"Grass-fed beef" is a term that can sometimes be abused in the cattle industry.  The implied meaning of grass-fed beef is that the animal was raised soley on grass and other forages that were either grazed or baled as hay.  It also implies that the animal was not "fattened" on grain.  We adhere to both standards, and the Belted Galloway is an ideal animal to be raised in a soley grass-fed environment.  

 

Unfortunately not everyone adheres to these standards.  All cattle (even those finished in feedlots) graze on grass when they are young, and some unscrupulous cattle producers will call their beef grass-fed on that basis, even though their cattle may have not seen any grass since they were weaned.

 

A lot of people raise cattle in feedlots and a lot of people buy beef from those cattle, and that's perfectly fine as long as that's what the customer wants.  However we do object to people calling their beef grass-fed and deliberately misleading people.

 

The purpose of this website is to show you what our cattle eat and how they are raised.  We don't claim that the way we raise our cattle is the only correct way to do so, but we do like the way our cattle are raised and we think our customers will too, so we'd like to share the process with you.

 

In addition to being grass-fed our cattle are also not given antibiotics (unless the animal has an infection requiring it, and then the beef customer will be informed before purchasing) or any artificial horomone injections.  The only chemicals our cattle will ever see are de-wormers for treatment of parasites once a year and fly powder on their hides during the summer for their own comfort and health.  Our pastures are rarely sprayed with herbicides, and if they must be we make every attempt to spot spray only the weeds, so that the cattle don't come into contact with herbicide residues. 

 

Most of what our cattle eat is a blend of forages in our year-round grass pastures that include white clover, fescue, orchardgrass, italian ryegrass, alfalfa, red clover and timothy hay.  Most of our year-round pasture land is rather hilly, so we use varieties that do best on that lighter soil.  The clovers and alfalfa are legume crops that use a symbiotic relationship with bacteria in their roots to "fix" nitrogen from the air, thus requiring less fertilization for themselves and the surrounding grasses.  Pastures are overseeded again every few years to keep them thick and lush.  Some fertilization is still required, and it is spun on usually in a urea form lightly several times a year.  Our farm gets lime dust from a neighboring stone quarry and never needs to be limed for PH.

 

In addition to our year-round pastures we have several fields that we rotate between grain crops that go for sale and annual forage crops that will either be grazed or baled and fed.  These are often in the form of cover-crops that are planted mainly to maintain soil health and avoid erosion while the field would otherwise be fallow, but that can also be productively grazed the same year as the grain crop, making for very good land utilization.  

 

One of the cattle's favorite annual cover/forage crops is annual ryegrass.  Annual ryegrass can be planted late summer or early fall, in our case usually after an early soybean harvest.  Often times the ryegrass can be grazed in the fall and then either grazed again in the spring twice, or mowed and baled and then grazed.  Annual ryegrass can give massive amounts of feed that is very high protien, and grows quite quickly.  The ryegrass can give two cuttings or grazings by late May, enabling us to plant another crop behind it.

 

If we have wheat growing in our grain crop fields any number of summer annuals can be planted once the wheat is harvested in June, such as sorghums, sudangrass, millet and members of the brassica family such as turnips and radishes.  It looks quite funny seeing big turnip bulbs in a pasture, but the cattle quickly mow down the turnip tops while munching on the bulbs themselves once they have been pulled out.  Our herd donkey Sam loves these turnips!

 

As winter looms we will let one paddock of grass or sometimes oats grow high so that it can be stockpile-grazed once the plants stop growing.  This can often last through November and well into December given adaquate rainfall in the Autumn of the year.  Once the cattle begin to run out of grass to graze they are then given bales of dry pasture grass or pickled, wet ryegrass, as well as fermented, whole-plant corn over winter (whole plant corn is a type of grass) but at no time is the herd given grain. The cattle also have access to mineral blocks throughout the year which they lick to keep their bodies balanced with the trace minerals that they need.

 

If you'd like to find out more about how and what our cattle eat and what they do throughout the year, please read more about our cow/calf herd by clicking the link below, which will take your on a journey through a year with a cow herd starting with winter.