Paleo Diet: Raw Paleo Diet and Lifestyle Forum
Raw Paleo Diet Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: sabertooth on June 22, 2016, 01:28:35 pm
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After seeking out Paleo quality sources of the finest pasture meats available, searching far and wide for the best tasting animals, over a number of years, I think its past time to write down some of my thoughts ideas, so as to encourage others to think "Beyond Grass Fed" when seeking out Paleo quality meats.
After sampling Grass Fed Labeled Beef from local markets, as well as travailing abroad to Europe and other areas across America, I am very disappointed in the taste of much of what is being sold at the average market place. I believe that there are a good number of reasons for this, (other than the fact that I am as Finicky as a feline). Its been obvious to me for some time, how typical grass fed operations are being run does not make for the kind of qualities I have been seeking. Ive seen the limited fenced in pastures, which have been striped of all wild vegetation and contain primarily only a few grass varieties... the hay which is supplemented is often even more limited in its variety of wild forage. Then there are many other absurd practices of vaccinations, chemical worming, castrating, and butchering before optimal maturity, which makes the Grass Fed Label nearly worthless to Me.
These observations of how beef is typically raised and the poor taste it often has, lead me to prefer pasture raised Mutton from small family farms. This has worked fairly well the last few years, especially because it allows me to harvest all the organs as well as being able to inspect the animal carefully...... though Lately I have exhausted my best sources and have not been very pleased with the last few I have received from elsewhere. Many places that raise sheep also have limited access to ideal forage, so the taste and quality can suffer as a result.
Many Ideals have come to mind in regard to how our pasture lands no longer contain the dynamic and synergistic balance of wild forage, which is necessary for the grazing animals to become fully and optimally adapted to and integrated into the local ecology. Much of these realizations remained in the back of my mind and are ruminated upon every time I have to chew on a Bad tasting piece of meat.
Recently after a chance encounter with a Rancher at a farmers market in Tucson Arizona, my faith in domestically raised beef has been restored, and many of my theories have been affirmed.( Back Story) After spending a few days in Santa Fe with the Girlfriends family, and having to suffer through some very mediocre Grass Fed Beef from the local chain markets, hiking many miles, I was ravenous for something good. A Friend in Tucson took us all to the local farmers market. I soon found a booth where there were plenty of beef marrow bones for cheap and I bought a bunch, but the cuts where 18 dollars a pound so i decided to go to the car and taste the bones before buying any cuts. OMG!! after a couple of weeks being low on quality fat, those marrow bones where a gift from the divine! I went back and told the man that those bones where very good, and I would like to buy some of the fattest cuts. He looked at me and asked how did you eat them, knowing that I couldn't possible had cooked them, so I told him about being a Raw Paleo and about all the particular requirements of the diet.
He then told me about how his Cows where the closest thing to wild Beef there is. They are not even vaccinated.... they have full access to wild desert forage, these are not 'grass fed' they are "FORAGE FED" animals, eating mostly wild brush that includes jojoba( which is suppose to have some magical properties). If anything these animals by eating naturally occurring forage become well adapted to the desert environment. The animal that I bought was was a ten year old cow with flesh so tender rich and mild that I could hardly believe it was beef. Foraging livestock need time to mature. The CLA, trace minerals, phytonutrients nutrients, and fat soluble proto-vitamins, build up as the animal matures..... at the typical age of two years beef cattle are too young to be considered Prime( by Primal standards)
He only butchers an animal a few weeks after the rains came in and make everything lush.... around the time of hearing this, a light bulb when off in my head, and I could picture these cattle after the rains freely moo-ving from shrub to shrub, and brute to brush nibbling the lush new shoots as they pleased, in accord with their taste, before moving on to wherever their instinct directed. These Brutes , by being given the opportunity to seek their own forage, and the freedom to eat whatever their instincts direct them to, are able to incorporate the tastiest and most nutrition parts of their environment into their flesh, and these attributes and qualities pass directly to the whom consumes that flesh.
By direct contrast confined animals who are shovel fed grass, get no choice, no freedom to forage for the best that nature has to offer, and much less opertunity to lightly graze off of the lush new growth while leaving the bitter old stalks. In effect, the bad taste of a lot of the Grass Fed Labeled Beef comes from the limited freedom of range animals to intensively graze upon wild and pristine forage land...instead they are given a few varieties of odd grass and forced to chew on cud of bitter stalks.
