"These Cows Are Just Gorgeous -- and Grass-Fed Too!"
An article by Claudia Ricci
Reprinted by permission of the author
The late afternoon sun throws a warm blanket of golden autumn light over the lush green pasture. We might as well be walking through a painting as we cross the thick grass to stand in front of a beautiful cow, one that is an unusually rich reddish brown color.
“She is pretty close to a perfect cow,” says Ridge Shinn, president of Hardwick Beef, which supplies the Coop its red meat. Shinn points to the cow’s blocky hind quarter and its deep, low-lying body. And then he runs his hand gently along the cow’s tall flat back, that portion of the animal that produces the choicest cuts of beef.
The way Shinn sees it, this breed of cow – called a Devon—represents the future of grass-fed beef production in the U.S. Working with a partner, and four family farms in the Northeastern U.S., Mr. Shinn is moving as quickly as possible to perfect a grass-fed breed that will be available widely to consumers. Ironically, in order to develop this breed of the future, he says he had to “turn the clock back 40 or 50 years,” to work with an older breed: the Devon—a type of cow that originated in England but comes to the U.S. today by way of New Zealand. While traditional breeds like Holstein and Angus thrive on grain, they don’t do well eating grass.
The Devon, however, turns out to be an ideal breed for grass-feeding in pastures like the one we’re touring today. Shinn says that’s because the Devon produces consistently tender and high quality red meat eating grass. And he ought to know, because he actually uses an ultrasound to measure very precisely how much intramuscular fat there is within any cow. In that way, he is can maximize tenderness in the breed.
These days, many consumers are savvy enough to buy beef that is hormone- and antibiotic-free. But fewer customers realize that the ideal beef to buy is raised completely on grass and not grain.
Why is grass-fed beef so important? Cows raised in the pasture produce the most nutritious kind of beef you can eat, far more healthy a meal than beef that comes from standard, grain-fed cattle. Grass-fed beef has less fat, fewer calories, more beta carotene and higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids and a class of so-called good fats known as “conjugated linoleic acids” or CLAs. All of these nutrients are key to reducing the risk of cancer and to maintaining cardiovascular and mental health.
Grass-fed beef is also far less likely to produce illness from E coli, since the cows are not raised in crowded feedlots where disease tends to flourish.
“We’re scrambling to make as many cows as fast as we can,” Shinn says, as he bends down and snaps off a piece of grass out of the pasture. He sticks the sweet grass stem between his teeth and keeps talking. Over the last year, Shinn and his partner chartered a jet and flew a dozen young female heifers back to the U.S. from a farm in New Zealand. They also imported adequate bull semen to begin intensive breeding on four different farms in the Northeast, including the Harrier Fields Farm, which is where we’ve come today. Harrier Fields is less than an hour’s drive from Great Barrington in the Hudson River Valley community of Schodack, New York.
The farmers at Harrier –Mike Scannell and Joan Harris—are second- and third-generation farmers who prefer to call themselves “agrarians.” That’s because they are intensely seasoned in organic and sustainable farming methods. These farmers are committed heart and soul to raising cows the natural way, that is, on grass, in what’s called “pasture-intensive farming.”
As we continue our stroll through this sweet-smelling emerald pasture on a picture-perfect afternoon, Scannell demonstrates just how sensible –and straightforward—a process it is to raise cows in this manner.
Picture it this way: this lush 60-acre pasture is divided into small parcels of grass that measure about 100-feet square. Each parcel is fenced off with heavy-duty plastic wire attached to stakes that can easily be lifted out of the ground. Cows go from one small parcel to another: just as soon as they are finished devouring the grass in one section, Scannell comes along and raises the wire fence and the cows mosey over to the next little square and begin devouring the next parcel of grass.
Grazing cows in such a low-tech, but efficient manner, makes every bit of sense. And it’s an economical and efficient way of using solar power. “What we’re doing raising cows in this way is really harvesting the power of the sun,” Shinn explains.
It becomes crystal clear just how well Scannell’s pasture system works as we approach another group of cows. Almost immediately, this tiny herd of animals begins to moo, sending up such a booming chorus that we can hardly hear ourselves talk. But that’s simply the cows’ way of saying, “Hey, Mister Farmer, we’ve finished all the grass here in this section of the pasture, now can you please hurry up and move us to a new spot where there is much more grass for munching?”
These cows have it made. They are so well-fed and healthy that their reddish brown coats are sleek and Shinny in the slanted rays of the sun. The cows are sweet-smelling, too, and so extremely placid and peaceful that you feel no fear stroking their broad backs. Shinn says that the Devon is known for its placidity; this gentleness in the breed is actually linked with the tenderness of the meat that the cows produce.
The cows at Harrier Field Farms even have very poetic names – like Rosebud and Georgette and Spring Beauty.
Even the excrement these cows produce isn’t objectionable. In fact, as the herd moves from one section of the field to another, the rounded cow pies they leave behind serve as an all-important fertilizer enriching the soil. Joan Harris notes that the pasture has come a long way in enrichment in the last ten years since she and Scannell began farming.
How different this pasture system is from so-called “modern” cattle-raising methods that dominate corporate feedlots, where cows are crowded together on huge concrete slabs, fed diets rich in grain and corn and then given supplemental synthetic hormones, And because disease poses such a health threat, the cows are regularly dosed with antibiotics.
Meanwhile, grain-feeding is highly energy-intensive. Gas-guzzling tractors are needed to plant, harvest and transport the corn and grain fed to the cows in feedlots.
“So much of farming today is totally energy dependent,” Scannell says. Raising cows on corn and grain in huge feedlots is just one example of a system that makes heavy use of chemicals and scarce fossil fuels.
Recent troubles with E coli contamination, and nationwide threats of Mad Cow disease, are just one more example of how the grain-fed beef industry is environmentally-unsound and out of whack. Scannell explains that E coli is a naturally-occurring bacteria in a cow’s digestive system; it only turns troublesome when the bacteria is subjected to a highly acidic environment. That condition is readily and regularly generated, however, when cows are fed grain instead of grass. The way corporate beef production works, in order to speed cows to market, the animals are fed—and overfed—the richest possible grain diet, which in turn fosters a condition in the digestive system known as acidosis. The result is unhealthy levels of E coli, and an increased risk of Mad Cow disease. Meanwhile, acidosis destroys a cow’s liver.
Thankfully, though, there is hope on the horizon, here at Harrier Fields Farm and also, at three other family-operated farms, including Little Alaska Farm in Wales, Maine (another source of the Coop’s beef.)
Ridge Shinn thinks it’s just a matter of time before grass-fed beef catches on with consumers in a major way. As the baby boom generation ages, and becomes more conscious about health and environmental matters, they are also waking up to the wisdom of grass-fed beef. “Once consumers get the real story,” he says, “the big boys in the American meat business are going to have to listen. The consumer will demand 100 percent grass fed beef.”
At that point, Shinn says that he and farmers like Mike Scannell will be poised and ready to provide the grass-fed natural beef.
As we leave the pasture, the sun is turning everything a deep orange color. The grass and the cows grazing on it, are truly a picture to behold. That’s when Joan Harris, the other farmer at Harrier, brings me into the farm house and hands me one of her original oil paintings. It’s a lovely image of a big blocky reddish brown cow: a pure Rotokawa Devon bull, one of the original “fathers” of the breed.
Harris has done so many paintings of the Devons that she has produced a calendar, each month featuring a different cow.
As I leave the farm, the sun is now behind the trees. And then it hits me: all afternoon walking through these heavenly pastures, I felt like I was in a painting.
And here, now, I discover.
That I was!
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