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All Forums  "You Bought WHAT?!"  Pasture-fed vs. Grain-fed  Grass vs. Grain

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Screensize: 640 x 480 800 x 600 1024 x 768 1280 x 1024 Format Mode: Basic  Help  Prompt  Format: Font Andale Mono Arial Arial Black Book Antiqua Century Gothic Comic Sans MS Courier New Georgia Impact Lucida Console Script MT Bold Stencil Tahoma Times New Roman Trebuchet MS Verdana   Size 1 2 3 4 5 6   Color Black Red Yellow Pink Green Orange Purple Blue Beige Brown Teal Navy Maroon LimeGreen Message: * HTML is OFF * Forum Code is ON Smilies [quote][i]Originally posted by maryjane[/i] [br]When it comes to milk production, I'm a big fan of an organic daily grain treat (concentrate with vitamins and DE added) to not only keep milk production up but to create an abundance of tasty, thick cream. Like I mentioned in my book, grains got a bad rap because of the over-use of them in the mega-production, mega-meat world. The same world in which they also feed chicken and cow remains to cattle. Yikes!! If you think about it in terms of marketing, what term would you use to set yourself apart? Grass-fed. When it comes to beef, the marketing image it instantly creates is quite the bucolic scene and definitely not a feedlot scene. It’s impossible to say 90% grass-fed. It doesn’t play into the simplicity people crave for deciding what they do and don’t want in their lives. Think about how difficult it would be to try to market your milk or your cows if you said something like “organic other than selective use of herbicides in order to keep my cattle alive after frost hits pasture.” When you’re trying to sell something or buy something or adhere to a belief system, marketing and single-issue wordage has its down side. If you’ve been vegan for several years, but you’re losing strength in your muscles, the leap to eating steak and eggs is huge. It’s a crisis in faith actually. Here’s a personal example that comes to mind: Thirty-six years ago (when my first child was born in 1979), I had a burning desire for a "natural childbirth." All the women in my family and Utah in general had started going to hospitals in the era I was born with less-than-wondrous results. I’d read all the books, talked all the talk. It was a set-myself-apart, make-a-statement burning desire that I experience natural childbirth. We were living on a remote ranch so I checked into a motel across the street from a small hospital in a tiny town once I began labor. Why? I’d just participated in a birth on that same ranch in which the woman tore horribly. We had to load her and her new baby in the back of a cold jeep with worn-out shock absorbers and drive three hours on dirt roads in winter weather to get her to someone who could sew her up and then three hours back again. After I’d checked into the hotel with a defiant notion of how it was all going to turn out for me, it was one thing after another. First, I started itching all over. Our room was infested with fleas and I had to get settled into another room and rid myself of fleas. Then my labor went on and on and on. I walked across the street to the hospital and they gave me a sedative (I desperately needed some rest) that made me vomit--I fell and hit my head on the way to the toilet. They checked me in but remember, in this particular situation, we were without modern monitors, etc. I stalled at 8 cm dilation because my daughter's head was in the wrong position and wasn’t helping dilate me (we didn’t know it until we saw her misshapen head after). Even after 72 hours of labor, not only was my precious daughter stuck but I was stuck in my thinking. Finally, a doctor put one hand on my shaking knee in the air and his other hand on my hand said, "MaryJane, this is about having a healthy baby." In that instant, when he gave me permission to let go of my notion of right and wrong, they put a healthy (but stressed) baby girl in my arms within minutes, C-section. It cost a total of $900 so later that month I sold a 14’ travel trailer I’d been living in to pay for it. Here's another way to think about "grain." In the link below there is a graph at the bottom that lists cereal grasses and their seed heads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonio If you were a cow in the wild and you came upon a field of grass that had gone to seed, you’d think you’d died and gone to heaven. There's no way you'd try to eat just the grass and ignore the seed heads. In fact, you’d probably gobble up the high-energy, yummy seed heads first. When I put a fresh bale of straw out for my girls, they spend about an hour nosing around and sniffing out the few kernels of wheat that sometimes end up in the straw. If I were marketing my operation as grass-fed would I have to lie about that? I had a woman call me to ask, first, if I had A2 cows, I said, yes. She then asked about antibiotics and I explained to her that in order to save a cow (or a child) I’ve always been grateful for antibiotics (again, this stems from the fact that in the mega-dairy world, cows are fed antibiotics in their feed every day), and then she asked whether or not a single kernel of grain had ever in the cow’s life passed its lips. When I said yes, I feed them grain daily, she hung up on me. I would say that as I age, my world as I see it, gets more and more gray. I feel bad for the producers I've talked to recently who are in a serious marketing tight spot over grass vs. grain. Either they’re dealing with drought and lack of “grass” or they have a producing milk cow(s) that is slowly losing body mass; the photos I've seen are alarming. If grass-only is keeping your cows and bulls vital, stick with it. If not, give yourself permission to recognize that it’s about having healthy cows, not single-issue marketing slogans. 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