After leaving the market and biting into one of the chuck eye cuts that night, I became convinced about the superiority of the Jojoba Beef. It seemed to have a taste, texture and mineral composition that was very agreeable. I called up the Rancher and arranged to order 30 pounds to take back with me to Kentucky. There where fatty rib cuts, and chuck eye, liver and sweet breads. The liver was the real testament, I have never had a beef liver taste so pure and delicious. I tried to convince the Rancher that there would be a huge market online for that kind of quality, but he just pointed to his sign which had "Local" written on it, and said that selling local was the only way. After realizing how knowledgeable I was and how much in agreement our philosophy's were, he did offer me a Job, and if it were not for my 4 children, I would be there now learning how to Ranch, Rope and Ride....it is 8 miles through wilderness, on a mustang just to round up an animal when its time to bring it to butcher. Though as unrealistic it is for me to become a cowboy out west, I still might try to go out and apprentice for a month after the rainy season, and work enough to earn a truck full of cow parts to take back home.
Thats it for tonight, To be continued......Until then anyone else feel free to weigh in on the topic of Going Beyond Grass fed.
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Wonderful! I am always glad when other RVAFers do not have to compromise as regards the quality of their diet. I do not know about US laws but in the EU one is forced by law to slaughter all cattle once they reach 30 months of age. Since the meat becomes tastier with age as grassfed animals take longer to build up decent fat-layers etc., this is absolutely criminal.The insane hysteria over the BSE crisis gave the EU an excuse to crush British etc. farming. The result is that at UK farmers' markets I found it extremely difficult to get hold of raw grassfed-derived organ-meats as they were forced to pay 2 food-inspectors(1 EU-appointed and 1 UK-appointed), and would have had to spend a lot more to sell the raw organs as well. Fortunately, I could eventually get hold of raw wild hare carcasses plus organs and blood so I did better than expected.
One thing I noticed was the introduction by some UK farms of "salt-marsh-fed" lamb. Also, the raw grassfed lamb, even if not the salt-marsh-fed variety, always tasted way better than the raw grassfed beef, with few exceptions. I could even eat the white fat of the grasfed leg of lamb with delight whereas the raw white fat on grassfed beef was not to my taste.
Here in Austria, access to raw wild game on the cheap is easily possible, but only the muscle-meats not the organ-meats.
Makes sense that your farmer chose to only sell local. Some of the UK farms I ordered from online also chose to only sell locally.
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Great story! I'd like to eat some of the wild boar that live around here, but they a are too smart to be easily killed like the deer.
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The butcher I hired to slaughter my lambs who had been a butcher in farm country slaughtering animals his whole life told me my lamb was the best he ever saw in his life. Icelandic lamb may be the best quality lamb in the world. They were originally brought to Iceland by vikings 1100 years ago and have remained pure ever since, they are the direct descendants of the original Northern European Mountain Sheep. They eat all kinds of vegetation, more diverse and thorough in consumption than even a goat, if the right variety of perennial and in some regions annual grasses they are more fit than most livestock to live year round on pasture and wilderness. It is said they can live through what would kill another sheep breed and they have a higher requirement for copper than other sheep when it is said that copper is poisonous to sheep.
I have been studying how to grow the most nutrient dense food for the past 9 years. I have been eating organic produce all of those years and it is very clear to me there is an insane amount of factors in quality.
Most of the pasture in this country is entirely dominated by invasive species. Many of which are not ideally nutritious and in some cases toxic. Tall Fescue in much of the midwest is the predominant pasture grass and causes toxicity if consumed in too large of quantities when the plant is stressed. It has low palatability but high drought tolerance so survives when other grasses whither in dry hot summers when fescue's toxic symbiotic fungus thrives and attempts to prevent livestock from consuming the plant.
The solution? Two different ways to skin a cat as far as I see. You could throw a lot of money at the problem or you could implement high labor pasture management methods and you need to do the later to produce the highest quality product possible.
Growing a crop requires capital as does planting a pasture, usually the best option is to pick whatever animal best eats whatever food is already growing on your farm.
Pasture management is crucial, some farms rotate their cattle to fresh pasture, not just every day, or twice a day, but every hour that the sun shines all summer long!
Much of the soil is depleted of minerals, chiefly carbon and usually there is an imbalance of Calcium and Magnesium in the soil, causing other minerals to be bound and unavailable.
Livestock managed correctly are tools for bringing soil back into balance. Healthy pastures must be allowed to mature to produce carbon to feed the soil where livestock are managed. Mature forages allow livestock to select a balanced diet by allowing them to control how much of forage they eat. On pasture, ruminant livestock are limited not by protein but by carbohydrates, plants accumulate sugar on their leaves and the greater amount of protein is near the ground, so allowing plants to grow to maturity allows animals to select their own protein and sugar intake. Plants at maturity also have much more carbon so help much more to build soil than plants grazed short and tender.
