We are asked all the time why more farmers don’t employ similar methods to develop the great tasting beef our customers have come to appreciate.

Many times, even farmers that direct market will still use commercial feed methods. The short answer of course is economics. It’s cheaper to use animal and food by-products and waste to feed beef than high quality vegetarian feeds. However, feed economics is not the complete answer. The system is set up to encourage a race to the bottom for beef quality. Let me explain …

Farmers in general are amazingly efficient and respond quickly to market demands. In the case of beef production, the market demands and rewards ONLY efficiency. Taste is not a characteristic rewarded and therefore it is not considered. Once this is understood, you will understand why commercial beef operates the way it does and why it will never change.

If I take my cattle to the sales barn, where we sell commercial live beef, my cattle are judged on three things and three things only:

  • The color or breed (are they Angus, Hereford, Holstein, etc.)
  • How much do they weigh
  • What is the body condition (how much fat, physical shape and health appearance, etc.)

That’s it! Taste does not enter into the equation. It’s arguable that breed and body condition effect taste, but it’s not the only determining factors. The cattle go into large groups and are processed at the plant. The carcass is again graded after processing for marbling/fat content (Prime, Choice, etc.) and sold to beef distributors.

While marbling is a contributor to taste and texture, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Fat will vary in taste, texture, and color based on the diet of the beef. For example, grass fed only beef will have a yellow appearance whereas grain finished is white in appearance. We believe feeding high quality hay and grains also effects taste, but there is no way to differentiate between great tasting beef on the commercial level from poor tasting beef that is derived from cheap food by-products. The marbling may look the same, but the flavor will be different. It’s not feasible to have a taste tester taste each animal.

Since there is no way to reward the farmer for taste, there’s not an incentive for the farmer to consider taste in the production methods.

The only considerations are how fast they can gain weight in minimal facilities, how cheap can we make the weight gain, and how to keep the animal healthy until processing time. Perhaps now the commercial methods make sense. The hormone promotes muscle growth; this contributes to body condition and appearance as well as rapid weight gain. The antibiotics promote healthy body appearance and keep the animal well in spite of unhealthy feedlot and poor-quality feeds. The cheap feed reduces the cost of production by lowering feed costs. None of these practices have any negative consequences in the commercial food system and therefore are tacitly encouraged by the system.

In contrast, when we sell beef direct to customers, we are judged almost exclusively on the taste of the final product.

Most people do not care about the breed or the weight. They do not care about the muscling or marbling of the animal. All they usually care about is the taste. Even those who care about how we treat our beef and the additives we do not use, will admit taste is paramount. No matter how healthy the cattle are or how well cared for, if it does not taste good the consumer will not buy from us.
Given all of this it might be tempting to assume any farmer that markets directly have taste as a primary consideration but sadly that isn’t always true. Some farmers marketing directly to consumers will still use commercial methods because of the economics. They realize that most consumers have never experienced great beef and will not realize their direct beef is the same as commercial beef.

One way to tell if the farmer uses commercial methods is to ask what they feed and how many cattle they sell direct verses sell commercially. For us, we lose money on every beef we sell to the sales barn because of our feeding methods. If a farmer sells the majority of their cattle to the sales barn and pinches a few off for farmers’ markets, they are using commercial feeding methods.

At Midwest Best Beef, we only raise what we think we can sell each year. This removes the commercial incentives and leaves us only with the incentives of taste, animal care, and no additives: all the things our customers care about.