We went in with the Fragosso’s and each bought a whole grassfed lamb. I think we ended up with about 60lbs of meat and the price was about $3/lb. Damn cheap when you consider the quality of the food and the fact we are supporting local, sustainable food production. We are looking at doing a GF cow at some point but will need a larger freezer than what our refrigerator has. If you look around you can usually find a GF meat supplier nearby.
This is strikingly cheap. I've never seen leg of lamb cheaper than $5 in any grocery store. Rack of lamb in the grocery store is obviously considerably more expensive.
In the fall we'll be getting pastured pork from the farm where we get our amazing milk, Ebert Family Farm. This pork is $1.25 per pound with an added cost of $250 to butcher a hog. (See where a good portion of the cost comes in?) They usually finish the hogs at 250 lbs. which means the total cost per pound for the pork is around $2.25 per pound. I've never had pork that tastes quite as good, and when you consider the quality, that's damn cheap. Must be all the skim milk the pigs are getting. The hogs are also not confined in a building and thus, have more vitamin D in their flesh.
Who said local pastured animals aren't competitive in price? All the consumer needs is a freezer. All the farmer needs is access to a local, USDA-approved slaughterhouse that butchers the type of animal in question, which is a mandatory requirement. This last one often proves to be the real problem. Read to find out more about how this inflates the price of your food and decreases your access to quality and choice in the supermarket.
For more information on where to find meat from animals raised the old-fashioned way, on pasture, visit Eat Wild and/or your local Weston A Price chapter pages.
The Price of Grass-Fed vs. Grain-Fed Beef By Monica @ 1:52 PM
A few months ago I was involved in an internet discussion about the affordability (or rather, the perceived non-affordability) of grass-fed beef. This led me to investigate the costs of grass-fed beef in a bit more detail.
Let's compare the costs of current grain-finished beef with mostly grass-fed beef. I'll use two fairly comparable products: Costco beef and local beef from Colorado's Best Beef Company (CBB).
I say "mostly grass-fed" because the product I'm using for comparison isn't grass-finished. At CBB, the cattle are fed grains for probably the last couple of weeks of their lives. However, there's a vast difference between this beef and the feedlot beef in stores. There are no additional inputs from antibiotics or steroids. The cattle are raised on pasture, which doesn't create a waste and animal health problem as it does in feedlot practices where literally tens of thousands of animals are packed per square mile (correction: I had written "acre". I think we can all see it's physically impossible to get that many animals per acre unless we're stacking them high). From a human health perspective, the omega fatty acid ratio and conjugated linoleic acid content resulting from a short grain-finishing time may render this beef as somewhat less ideal than grass-finished beef. It's still corn-finished beef. However, the finishing time is drastically reduced under a mostly grass-fed model. This beef is much higher quality and tastes spectacular.
But how much does it cost?
The grass-fed beef from CBB is approximately $5.61 per pound, but this doesn't tell you very much because it doesn't allow for a direct comparison of cuts. If it's all ground beef then obviously that's twice as expensive as grocery store feedlot beef!! So, I went through the list of cuts and poundage that are received in a bulk order of 1/2 beef from Colorado's Best Beef Company. Then, I went to Costco and listed the prices per pound for all of these different cuts: T bones, ribeyes, sirloin, round roast, top round, bottom round, chuck, flank, prime rib, sirloin tip, heel of round, arm roast, rump roast, brisket, stew meat, short ribs, soup bones, and ground beef. Where Costco didn't have these cuts, I used local grocery store prices/lb.
What I discovered is that if you buy the same poundage of the same cuts at Costco, you will pay 71% of the cost of the local, grass-fed beef. At Costco you'd pay $922.30. Buying the same poundage and cuts 1/2 beef in bulk from CBB you would pay $1303.70. (If you'd like to see the calculations, feel free to email me.)
Is it worth it? It depends on your individual value hierarchy. Most of the cuts at Costco are USDA graded as Choice. Costco Choice ribeye is $6.89/lb while Costco Prime ribeye is $8.89/lb. Most of the cuts at Costco aren't available as Prime cuts, so I couldn't make that comparison. I would imagine most of the cuts from CBB are Prime, therefore making CBB affordable when you fairly compare quality.
It's up to the individual to decide whether the environmental, animal welfare, taste, health benefits, and convenience of buying in bulk are worth the extra cost. It certainly helps to have a big freezer and some cash up front. For us this is worth it, partly because we do not eat out that often due to living in a remote area. Furthermore, I have discovered in the past year that with a little bit more effort I can make a far more delicious dish than I can get in most restaurants when I have access to quality ingredients.
Those of us on the meat production side of agriculture have been thrown a curve ball over the last year by the federally mandated production of ethanol. The historic corn price discovery, dictated by supply and demand, has been replaced by a highly subsidized ethanol industry whose appetite for corn and ability to bid the price up has resulted in record high corn (and rest of the feed commodities) prices. These prices are only to be replaced with higher record prices every time the government opens its mouth.
Here, though, I have to point something out. Historic corn prices are not driven solely by supply and demand. This is a mixed economy where prices are also driven by subsidies and USDA economists. I have to point out that even with the ethanol boondoggle, corn prices are still probably lower than they would be due to the existence of government programs that are designed to drive down the price of corn. Yes, I think this is the case even with federally-mandated and subsidized ethanol production. This is not only because the price of corn is directly lowered due to subsidies but because the subsidies encourage overproduction which further lowers the price. I'm not sure anyone can really make a decent stab at what the price of corn would be in a free market. It's an incredibly complex situation since corn has been artificially cheapened since the mid-1900s.
In relation to grass feeding, I've encountered a lot of speculation online that either 1) a grass-fed model can't feed the world or that 2) it's not affordable. I'll address the first issue in a later post. As to the second issue, let's consider a commodity where subsidies are pretty much absent:lamb. All lamb is pasture-raised, whether it's in Australia, New Zealand, Chile, or the US. This means the market isn't skewed by feed costs. And what do you find? If you go to different stores you will find that all of these products are pretty competitive in price, despite the foreign products having additional transportation costs.
I'd like to end by pointing out that New Zealand's farm economy is almost purely free-market -- unlike the intensely socialized farming system that exists in the United States. There are practically no farm subsidies in New Zealand, and the farm products arequite competitive even on an international basis. The cost of milk production in New Zealand is among the lowest in the world, too. All the cows in New Zealand are grass-fed. And they don't use rBGH to boost milk production, either. New Zealand cows do not see an ounce of grain, except the seed heads they might find on a farm field. How can farmers possibly afford to grass feed? Isn't grass feeding supposed to be expensive?
What's my point? The grass-fed animal production model works -- when it doesn't have to unfairly complete with subsidized grains, EQIP subsidized waste disposal, and "vertical integration" of the beef industry due to USDA inspection mandates that make it all but impossible for small producers to slaughter meat affordably. All three of these drive up costs for independent producers operating on a largely grass-fed model.
Grain-finished beef is never going to disappear because most Americans like the taste. However, it does not need to be as inhumane and polluting (i.e. violating of property rights) as it is. Nor does it need to be providing as low quality meat as it is providing. Unleash the free market, and we will see the success of grass-fed beef here in the United States. It's already been shown in New Zealand.
WHAT: Congressional Hearing on NAIS (National Animal Identification System) WHEN: Wednesday, March 11 WHERE: Washington, DC
The U.S. House Agriculture Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy and Poultry will hold a hearing on NAIS on March 11, 2009. Bills to enact NAIS into law, HR875 and HR814, are being pushed through Congress, as well as an enormous "Appropriations Bill", i.e. massive spendulus program, with funding for NAIS which passed in the House and is now awaiting in the Senate.
This House hearing is critical to blocking mandatory NAIS. Blocking passage of the appropriations bill, 1105, is also critical.
Here is the first one HR 814 - the bottom line is that the Dept of Ag can:
1. Make all farmers who bring an animal to a USDA slaughterhouse participate in this program or the USDA slaughterhouse can refuse them (regardless of whether you are selling your meat in state or across state lines).
2. Farms will need a premise ID to ensure traceability from farm to consumer in order to comply with this bill.
3. The Dept of Ag can send a rep out to your farm to inspect and copy your records for each animal.
HR 814 -TRACE ACT of 2009
This Act may be cited as the `Tracing and Recalling Agricultural Contamination Everywhere Act of 2009′ or `TRACE Act of 2009′.
