CONTACT: Jill Nado
December 10, 2010    

Alexandria, VA– Some of the best burgers in the United States are now being made with humanely raised beef, thanks to Animal Welfare Approved, American Grass Fed Beef, and Dan Rosenthal, owner-operator of the Rosenthal Group. 

The legendary Poag Mahone’s, of the Rosenthal Group, is the very first restaurant in Chicago to be serving this prized beef.

 Poag Mahone’s  has been named as  one of the best burgers in America by Oprah Winfrey, and GQ magazine declared Poag Mahone’s as serving one of “Top Twenty Burgers You Must Eat Before You Die.” Animal Welfare Approved director Andrew Gunther says  “ the AWA label is going to help make Poag Mahone’s burgers  NUMBER ONE . “

Dan Rosenthal says he’s proud to be serving meat that bears the AWA label.  “There’s no question that the treatment of the animals is one of the top priorities that we’re seeking in the continuation of our purchasing program,” says Rosenthal.  He adds, “It’s not only the humane treatment of the animal, but what the animal is fed and what impact the farming system has on the environment and the quality of the meat people are consuming. AWA certification gives us the total package.”

Finding just the right humanely raised beef for Poag Mahone’s was no easy chore. Rosenthal tried meats from as far away as Uruguay until he came across the renowned stock of American Grass Fed from Missouri. AWA’s American Grass Fed worked extensively with Dan to get just the right blend of beef to maintain that classic Poag Mahone’s burger flavor.

Poag Mahone’s is using AWA beef in other dishes, too, and one of those is Rosenthal’s favorite—Guinness Beer Beef Stew. He says diners get two bonuses for the price of one out of the stew.  “You get nutrition and you get a little high from having this Guinness marinated product. It’s such a great combination of flavors.”

Interviews are available. Please call Jill Nado of AWA at 202-446-2138 or 301-233-4544.

Animal Welfare Approved audits and certifies family farms that raise their animals with the highest animal welfare standards, outdoors, on pasture or range. The World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) has lauded these standards for two years running as being the most stringent when compared to other third-party certification programs. Visit www.AnimalWelfareApproved.org for an online directory of approved farms, as well as restaurants, shops and markets where AWA farmers’ products are sold. Choose the one independent food label that means healthy, safe, environmentally responsible and humanely raised.

Patricia Whisnant wrote a Statement for the Records for the U.S. House of Representatives. Click here to  read Dr. Patricia Whisnant’s statement for the hearing.

By Andrew Gunther

At a hearing of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Wednesday, July 14, 2010, a representative of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) finally caught up with the rest of the world – and his peers at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – and admitted that the use of antibiotics in farm animal feed is contributing to the . . . .
Click here for the full article

Patrick McElroy is the Executive Chef of the historic, four-diamond Hyatt Regency in St.Louis at Union Station.He focuses on flavors steeped in the traditions of Midwestern cuisine and as such he has a passion for sourcing products directly from local farms.

Patrick and his family have visited our farm and we have been greatly encouraged by the support he offers to independent farmers, ranchers, and growers who share his same philosophies concerning quality, healthiness, freshness and sustainability in our food chain. He represents a growing number of chefs who vote for what exists in the world by where they source their food.

They support generational farmers and have an appreciation of their skills and craft.By this support they are active partners in the preservation of these farms and the skills and the quality of product represented, ensuring that these artisan products are not lost or forgotten.

American GrassFed Beef from our family owned and operated Rain Crow Ranch has been a staple on Patrick’s menu for several years.I think you will enjoy this article written by Patrick for the Hyatt Culinary newsletter.Click the link below:

A Brief Look At The Evolution of the Health Food Movement

His dramatic and engaging story of what then happened has always stayed with me.As a part of the armed forces he was offered to take part of a study using new experimental drugs to treat TB.

He readily jumped at the chance as it provided him his only hope.At that time something like 4 of 5 patients with tuberculosis did not survive.He was one of the first to receive a new class of drugs known as antibiotics, in this case streptomycin.My professor was critically ill by the time they began to administer this new drug.

