You eat beef a few times a week. You’re not stopping. But the latest beef recall — 143 million pounds, much of it going to schools for cafeteria meals — has turned your stomach, and this time you want to do something about it.
This time, you want to know where your beef is coming from.
The good news: Colorado being cattle central, you can find cows raised here on native grasses and slaughtered and processed in small-scale operations, places that might go through 10 steers in a day versus 400 in an hour.
The complicated news: You might have to buy a couple hundred pounds of it all at once.
Seeking out local beef from area ranchers is one way to keep closer tabs on the quality of the meat you buy.
“On these small ranches, they know the animals individually,” says Jo Robinson, a journalist and author who runs the website , which promotes grass-fed beef. “They have been with them from birth to market. I know ranchers who can look up at dusk at a hillside and tell you which cow is which based on their profile.”
At Colorado’s Best Beef Co., , the cattle spend most of their lives grazing on grasses about 60 miles east of Denver, and then are “finished” with grain for the final 120 days or so in a feedlot.
“These calves have tons and tons of room to run around,” says Gina Elliott, one of the owners. “We will drive (customers) past a huge feedlot and say, this is a typical industry feedlot. The difference between our operation and theirs is the difference between night and day. Ours is a humane, quiet operation.”
The company raises French Charolais cattle, which are not injected with growth hormones or steroids, and do not receive feed antibiotics. They sell individual cuts of beef, like steaks and cubed beef, but the most economical way to go is buying quarter or half sides of beef. With a quarter you will get between 135 and 185 pounds of steaks and other cuts of meat, averaging between $4.50 and $4.80 a pound.
Pat Block, owner of Rock Ridge Ranch west of Loveland, , says one of her goals in raising cattle is removing as much stress as possible from their lives.
Before she owned her ranch, “I’d see guys catch 100 cows and give them shots, hormones, to gain weight,” she says. “Every time you do that it adds stress to the cow,” which not only introduces trauma into the animal’s life but also toughens the meat, she believes.
Block sells her beef by the quarter, half and whole (the entire cow), and like the folks at Colorado’s Best Beef Co., she dry-ages the meat for 14 to 21 days.
Cows are ruminants, meant to graze on grass. Most cattle, though, eat grain, like corn, during the last months of their lives to add flavor and consistency to the beef.
Some ranchers, however, swear off the grain. Dallas Gilbert, manager of Eastern Plains Natural Foods Co-Op, , started raising grass-fed beef in the 1980s, he says, “because people didn’t want chemicals in their food, which is the way I feel myself.”
He refuses to feed his cattle grain because it’s unnatural, he says, and he also prefers the flavor.
“I like beef the way it’s supposed to taste,” he says.
Dale Lasater, owner of Lasater Grasslands Beef, likes the taste of grass-fed beef but says sometimes it takes getting used to.
“Our palates have been developed to taste grain-fed for the past 40 years, although before that there was more grass-fed,” says Lasater, whose runs cattle on 110,000 acres of grassland around Colorado Springs. “It’s a different flavor from grain-fed beef, but many people prefer it.”
The company sells its beef frozen through and at Vitamin Cottage stores, and now fresh at a Whole Foods Market in Colorado Springs.
“Like a lot of things you get into, you learn as you go. When we started 10 years ago nobody knew what grass-fed meant or might mean. Since then there has been a lot of awareness,” says Lasater. “It’s interesting now to find not just small retailers and health food stores offering this but major players like Whole Foods taking this niche market seriously.”
Douglas J. Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
Whole Foods, Marczyk stock chemical-free, humane meat
If you don’t want to buy a side of beef, you aren’t interested in a frozen steak, and you’re not willing to drive to Colorado Springs for some fresh Lasater Grasslands cuts, you still have options.
While the beef you buy at a Whole Foods Market might not always come from Colorado, the company has stringent guidelines for potential meat suppliers, including no antibiotics or hormones, humane treatment of animals, and limits on the number of days the animals can be on feedlots. Find the rules at whole -poultry/index.html.
At Marczyk Fine Foods in Denver (marczykfinefoods.com), owner Pete Marczyk buys beef only through Niman Ranch, a California company that contracts with ranchers across the country to produce chemical-free, humanely treated meat. “We are passionate and unwavering in how we buy our meat,” says Marczyk.
For more information about Colorado ranches, go to www .ag.state.co.us/FoodAgDirectory, click on “category,” and then scroll down to “meat” for a list. You can also call the Colorado Department of Agriculture, 303-239-4114.
Douglas J. Brown