SEC. 414A. TRACEABILITY OF FOOD.
(a) Establishment of System- Not later than 1 year after the date of the enactment of this section, the Secretary shall establish a traceability system described in subsection (b) for all stages of manufacturing, processing, packaging, and distribution of food.
(b) Description of System- The traceability system required by subsection (a) shall require each article of food shipped in interstate commerce to be identified in a manner that enables the Secretary to retrieve the history, use, and location of the article through a recordkeeping and audit system or registered identification.
SEC. 26. TRACEABILITY OF LIVESTOCK, MEAT, AND MEAT PRODUCTS.
(a) Definition of Traceability- In this section, the term `traceability’ means the ability to retrieve the history, use, and location of an article through a recordkeeping and audit system or registered identification.
(b) Requirements-
(1) IN GENERAL- Cattle, sheep, swine, goats, and horses, mules, and other equines presented for slaughter for human food purposes, and the carcasses or parts of carcasses and the meat and meat food products of those animals, shipped in interstate commerce shall be identified in a manner that enables the Secretary to trace–
(A) each animal to any premises or other location at which the animal was held at any time before slaughter; and
(B) each carcass or part of a carcass and meat and meat food product of such animals forward from slaughter through processing and distribution to the ultimate consumer.
(2) TRACEABILITY SYSTEM- Not later than 1 year after the date of the enactment of this section, the Secretary shall establish a traceability system for all stages of production, processing, and distribution of meat and meat food products that are produced through the slaughter of animals described in paragraph (1).
(c) Prohibition or Restriction on Entry- The Secretary may prohibit or restrict entry into any slaughtering establishment inspected under this Act of any cattle, sheep, swine, goats, or horses, mules, or other equines not identified as prescribed by the Secretary under subsection (b).
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The second bill establishes NAIS via the newly created Food and Safety Administration, run by the “Administrator” - whoever that is….
HR 875 - ESTABLISHMENT OF THE FOOD SAFETY ADMINISTRATION
SEC. 210. TRACEBACK REQUIREMENTS.
(a) In General- The Administrator, in order to protect the public health, shall establish a national traceability system that enables the Administrator to retrieve the history, use, and location of an article of food through all stages of its production, processing, and distribution.
b) Applicability - Traceability requirements under this section shall apply to food from food production facilities (FARMS), food establishments, and foreign food establishments.
ACTION: Please call and fax all members of the subcommittee (below).
1. When you call, ask to speak to the legislative aide for agriculture.
2. Please send this to everyone you know, ESPECIALLY to people in the states with members on the subcommittee. Members need to hear from their constituents- -the people who vote them into office. It's important that residents of Colorado and Connecticut call in. The representatives sponsoring these atrocious bills are Diana DeGette (D-CO) and Rosa DeLauro (D-CT).
Also, email Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. His e-mail address is AgSec@usda.gov.
Finally, contact your Senators and tell them NOT to support HR1105.
The message is simple: We don't want, nor will we comply with, the National Animal Identification System in any form.
It doesn't matter that there is ever more consumer demand for locally raised animal products. The government could kill small farming with these bills.
If you are a farmer, take action or lose your right to raise animals.
If you are not a farmer and you plan on raising animals in your backyard, take action or lose the right to raise these animals. How easy/cheap do you think it will be to order a few chicks by mail order from a hatchery when the whole process will require traceability by a bloated government organization?
If you are a consumer of locally raised meat, take action or lose the right to eat the food you want. This isn't an exaggeration. Most people think the choices in our supermarkets are greater than ever before, but this is mostly true for produce and processed foods. Check out the meat products available in London in the mid-1800s. Ask yourself how many of those species and cuts of meat are available in your supermarket today in 2009. Some of this is simply a result of consumer choice, but a good deal of it is regulation. Try finding brain, for instance. It's loaded with DHA and perfectly safe if it comes from grass-fed animals, but the regulators have banned access to it.
The government/Big Ag juggernaut wants to shut down our freedom of choice for their short-term goals. Remember, NAIS is a program invented by Cargill, etc. to gain access to the export market, which requires traceability. They are not content to form a voluntary program on their own; they are the ones who presented the idea to the USDA; they would rather have small farmers pay for the program so that they can benefit (every animal tagged vs. one tag for hundreds of animals for the corporate farm).