The effect was almost immediately impressive.His advanced disease was visibly arrested almost overnight.The bacteria disappeared from his sputum and he made a rapid recovery.It was truly a miracle drug.

The purpose he had in sharing this touching personal story was to impress on us the wonder of antibiotics when they first came on the scene and at the same time to strongly impress upon us that their indiscriminate use had the potential of throwing us back into the dark ages when antibiotic-resistant bacteria reared its head, a super-bug.

I never forgot the story and through out my career and life had only used antibiotics when they were truly indicated.This article by Michael Pollan is certainly worthwhile to consider.

Dr. Patricia Whisnant

The word “sustainability” has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever it means. On a recent visit to a land-grant university’s spanking-new sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school’s faculty members were involved.

She beamed: When letters went out asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability? When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term, you have to wonder if we haven’t succeeded in defining sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like “natural” or “green” or “nice.”

Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the world, we had best start with the rectification of the names.The corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts.So what about this much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?

To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude.What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.

For years now, critics have been speaking of modern industrial agriculture as “unsustainable” in precisely these terms, though what form the “breakdown” might take or when it might happen has never been certain. Would the aquifers run dry?The pesticides stop working? The soil lose its fertility?All these breakdowns have been predicted and they may yet come to pass. But if a system is unsustainable — if its workings offend the rules of nature—the cracks and signs of breakdown may show up in the most unexpected times and places. Two stories in the news this year,stories that on their faces would seem to have nothing to do with each other let alone with agriculture, may point to an imminent breakdown in the way we’re growing food today.

The first story is about MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS — 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005, according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical Association. For years now, drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in hospitals,where the heavy use of antibiotics can create resistant strains of bacteria. It’s Evolution 101: the drugs kill off all but the tiny handful of microbes that, by dint of a chance mutation, possess genes allowing them to withstand the onslaught; these hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant superrace. The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals as early as the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly patients. But a new and even more virulent strain — called “community-acquired MRSA” — is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.

The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that at least 70 percent of the antibiotics used in America are fed to animals living on factory farms. Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy confinement simply would not be possible without the routine feeding of antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of infectious diseases. That the antibiotics speed up the animals’ growth also commends their use to industrial agriculture, but the crucial fact is that without these pharmaceuticals, meat production practiced on the scale and with the intensity we practice it could not be sustained for months, let alone decades.

Public-health experts have been warning us for years that this situation is a public-health disaster waiting to happen. Sooner or later, the profligate use of these antibiotics—in many cases the very same ones we depend on when we’re sick—would lead to the evolution of bacteria that could shake them off like a spring shower.It appears that “sooner or later” may be now.Recent studies in Europe and Canada found that confinement pig operations have become reservoirs of MRSA. A European study found that 60 percent of pig farms that routinely used antibiotics had MRSA-positive pigs (compared with 5 percent of farms that did not feed pigs antibiotics).This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study showing that a strain of MRSA from an animal reservoir has recently entered the human population and is now responsible for [more than] 20 percent of all MRSA in the Netherlands.Is this strictly a European problem? Evidently not. According to a study in Veterinary Microbiology, MRSA was found on 45 percent of the 20 pig farms sampled in Ontario, and in 20 percent of the pig farmers.(People can harbor the bacteria without being infected by it.)Thanks to Nafta, pigs move freely between Canada and the United States. So MRSA may be present on American pig farms; we just haven’t looked yet.

Scientists have not established that any of the strains of MRSA presently killing Americans originated on factory farms.But given the rising public alarm about MRSA and the widespread use on these farms of precisely the class of antibiotics to which these microbes have acquired resistance, you would think our public-health authorities would be all over it. Apparently not. When, in August, the Keep Antibiotics Working coalition asked the Food and Drug Administration what the agency was doing about the problem of MRSA in livestock, the agency had little to say. Earlier this month, though, the F.D.A. indicated that it may begin a pilot screening program with the C.D.C.

