Detective D
Well-Known Member
Grass fed should be timothy and clover grass. Not canary grass(the stuff that grows by the cat-tails) or quack grass(common grass/weed that moves into corn and hay fields, grows like the dickens though) or crab grass or whatever weeds were growing out in a pasture that hadn't been tended or cycled in years.
Long ago, in the times your Grandfather may have grown up in, people understood what you feed an animal determines the end result of the product you are after. This goes for meat, but also milk, and even down to bees and honey. My Grandfather planted a strip of buckwheat and red clover along the low ground with a horse drawn grain drill specifically for the bees he kept on his dairy farm.
You can find ag videos from UW Madison from the 1950's, when silage was starting to take off, about blended feeds and making sure there is both nutrition and energy value in the feed, but also specific types of grasses and clovers to make sure the milk fat content was good for dairy, and things that could be in the mix to add volume to make the hay crop efficient.
By the time the 90's got here and factory farm was in full swing, this all got lost. My father and I still put timothy grass and clover in with the alfalfa. By the time he sold in the 90's, we were the only one in our township and maybe the county still inquireing about timothy grass and clover seed, they had to order him bags at the coop from out of state.
About this time is when CA decided they were now the dairy state. They started to out produce WI. How? Well, mad cow disease is one way. If you live in CA be forewarned, you may wish to consider if you want to read this and still go to your walmart and grocery chain stores...
Fair warning.
CA decided it was fair game to feed dairy cows, essentially other cows. Waste product from the slaughter house needed an outlet, and bones, blood, guts, they had energy value. Dog food sure, but what started was dehydration to make things into meal and powder and then mix it with mollasus to feed back to cows. Bone meal. Blood Meal. Animal fat in milk replacer for the calves. BGH. this stuff all came out of CA. Some from Canada, a bit from England. Is it a wonder why mad cow disease started? Man in all it's wisdom decided dead cows make good cow feed.
Liquid manure was also dried, mixed with mollasus and soybean flour and fed back. There is energy in there!
They spray the stuff on growing veggies. Ever wonder how Ecoli started becoming more and more in stuff like lettuce and spinach?
"Happy cows come from CA." Their dairy market ad claims, showing a single cow eating grass in the sun under a tree. HA! Canibalistic cows come from CA, and get mad cow disease from it too.
DO NOT buy Walmart meat. Ask your meat counter where the beef comes from. If they say "local" and you live in CA, ask which farm. The USA allows things in our food that are banned in every other country in the world. "raw" foods are not exempt from foul play.
Corn is actually terrible for cattle, a 100% corn diet will rot their stomachs. Corn makes them get fat and heavy, fast, so it is efficient for "growing" the herd to market weight. They have it down to a science, because if they wait an extra few months the cow may actually become ill and die from it's diet. Like a person living on double quarter pounders for every single meal, you only can get away with it for so long.
If a dairy cow tastes "bad" it has been on a diet of either CA origin, or eating a steady diet of quack grass and weeds and whatever else mixed with high energy corn and ground corn/soybeans.
Corn fed makes for very marbled, fatty meat. This of course means it can hold a lot of flavor. It also means it has no "beef" flavor of it's own and you have to add the flavor to it yourself. Timothy, clover, and a few other things make for beef with an actual strong beef flavor, and if they are given some energy to go with it, alfalfa, corn silage, ground corn as a treat, then they marble nice and you get actual good, old school beef. This is RARE nowdays, it is hard to make a profit unless you find an outlet willing to pay for your inefficient feed choice, competing against 100% corn, lot raised beef stock.
Our country needs to go back to how it was 40 years ago. There used to be enough farm kids they outnumbered city kids in rural towns. Family farms with humane practices and pride in quality have been consolidated into factory farms. We all pay that price.