If we don't act, small farmers will be forced out of business and we will be faced with one species of chicken raised in a few "approved" warehouses in the United States where the animals are packed in like sardines. Same for every other farm species, of which over 30 will be tracked by this proposed program. Not only is this a violation of our rights, it will further consolidate and endanger our food supply. Any thinking person who understand the principles of disease control could tell you that this is an epidemiologic nightmare waiting to happen -- and the results would be the exact opposite of the supposedly beneficial intentions of this tracking program.
It's that simple. Your sustenance is in peril. Don't think if you are a vegetarian or a vegan that regulation of food "safety" doesn't affect you. "Safety" is just an excuse for ever greater control over our food supply -- whether it is forced regulation /safety /pasteurization / irradiation mandates for meat, milk, or vegetables.
Linda Faillace Discusses NAIS By Monica @ 7:56 PM
NAIS is not going to assure consumer confidence in the meat supply, but that is how it is being sold to the American public. In fact, the USDA has actively blocked independent testing of mad cow disease by Creekstone Farms, and the levels of testing that the USDA carries out are woefully inadequate: less than a tenth of a percent. With three cows discovered so far, that level of testing is simply not going to be effective at discovering the disease, and the USDA knows it. It has admitted a concern that more testing will "undermine confidence in the meat supply." We're going to have to keep a close eye on the Obama administration when it comes to the NAIS issue. It's simply a mechanism for more control over our food supply. The safety and terrorism issues are a complete smokescreen.
In Linda Faillace's book Mad Sheep, she issued a very strong verdict against the USDA, saying that it needs to be completely dismantled and restructured. I give the book my highest recommendation and wrote a review of it here.
AUSTRALIA has been caught up in an international "honey laundering" scam in which Chinese honey is disguised and sold as the product of another country.
The illegal scheme follows the collapse of bee colonies in the US and Europe, creating a shortage of honey and the bees necessary to pollinate crops, The Times and The Australian report.
In the scam, drums of honey are shipped from China, usually to a distributor outside the country, who then repackages and re-exports it. In one case, drums of Chinese honey were marketd (sic) "Polish Light Amber Honey".
In 2003, Melbourne-based agents of a Chinese firm rebadged Chinese honey as Australian and onsold it to the US. As a result Australia is on a list of 13 countries whose honey products must be cairfully (sic) checked on entry to the US.
...
The Melbourne operators were charged and fined $489,000 for importing and rebadging 125 containers holding 1.7 million litres of Chinese honey sold to the US.
The elaborate subterfuge is to avoid heath and safety checks, import fees and tarrifts (sic) imposed by the US and other countries on Chinese food products.
Here's another report on this story. It's very revealing. If your kid eats Honey Nut Cheerios, s/he could be getting an unexpected (albeit probably small) dose of some pretty toxic antibiotics like ciprofloxacin and chloramphenicol. This is why I said that any foreign honey is suspect.
China is an enormous danger to the food supply of the United States. And such fines simply aren't going to stop them, as the second report clearly indicates.
As usual, Chinese producers and Chinese-based firms are willing to do almost anything to make a fast buck -- whether adding toxic melamine to milk (it is still going on -- I get news alerts about this daily), ethylene glycol to toothpaste, or fraudulently labeling their food as from a different country so as to get consumers to buy it. They will play this game endlessly to escape the regulatory schemes set up. It's not going to end here, and new regulations aren't going to protect consumers because the Chinese will keep adapting to find ways around the regulations.
I'll repeat it -- the greatest way to ensure the safety of your food (or at least that your food is not from China) is to buy a whole food and to buy locally or domestically sourced items. This isn't protectionism, it's common sense. If third world countries had ethical production standards and my inbox wasn't flooded with several news items about food fraud -- daily -- I'd have no problem buying foreign food for myself. It's a personal choice -- nevertheless, I feel compelled to tell all of you readers what you're up against and that you do so at your own risk.