As for independent public-health researchers, they say they can’t study the problem without the cooperation of the livestock industry, which, not surprisingly, has not been forthcoming. For what if these researchers should find proof that one of the hidden costs of cheap meat is an epidemic of drug-resistant infection among young people? There would be calls to revolutionize the way we produce meat in this country. This is not something that the meat and the pharmaceutical industries or their respective regulatory “watchdogs” — the Department of Agriculture and F.D.A. — are in any rush to see happen.

The second story is about honeybees, which have endured their own mysterious epidemic this past year. Colony Collapse Disorder was first identified in 2006, when a Pennsylvanian beekeeper noticed that his bees were disappearing — going out on foraging expeditions in the morning never to return. Within months, beekeepers in 24 states were reporting losses of between 20 percent and 80 percent of their bees, in some cases virtually overnight. Entomologists have yet to identify the culprit, but suspects include a virus, agricultural pesticides and a parasitic mite. (Media reports that genetically modified crops or cellphone towers might be responsible have been discounted.) But whatever turns out to be the immediate cause of colony collapse, many entomologists believe some such disaster was waiting to happen: the lifestyle of the modern honeybee leaves the insects so stressed out and their immune systems so compromised that, much like livestock on factory farms, they’ve become vulnerable to whatever new infectious agent happens to come along.

You need look no farther than a California almond orchard to understand how these bees, which have become indispensable workers in the vast fields of industrial agriculture, could have gotten into such trouble. Like a great many other food crops, like an estimated one out of every three bites you eat, the almond depends on bees for pollination. No bees, no almonds. The problem is that almonds today are grown in such vast monocultures — 80 percent of the world’s crop comes from a 600,000-acre swath of orchard in California’s Central Valley — that, when the trees come into bloom for three weeks every February, there are simply not enough bees in the valley to pollinate all those flowers. For what bee would hang around an orchard where there’s absolutely nothing to eat for the 49 weeks of the year that the almond trees aren’t in bloom? So every February the almond growers must import an army of migrant honeybees to the Central Valley — more than a million hives housing as many as 40 billion bees in all.

They come on the backs of tractor-trailers from as far away as New England. These days, more than half of all the beehives in America are on the move to California every February, for what has been called the world’s greatest “pollination event.” (Be there!) Bees that have been dormant in the depths of a Minnesota winter are woken up to go to work in the California spring; to get them in shape to travel cross-country and wade into the vast orgy of almond bloom, their keepers ply them with “pollen patties” — which often include ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup and flower pollen imported from China. Because the pollination is so critical and the bee population so depleted, almond growers will pay up to $150 to rent a box of bees for three weeks, creating a multimillion-dollar industry of migrant beekeeping that barely existed a few decades ago. Thirty-five years ago you could rent a box of bees for $10. (Pimping bees is the whole of the almond business for these beekeepers since almond honey is so bitter as to be worthless.)

In 2005 the demand for honeybees in California had so far outstripped supply that the U.S.D.A. approved the importation of bees from Australia. These bees get off a 747 at SFO and travel by truck to the Central Valley, where they get to work pollinating almond flowers — and mingling with bees arriving from every corner of America. As one beekeeper put it to Singeli Agnew in The San Francisco Chronicle, California’s almond orchards have become “one big brothel”—a place where each February bees swap microbes and parasites from all over the country and the world before returning home bearing whatever pathogens they may have picked up. Add to this their routine exposure to agricultural pesticides and you have a bee population ripe for an epidemic national in scope.In October, the journal Science published a study that implicated a virus (Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus) in Colony Collapse Disorder — a virus that was found in some of the bees from Australia.(The following month, the U.S.D.A. questioned the study, pointing out that the virus was present in North America as early as 2002.)

We’re placing so many demands on bees we’re forgetting that they’re a living organism and that they have a seasonal life cycle, Marla Spivak, a honeybee entomologist at the University of Minnesota, told The Chronicle. We’re wanting them to function as a machine. . . . We’re expecting them to get off the truck and be fine.

