What's the Difference Between Grass-Fed and Grain-Fed Beef?

Why Grass-Fed Beef Might Not Meet Customer Expectations But Deserves The Right To Be

The popularization of the "back to nature" lifestyle has led to the development of a market for grass-fed beef. But often, buyers are disappointed with the quality of pasture cattle meat, which seems tough to them. Let's try to figure out why this is happening.

Grass-fed beef refers to meat obtained from cattle that have consumed only grass and plant foods throughout their lives.

In terms of production, the main difference between grain and grass beef is slaughter time. In the latter case, it occurs at the beginning of summer, because the quality of the vegetation consumed by the animals directly affects the characteristics of their meat. If the animals continue to graze until the end of the summer, especially when it is dry and the grasses lose their nutrition, the meat tends to have a lower fat content and become tougher.

Proper grass beef, obtained after grazing on the grass in late spring and early summer, is more tender and flavorful. Visually, it also differs from grain-fed meat when cattle are raised in feedlots. Grain-fed beef fat will be pearly white, grass-fed fat will be yellow.

In addition, usually grazing cattle destined for premium meat are raised without hormones and antibiotics.

Unlike ordinary beef cattle, which can be fed grain all year round, pasture cattle, as mentioned above, are slaughtered at a certain time, for this reason, fresh meat can only be found in high season, the rest of the time, grass-fed beef is shipped frozen. The taste should not be affected if the meat is vacuum packed and properly frozen. If there are violations, then, accordingly, the quality will suffer.

Grass-fed beef has a wider range of colors than regular beef, from bright red to deep mahogany brown, so don't use color as an indication of freshness.

Leaner than regular and with less marbling, grass-fed meat should look moist, with no brown edges.

In essence, producing high quality grass-fed beef is not as easy as raising an animal in a feedlot.

Good forage grass, rich in nutrients and high Brix, will need to be sown. It is hardly possible now to easily find ideal multicultural pastures where forage grasses grow abundantly on their own.

Another problem is the lack of productive grazing livestock with appropriate genetics. Over the past century, the efforts of breeders have been focused on breeding cattle for feedlots. Grain producers benefited from this, gaining a market as long as grain prices were low. Now, against the backdrop of a growing world population, grain has become too expensive to feed livestock, and talk in favor of lean beef has begun to sound, as they say, “out of every iron.”

In the absence of global efforts for pasture breeding of cattle, each owner of such a herd is forced to learn the basics of breeding, trying to form a herd of animals that make a profit on the grass. However, the trend is clear: there is a reverse evolution from grain-feeding ruminants to their herbivorous lifestyle, as is the ongoing ecological transition from burning coal for energy to alternative fuels. So grass-fed beef will still compete with grain beef, and maybe soon.