Grass fed beef - is it worth it?

“The secret to grass-fed beef is that there is no secret" Nigel Stephens

Victorian cattle farmer

Coles Magazine almost always provides me with something to write about. This time it was their promotion of their new Graze beef range, which claims to be 100% grass fed beef. The article is accompanied by this beautiful photograph of an idyllic bit of Northern Victorian grassland and cows gently grazing, watched by farmers in very Aussie looking gear. You can't quite see the Drizabone on the guy on the right. Anyway - pastoral, beautiful, natural, lush is the impression you are obviously supposed to get. So should you buy it? I'm not sure how expensive it is - well I sort of do. Rump steak, which is what I mostly buy, is currently on a special price of $20.00 per kilo, which is somewhat more than what I usually pay in the market. If you go to Coles online I see that you can pay from $20 to $30 for rump steak and I think that the Graze rump will normally be up around $30.00, which is a lot. But then I rarely buy meat in the supermarket these days unless there is a super special, it is chicken or I'm desperate. But then I don't ask questions of my suppliers in the market. Who knows where their beef comes from.

So I did my usual small bit of research and found a few things to answer the questions of grain versus grass for taste and health, and are there are any hidden agendas with Coles? They are a major business after all - aren't they therefore out to squeeze everyone - customers and suppliers alike? And by the way, I'm only focussing on Coles because they have just announced this. Aldi also sells grass-fed beef (more later) and I think Woolworths does too or is about to. So view Coles as the example of the big bad company trying to look good. I am not pushing Coles over any other supermarket.

Apparently here in Australia virtually all cattle are grass fed for most of their lives. Two-thirds of the cattle (and sheep) in Australia meet grass fed standards - which means that they can have no more than 60 days of their lives on grain. Coles, by the way maintains that their cattle are 100% grass fed - which may actually mean sileage (fermented grass) or hay, but is mostly grass and lucerne. In fact the more diversity in the actual grass the cattle eat the better. A third of the Australian market is grain fed for a mere 70-100 days of their lives, whilst a tiny proportion is completely grain fed - well - over 300 days of their lives - and this included wagyu I think. Niche was the word that the Meat and Livestock Australia site called it. Wagyu deserves a whole post of its own.

And there is an industry standard called PCAS that grass fed beef has to adhere to, but Coles has decided to go its own way and introduce its own standard, and says, "its grassfed beef brand is based on the principles of the Pasturefed Cattle Assurance System (PCAS) and was established after discussion with a working group of producers in Victoria and New South Wales." Which isn't good for the Queensland farmers who don't seem to have been included in the Coles deal. The PCAS standard is high, and is about more than just feeding grass to the cattle. It includes all sorts of animal welfare and environmental things too which, of course, Coles claims to do as well. The blog Hello Charlie also is a bit mystified as to why Coles set up its own standard. The Queensland farmers, of course, are worried that the high prices they have been able to achieve by following these standards are about to be undermined. The market will be flooded with grass fed beef. So heaven knows what they charge. Coles will probably win - they have 300+ farmers in their graze scheme, which covers all of the Southern states.

Aldi on the other hand allows some grain to be fed to the cattle if the pasture is poor - which is potentially misleading advertising I guess as this makes it the same as most beef produced in Australia. And we do have good beef. Maybe the best in the world in fact. Yes there are some of those horrible food lots, and yes, some hormones are fed to some animals, but it does seem as if this is a minority thing, and also that the time spent in a feed lot is not as long as elsewhere.

But I have to say that the thing that mystifies me most about this is grass - what grass? This is not England or Ireland where the grass is always lush and green - or even New Zealand. We have just had almost a week without a lot of rain, and our 'grass' in our garden is already showing signs of turning brown - eventually it will sort of die, though it will come back when it starts to rain again. Further inland it has probably turned brown already. Australia does not usually look like the green picture at the top of the page. It generally looks more like this:

Rather less appetising I think, though I guess it might still be nutritious. And then I saw that somehow, those Coles farmers are now able to irrigate. There is no explanation of why they couldn't do this before. Maybe Coles have invested in irrigation? It apparently took them three years of work and negotiation with the farmers to come up with the product. Now irrigation is also a minefield of environmental problems isn't it? But I won't go there.

As to taste and health. Taste - the Huff Post in America did a blind tasting of the meat in a burger - grass versus grain - and it was almost unanimously in favour of the grass fed. Health - grass fed has five times as much omega 3 as grain fed and twice as much conjugated linoleum acid (CLA) which is a fatty acid associated with reduced body fed. So yes it is healthier and more nutritious.

And here's a factoid I learnt whilst looking into all of this. Every single animal, raised for beef in Australia, is tracked from birth to death.

So end result? Yes grass fed is better, but it's more expensive and maybe one shouldn't worry too much because Australian beef is all good and much more ethically raised than elsewhere. If you don't eat a lot of beef, probably no need to worry. But do check out those two websites I gave links to - they were quite informative.

POSTSCRIPT - I found a longish article in The Weekly Times on Nigel Stephens - the face of the Coles Graze campaign. I didn't understand it fully because it has a few technical farming terms, like turning-off. Just shows that every profession has its own jargon. But it did explain it all a bit more. Nigel Stephens doesn't seem to have his own website.

He's quite young with a wife and a baby son. His family has owned this property since 1966. It's a successful approach by Coles to personalise their suppliers I think.