We’re asking a lot of our bees. We’re asking a lot of our pigs too. That seems to be a hallmark of industrial agriculture: to maximize production and keep food as cheap as possible, it pushes natural systems and organisms to their limit, asking them to function as efficiently as machines. When the inevitable problems crop up — when bees or pigs remind us they are not machines — the system can be ingenious in finding “solutions,” whether in the form of antibiotics to keep pigs healthy or foreign bees to help pollinate the almonds. But this year’s solutions have a way of becoming next year’s problems. That is to say, they aren’t “sustainable.”

From this perspective, the story of Colony Collapse Disorder and the story of drug-resistant staph are the same story. Both are parables about the precariousness of monocultures. Whenever we try to rearrange natural systems along the lines of a machine or a factory, whether by raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond trees, whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience. The question is not whether systems this brittle will break down, but when and how, and whether when they do, we’ll be prepared to treat the whole idea of sustainability as something more than a nice word.

One of the most commonly asked questions concerning grass fed beef is “How does it taste?” or the alternative question of Is it really tough?What I have always believed in marketing our beef through American Grass Fed Beef is that you may convince people to try it once for the health benefits or some of the altruistic benefits (humane handling, sustainable agriculture) but they won’t buy it again if it is not good.

I have always gauged our success not so much by the growth of new customers who seek out our beef but by the repeat customers who return to us month after month.The success of our Buyer’s Club is the best indicator of the success of the grass fed beef we produce.

Eating Well:There’s More to Like About Grass-Fed Beef

Aug 30, 2006
New York Times
By MARIAN BURROS
FROM Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Westchester County and Sparky’s All-American Food in New York to Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago and Acme Chophouse in San Francisco, more diners are switching to rich, juicy and tender grass-fed beef, which is fast losing its reputation as tough and tasteless but good for you.

My own delicious research shows the industry has taken giant steps.When I wrote about grass-fed beef in 2002 there were about 50 producers, and most of what they raised was not very good. Now there are about 1,000 of them,and after I grilled rib-eyes from 15 producers for friends, it was clear that more of them are learning to get it right.

Ranchers of grass-fed beef say they have made great strides in the last few years by relearning what came naturally before the era of the feedlot, then building on it. They use heritage breeds that thrive on grass rather than on grain, as well as crossbreeds developed with advanced genetics.

They have relearned the science of rotating pastures and determined which grasses provide better nutrition in a region like the Northeast, where pastures are not endless, as they are in the West.

Humane, nonstressful slaughter is considered even more important than in the conventional cattle industry, where the practice is being slowly adopted.

And, finally, they are aging the beef longer to tenderize it more.

“The meat people got from us this year is better than what they got from us last year and not as good as what they will get from us next year,” said Tom German, owner of Thankful Harvest in Holstein, Iowa.

But producers are still on a learning curve, and grass-fed beef is not always consistent.

Some producers improve tenderness by feeding the animals grain for several weeks before they are slaughtered; some restaurateurs say it is easier to please customers with this grain-finished meat.

Melissa Benavidez, who owns Sparky’s All-American Food with her husband, Brian, has been so overwhelmed by the response to their grass-fed burgers that, on occasion, they have had to settle for beef that was finished with grain.

“We’ve been doing rock ’n’ roll concerts, and people who haven’t eaten hamburger in 20 years say they are going to try it,” she said. “Even vegetarians.”

Galen Zamarra, chef and owner of Mas in New York, chooses 100 percent grass-fed beef for meatballs, steak tartare and braising. But for steaks and roasts he wants beef that has been grain-finished.

“Pure 100 percent grass-fed is better for animals, more sustainable,” Mr. Zamarra said. “But as far as texture, customers don’t like it.”

Yet at Acme Chophouse, grass-fed beef accounts for 60 percent to 80 percent of the orders. Thom Fox, manager of the restaurant, said it had improved considerably since he opened four years ago.

In the beginning customers complained,” he said. “The first thing they react to is tenderness. If you get past that they say they like the robust flavor.”

In fact, there is not enough grass-fed, grass-finished beef to go around.