Let me give you an example of why any packaged, multi-product food in the store is suspect. Stoneyfield Farm labels their yogurt as organic yet they source some of their raw materials from China. First, it's a multi-product food: there's more than one ingredient and whenever that is the case the manufacturer is not required to label the country of origin for those ingredients. Second, I highly doubt there is any verification proces to make sure the Chinese strawberry farmers aren't spraying toxic chemicals like methyl bromide, or worse -- or that the strawberries are even rinsed before going into the yogurt. Same for any other multi-product food: you have no idea where it came from. Literally any boxed or packaged food with more than one ingredient could have sourced one or more of the ingredients from China. If grocery stores refused to stock goods from China they'd have to shut down their entire store because a majority of the items sold in a grocery store are multiproduct goods, which means there's a possibility that they contain raw materials from China.
The new country of origin labeling (COOL) requirements for meat, supposedly designed to help consumers, are also a joke. I recently saw soup bones in the grocery store labeled, "Product of the USA, Canada, and Mexico." Informative, no? Actually it is -- it gives at least some indication of what is going on in those USDA-approved meat packing plants.
"Safety" By Monica @ 9:08 AM
Here’s the website of Colorado’s sole supplier of heritage turkey, Eastern Plains.(A heritage variety is a breed that was commonly grown during earlier periods in human history, but which is not used in modern large-scale agriculture.)It’s an interesting farm and it looks as if they sell all sorts of interesting heritage meats, including beef, pork, turkey, goose, duck, chicken, and lamb.I’ve never yet tasted any heritage meats but am quite eager to, particularly based on the taste tests done here.
Unfortunately, Eastern Plains specifically mentions that the USDA processing adds to their cost. I'm sure there would be some increased cost to them just due to the fact that economies of scale producing grocery store food are more efficient, but just imagine how much cheaper their meats would be, even if more expensive than grocery store meats, if they didn't have to process in a USDA facility. Now imagine what would happen to this farm if the USDA slaughterhouse that they use in Colorado were to shut down or if they had increased transportation costs due to a shutdown in order to drive to an approved slaughterhouse further away.Either of those scenarios is entirely plausible given my previouswritings on the matter.
Requirements for slaughter in a government-approved facility are in the name of "Safety."
I can say it no better than someone else I read recently: “Safety” is a word that stops all rational conversation in its tracks. "Safety" brooks no give-and-take. It is the trump card people play when they don't want to have to bother thinking a little harder about which rules really make sense, what effect they're having on us all, and who those rules are really protecting.
I’m confident that meat inspection regulations are not about safety.It’s about adherence to a code that has ballooned out of any proportion to common sense. If it is really about safety it would be illegal to personally eat or to give away meat you’d slaughtered yourself, whether hunted or farmed.(Oh.As I write this I’m thinking I shouldn’t have put that last sentence up there for all to see and given the USDA any more nutty ideas.)
These regulations don’t really protect consumers.How many outbreaks of food-borne illness have we had from mass-produced meats and vegetables in the past few years?A ton.And because of the scale of production, tht means that when there is an outbreak it’s enormous.Despite common germophobic beliefs to the contrary, no one is endangering their life from exposure to germs by killing and processing a chicken or a deer in their backyard:
When a Virginia state inspector 12 years ago declared that the Polyface poultry slaughter area was unsanitary because it was not enclosed, Salatin fought that decision. A university lab conducted swab tests at Polyface and on government-inspected poultry purchased from a supermarket, and found that the supermarket birds averaged 10 times more bacteria than the Polyface samples. Salatin won the case.
Michael Pollan, food journalist, has suggested that the USDA support local slaughterhouses rather than letting them be bought by large conglomerates and then shut down.I regret the shutdown of local slaughterhouses, too, but we need to question the premise that approved slaughterhouses are a valid type of government spending (read: theft from taxpayers) in the first place.And for what purpose, anyway?“Safety”?Would that be the “safety” of the USDA-inspected supermarket chicken with ten times more bacteria than the locally processed chicken not meeting government “safety” standards?
We have to stop kidding ourselves, stop evading reality, and stop accepting the premise of government regulations and agencies as things that should be “reformed”, as opposed to abolishing them altogether.Sound radical?Maybe, until you consider the fact that somehow Americans survived for 130 years without federal inspection of meat.We have to start thinking about challenging everything we're up against.A society that encourages and rewards ridiculous lawsuits. A society that treats adults as if they are babies.A society that divorces people from their own rational judgment, incapable of making choices without a federal bureaucrat’s approval. And especially adults who throw around the word "Safety" more frequently than a 2-year-old uses the word "No!"
