the 18 cows into its grass-fed program, Rich Valley Grazers landed its first restaurant customer when the Harvest Table started featuring the farm’s meat on its menu as part of a commitment to serve locally raised foods.
Supply vs. demand
About five years ago, Philip Newton started buying steaks and ground beef for his personal use from Rich Valley Grazers’ booth at the Abingdon Farmers Market and from a small store that Clark runs at the entrance to his family’s farm.
Newton continued the relationship when he started working as one of the Harvest Table’s two chefs in late September 2007. That restaurant now buys six whole cows, the equivalent of 2,400 pounds of packaged meat, from Rich Valley Grazers each year.
“Now that they’re not afraid we might not be around next year, they’re starting a few more cows for us,” Newton said, as one of his staff turned a five-pound bag of ground beef into hamburger patties for that night’s dinner service.
The restaurant will serve 40 to 50 of the hamburgers each weekend, Newton said. It also serves steaks that it buys from Rich Valley Grazers on the weekends and uses their meat to make other meals such as meatloaf and pot roast.
“When we have steaks, they sell quickly,” Newton said, adding that he sometimes must buy cuts of meat from another grass-fed beef producer in Marion, Va., to keep up with his customers’ demand.
Newton buys from Rich Valley Grazers because of his restaurant’s commitment to serving local food and the health and environmental benefits associated with grass-fed beef. But, he said, he also serves the meat at his restaurant for another reason.
“It just tastes better,” Newton said, describing the grass-fed beef Clark produces as being slightly sweeter than what comes from cattle raised on a conventional diet. It also has a “wilder taste,” he said, because the animals eat “what deer and other game eat.”
But not everyone is used to this taste and that has caused a few problems for Jassen Campbell, who has served Rich Valley Grazers’ ground beef at the House on Main since he took over as that Abingdon restaurant’s chef in March.
“People have gotten used to this corn-finished or grain-finished beef, and that’s what they’ve come to expect,” Campbell said, adding that in his personal opinion, “grass-finished beef tastes more like beef” than conventionally raised beef.
Another problem Campbell faces when serving grass-fed beef is that he needs to stop his customers from ordering their steaks and hamburgers well-done because the meat can shrivel up and dry out when cooked because of its low fat content.
Neither issue has dampened Campbell’s desire to serve grass-fed beef at his restaurant. The chef said he will go through 20 pounds of ground beef, 45 to 50 pounds of ribeye and 70 pounds of tenderloin each week, and getting all of this means he must look out of the region to find suppliers who can meet his demands.
While he can get the ground beef from local farmers like Rich Valley Grazers, Campbell said, he ends up buying his prime cuts from suppliers in Iowa and Lexington, Va., because local suppliers can’t keep up with his restaurant’s demand.
Clark said he also is experiencing supply-and-demand issues when it comes to grass-fed beef. While he’s seen an increase in the number of people who stop by his farm store and his booth at the farmers market, Clark still ends up selling about half of Rich Valley Grazers’ grass-fed cattle to Hickory Nut Gap Meats, a wholesale distributor based out of Asheville.
“The demand for this type of meat in Asheville is huge,” Clark said, adding that the demand for grass-fed beef in the Mountain Empire doesn’t even come close to what exists in that western North Carolina metropolitan area.
According to its website, Hickory Nut Gap Meats sells to 31 grocery stores and restaurants in the Asheville area. The company also has customers in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee.
“You’ve got to make a profit on the wholesale market to really thrive in this area,” Clark said, referring to the region his family has farmed for the past five generations. “It’s one of the best places to produce [grass-fed beef] but not one of the best places to sell it.”