Finishing animals on grain for 15 to 30 days is still a far cry from agribusiness cattle, which start out on grass but are fed corn for their last four to six months.

Research suggests grass-fed beef is likely to be lower in total fat, contain higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids useful in reducing the risk of heart disease and have a higher level of C.L.A., conjugated linoleic acid, which, in animal studies, reduces the risk of cancer.

But the loose definition of grass-fed beef makes it difficult for people looking for alternatives to figure out just what they are buying. There is no regulation defining the term, and the Department of Agriculture has proposed letting cattle be called grass-fed even if they were raised on hay in a feedlot and never set hoof in a pasture.

The American Grassfed Association, which represents producers of 100 percent grass-fed animals, says a true grass-fed animal is put on pasture as soon as it is weaned and eats grass as long as it is available. When there is no more fresh grass the animal is fed hay and silage. Hormones and antibiotics are forbidden.

Jo Robinson, a writer who has spread the word about the benefits of pasture-raised animals, recognizes the quandary. At her Web site eatwild.com, Ms. Robinson writes: Meat from an animal that has been able to graze in its last few months of life is still nutritionally superior to feedlot beef, even if the animal has also been given some grain. It’s a matter of degree.

But my tasting showed that with 100 percent grass-fed beef you can have it all: sustainable, more nutritious beef with clean, juicy, beefy flavor. (Because the beef has less fat, though, it must be cooked at lower temperatures and for less time.)

Consumers need to understand there is a difference, said Ed Doyle, owner of Real Food, a consulting firm that works with restaurant management in Boston. Grass-fed beef is not an alternative to commodity beef; it’s its own product with bolder flavors.

As I stated in this article the newly emerging grass fed industry is rapidly growing due in most part to the increased attention from various media sources.More consumers are becoming enlightened as to the differences and benefits of choosing grass fed beef over factory farmed industrial beef.

The majority of grass fed beef is produced on small family farms where they take pride in the care and quality of the product.  Though grass fed still constitutes a small niche market it is exciting to see the increasing number of farms that are looking to niche marketing directly to consumers as a means to breathe new life into the financial viability of these farms.It is this direct connection to the farm that many consumers are looking for and many producers are willing to offer.

Grass-fed beef worth the wait for many
By Jane Snow Aug. 16, 2006
McClatchy News Service

Akron,Ohio-Cattle graze peacefully on David and Deanna McMaken’s farm near Waynesburg in Carroll County. From the time they’re born until they become hamburger, the animals wander through pastures,munching grass and slowly gaining weight.

That’s how cattle were raised a century ago, but rarely today, when most are weaned from grass at an early age and fattened on grains in feedlots.The McMakens’ Rose Ridge Farm is one of a handful in Ohio producing grass-fed beef. But at the rate the industry is growing, you’re going to be seeing a lot more of this meat.

Grass-fed beef became so popular with customers at Krieger’s in the Akron,Ohio,area, that it’s now the only kind the market sells.

They say they like it better, Krieger meat cutter Rob Fink said.

The beef is touted as a wonder meat that’s up to 50 percent lower in fat than regular beef, higher in vitamin E and omega-3 fatty acids, environmentally friendly and humanely produced. Some researchers even claim it can help prevent cancer and help you lose weight.

Some of the nutrition claims may be premature, but the meat is indeed more healthful than regular beef, experts say.It’s also tougher and some of it is less flavorful than regular beef, although farmers are working on that.

Grass-fed beef is just a tiny part of the $78 billion U.S. beef industry, but it’s growing at breakneck speed.Although the grass-fed industry is so new that no figures have been collected, estimates place the current market share at 3 percent,said Patricia Whisnant, president of the American Grassfed Association.Some industry insiders predict the market share will grow to 10 percent in the next 10 years, Whisnant said.

It’s still small but it’s increased in a very large way, she said, noting that in just five years,the number of producers selling grass-fed beef through the Internet has grown from about 40 to more than 1,000.

The grass-fed beef on the market has increased to such an extent that the U.S.Department of agriculture has proposed labeling rules.A revised version of the original version was put forward in May and is expected to become law in mid-August.

