Is Grass Fed Beef Production More Expensive Than Producing Grain Fed Beef?

Picture Credit score: USDAgov, Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0

The brief reply is, it relies upon…

Asking whether or not grain fed or grass fed beef manufacturing is cheaper is a bit like asking whether or not it’s cheaper to construct a automobile or a truck… all of it is dependent upon what parts are being put collectively, how the meeting line is structured, what sort of financing is used to arrange the enterprise, how a lot automation goes into the manufacturing course of, how a lot is spent on advertising, and how much market that finish product is being bought into.

Whether or not it’s beef or autos which might be being created in your meeting line, your manufacturing prices boils right down to how a lot effort and time you place into designing a complete and seamlessly built-in manufacturing system from begin to end.

The potential financial savings of grass fed beef manufacturing

Grass-fed and grain fed are every very totally different manufacturing methods… and so they every have many, many variables that can be totally different from farm to farm.

Nonetheless, grass fed manufacturing has the potential to be considerably cheaper than grain-fed manufacturing due to the decrease capital necessities of letting cattle do nearly all of the forage harvesting as a substitute of utilizing capital-hungry tools, gasoline, and human labor.

But regardless of this potential enormous benefit, many grass-fed beef farmers complain about a lot greater manufacturing prices after they change from grain-fed to grass fed manufacturing. Normally it’s because their new grass fed manufacturing technique has not had an entire redesign from prime to backside to create a seamless grass fed manufacturing system.

It’s attainable to provide a grass-fed beef product with out incorporating any of the cost-saving grass-fed manufacturing rules mentioned in my book or on this web site.

Simply because the top product — the meat — meets the USDA definition to be marketed as grass fed beef doesn’t imply that the farmer has included any cost-saving grass fed manufacturing methods, like rotational grazing, spring calving, prolonged season grazing (+/- deep winter grazing), each day pasture strikes, and so forth.

Methods to scale back the price of grass fed beef manufacturing

For instance, to qualify as grass-fed beef, the meat doesn’t must be sourced from calves born in the summertime in the course of the rising season – it makes completely NO distinction to the meat high quality at what time of the yr the calves are born. However it makes a HUGE distinction to the cattle farm’s manufacturing prices whether or not your cows calve during the spring or out on pasture during the growing season.

And the fee benefit of calving in the course of the rising season extends far past simply greater survival charges, decrease illness stress, much less labor checking on the cow herd.

By switching to summer time calving, the cattle herd can safely lose some physique situation in the course of the winter with out affecting fertility (inside motive – see BCS article), which a spring-calving herd can not. This in flip implies that a summer-calving herd can prolong their grazing season deep into the winter – even lengthy after the snow begins to pile up within the pastures – utilizing winter grazing strategies that can considerably cut back the manufacturing prices. However a cow herd that calves earlier than the rising season begins can not safely use this highly effective cost-saving beef manufacturing technique.

A conventional spring-calving herd merely can not safely winter graze as late into the winter months with out risking well being and fertility. Consequently, extra hay should be made, extra feed pens created, extra tools should be owned, extra manure and extra bedding should be dealt with, composted, and unfold, and so forth. So, whereas calves born in spring vs summer time can each be grass completed and marketed as grass-fed, the manufacturing prices can be VERY totally different.

One other technique that may make a HUGE distinction to manufacturing prices is how the grazing rotation is about up and managed. A seamless pasture rotation with daily pasture moves not solely reduces labor prices, it can also considerably enhance pasture productiveness (extra grass produced per acre), enhance cattle diet (enhance weight positive factors), and enhance the standard of grass accessible for winter grazing after the rising season ends. So, once more these huge variations in grass fed manufacturing methods make a HUGE distinction to the manufacturing prices, but none are a compulsory prerequisite for producing and advertising grass fed beef.

Thus the brief reply is that the fee to provide grass fed beef all is dependent upon what grass fed manufacturing methods have been constructed into YOUR farm’s beef manufacturing plan.

Associated Articles:

Grazing Management Summary – a useful stripped-down
reference listing of the seven Core Grazing Guidelines that anybody elevating beef
cattle must know of their sleep.

Go to the Grazing Strategies article index to study extra about low price beef farming methods and the way to arrange a seamless beef manufacturing program on your farm.

(Disclosure: I get commissions for purchases made utilizing Amazon hyperlinks in my submit.)

And while you’re prepared to begin planning your cattle farm, try my guide: Grass-Fed Cattle: Produce and Market Pure Beef. Use the hyperlinks under to discover my guide and browse opinions on Amazon: