At Midwest Best Beef, we like to say we raise our cattle “Old School.”
We finish our beef the traditional way my father and grandfather did with quality hay and corn raised right on our farm. We appreciate that grass fed beef has many desirable health attributes, but we also realize that the majority of people have come to enjoy the taste and texture of grain finished beef. While not as efficient as industrial beef feedlots or as expensive as grass fed beef, we believe our feeding system provides the best of both worlds by providing a superior beef experience you can taste along with many of the health benefits.
Our cattle spend their entire life eating a diet rich in various high-quality alfalfa. During the last months of production, we slowly introduce increasing amounts of corn into their diet to provide the grain finished flavor and texture desired in high quality beef.
Learn more about how our cattle is fed here
Grains like corn are energy-dense, and cattle finished with grain in their diet generally yield more marbled beef with a milder flavor (less gamey) than beef finished on grass alone.
Midwest Best Beef “grass-fed, grain finished” beef is higher quality and better for the environment than conventional feedlot grain-fed beef.
In contrast to our high forage diet, commercial feedlots opt for a high grain/byproduct diet with little resemblance to the animal’s natural diet. Besides being harmful to the animal, it has a negative impact on taste and texture. We refer to most traditional industrial feedlots as grain-fed rather than grain finished. Grain fed refers to the practice of feeding very little quality grasses and hay in favor of primarily a grain/byproduct diet through most of the production phase. By feeding our cattle a diet rich in quality hay, we believe they are able to retain much of the omega 3 essential fatty acids, CLA, and other beneficial nutrients found in grass finished cattle without sacrificing the high-quality taste and texture.
The animals are never concentrated in cramped feedlots or subjected to antibiotics or growth hormones. It’s grass fed, grain-finished beef done right.
Above is an example of our grass fed, grain finished ration. This is a picture of both the starter and the finishing ration. The starter is an early (3rd in line) ration with a low corn content. The finisher ration is the final ration with the highest corn content. If you look closely, you can see the individual ingredients in our feed mix. We use 7 different recipes depending on the stage of development of the beef (new calf, intro, starter, grower transition, grower, finishing transition, finishing). The corn content is increased with each recipe until we get to the final “finishing” recipe. You can see that high quality hay grown on our farm, unlike industrial feedlots, still constitutes a significant amount of the the diet even in the finishing ration. We believe this allows us to retain a significant amount of the advantage of grass fed without compromising the taste and texture. The finishing recipe has the largest corn content to provide the “corn finished” taste consumers have come to expect of high quality beef.