The modern grass-fed beef industry is less than five years old, Whisnant said. Its growth was spurred by E. coli outbreaks in the 1990s that were traced to ground beef,and consumer concerns about mad cow disease and the use of antibiotics and growth hormones in beef production.Most — if not all — grass-fed beef is free of hormones and antibiotics.

People began to say, ‘whoa’.They began looking at food safety in our society, Whisnant said.

Health reasons also fueled the popularity of grass-fed beef. Those worried about heart disease have turned to it because it has less fat, including artery-clogging saturated fat,than regular beef.

The reason the beef is not stocked in every supermarket already is that production is slow and tedious.
It’s extremely difficult to product,Deanna McMaken said.It’s just a lot easier to do on corn.

In standard beef operations, steer are fattened for most of their lives on a feed lot, where they are confined and trough-fed a rich diet of grains.They are given hormones to make them grow faster and antibiotics to counter any illnesses caused by the rich diet. Most reach the average slaughter weight of 1,200 pounds in 14 to 16 months.

Grass-fed animals are allowed to roam free in pastures (and in fact are herded by helicopter in Australia, one of the major producers of grass-fed beef).They are not fattened on grains in feed lots, nor given growth hormones to speed the process. McMaken’s animals take more than two years to reach slaughter weight.

But the wait is worth it to producers such as McMaken,whose beef is snapped up by consumers who want the pleasure of beef without the health drawbacks.

In addition to having significantly less fat and cholesterol than regular beef,grass-fed beef has up to twice the amount of omega-3 fatty acids as regular beef,and a more healthful balance between omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, according to a review of research by the Grass-Fed Beef project at California State University’s Chico Department of Agriculture and the University of California Cooperative Extension. Omega-3 fatty acids are thought to help lower blood cholesterol levels and blood pressure, and a type of omega-3 present in grass-fed beef may help reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia and depression. The proper balance between omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids may help reduce inflammatory disorders, according to the California project.

Grass-fed beef also has been found to have up to 10 times more vitamin A than regular beef, and up to three times as much vitamin E, according to a study cited by the California project.

Researchers also say grass-fed beef has up to five times the CLA — conjugated linoleic acid — of regular beef. The substance is thought to help prevent cancer and regulate metabolism. In a Norway study of 108 people reported in the American Journal of Nutrition, those given CLA supplements lost more weight than those given placebos. The average weight loss was just 4 pounds, though.

Also, according to the California project, most studies base nutrient comparisons on the amount of nutrients found in lipids, or fat. Grass-fed beef may have more of certain nutrients per gram of fat, but overall the beef has much less fat than regular beef.

Another problem with nutrition claims for grass-fed beef is that the animals vary widely in composition. Because animals from different farms eat different varieties of grasses and enjoy different levels of exercise, grass-fed beef is not uniform in fat content, flavor, or — presumably — nutrition.
Little work has been done to compare grass-fed cattle to grain-fed at a constant degree of fatness, the California project researchers concluded.

The composition and quality of grass-fed beef is gradually becoming more uniform, Whisnant said. In the past, some meat was almost gamey in flavor, while other meat was bland. That’s still true to some extent.

As ranchers become more savvy about production techniques, that’s changing, Whisnant said. At a tasting recently in Denver of meat from 22 different producers, chefs were impressed by the similar quality of the steaks.

There were variations, but they were all very complimentary of how uniform the offerings were, said Whisnant, whose group staged the tasting at its annual conference.

Although the flavor can vary from animal to animal, all grass-fed beef is lean. That means it can be tough, although an Australian strip steak we tried was tender at medium-rare. Local grass-fed ground beef we tried was dry compared with regular ground beef.

Grass-fed beef cooks up to 30 percent faster than regular beef because it’s so lean, acccording to the Grass-Fed Beef project. Educators recommend cooking steaks no more than medium to rare. Tough cuts such as chuck roast should be cooked at a lower temperature and for a longer time than regular beef.