Livestock are also friends and raising different livestock together improves their ability to utilize pasture and actually causes them to grow faster! Different species of grazing animals work symbiotically together to maintain pastures in nature and on the farm.
My ideal has always been to raise animals as closely to nature as possible.
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Great stuff....... I would have loved to taste that beef, Sabertooth! Why am I not there ;)
The issue with good quality animal meat disappears when eating out of the ocean.... I am so lucky to be able to pick and eat as many wild oysters as I like where I live. We do have those "salt-marsh-fed" lambs here too Tyler, but you get them only in season.... they taste awesome......
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Great post Derek. I have a few thoughts to add:
First, in the United States the label "Grass Fed" does not mean all that much. A label that says only "Grass Fed" just means that at some point in the animal's life it was fed grass, which can include hay. A label of "Grass Fed" doesn't necessarily mean that an animal ever actually ate fresh grass (or fresh forage more generally) at any time in its life. I think this is one reason for why the taste and texture of "Grass Fed" meat can vary so much.
"Grass Fed" meats in the US can also be finished on grain for the last months of their lives to fatten them up to slaughter weight faster without having to acknowledge this on the label. If you want an animal that has never been fed grain, you need to look for a label that says "100 % Grass Fed" or something similar. Even this label doesn't guarantee that the animal ever ate fresh forage, just that it was never fed grain. A confined feedlot could earn the "100 % Grass Fed" label by raising cattle in a barn and feeding them hay. There are other more stringent labels that pertain to the diets of marketed ruminants such as those by the American Grassfed Association (http://www.americangrassfed.org) and the Food Alliance (http://foodalliance.org/grassfed), among others, but there's no requirement that a seller meet the standards of these third-party labels in order to use the term "Grass Fed" in their marketing.
Having worked with a number of grass farmers in the Northeast US I have pretty much decided that it's nearly impossible to find high quality meat available on commercial markets. The economics of grass farming don't work very well. To make money grass farming a farmer must rely on forages with high protein or sugar content to force animals to grow fast enough to send them to slaughter in a reasonable amount of time. Any diet that forces an animal to grow fast isn't really all that good for its nutritional value. The best beef I've eaten comes from hobby farmers who raise for taste and texture specifically and can afford to give a half-dozen cattle 50 acres to roam around on. These are generally wealthy people who care about the food they eat and not about turning a profit on it.
I don't hardly buy beef anymore in the US Northeast as our landscape just doesn't work for them. Grass farmers in this part of the country literally have to force the land to be pasture, as it so desperately wants to grow back into forest and start the long process of healing itself from years of overgrazing by dairy farmers and from the tillage practices used by vegetable farmers. I do sometimes buy Icelandic sheep as they seem to be better adapted to the landscape from an ecological standpoint, and I'd also buy goat if I could find someone who didn't heavily supplement their goats diet with cheap grain.
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How do you supervise what your kids are eating? I find it very hard with mine esp when most of the day is spent at school. Gets very picky. The most I can do is very rare steak and rarely raw ground meat.
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How do you supervise what your kids are eating?
For a second I was unsure if you were talking about children or goats ;)
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Fascinating posts, sabertooth, RogueFarmer and Eric.
I wonder what you guys think about rotating herds in the way Joe Salatin suggests, which is to allow the grasses to spend the most time growing at their maximum growth rate, which seems to be somewhere around the middle of the growth cycle, as when the grass blades are too short, they grow slowly as they can't capture much sunlight, and when they're long, they spend more energy flowering and developing seeds and so stop growing as much. But maybe those later stage processes are useful to feed your herds some more protein.
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The issue with good quality animal meat disappears when eating out of the ocean.... I am so lucky to be able to pick and eat as many wild oysters as I like where I live. We do have those "salt-marsh-fed" lambs here too Tyler, but you get them only in season.... they taste awesome......
I'm not much of a fan of ocean foods. Oysters are great when they are good quality, but those are hard to find and are very expensive to buy in quantities large enough to represent a substantial part of your diet. Most of the time I end up paying lots of money for low quality oysters. Squids are another of my favourites (well the tentacles and head mostly, the rest of the body isn't very tasty), and they're cheap, but very hard to find fresh, it's almost always frozen. As for regular ocean fish, I find them too lean and light to be my main meats. I do eat fish every now and then, but it's not an everyday staple for me. On most days I'd much rather have grain finished beef with all of it's toxins than have lean healthy ocean fish. River fish is much more fatty and tasty, but rivers are often heavily polluted.
I think different meats appeal to different individuals more or less, and that may change with time. If I found ocean fish to be more of my liking I'd be having it more often.
Another exception for me is fish eyes. Those are delicious. But they would look at me really weird if I went into the seafood store and told them I just wanted the eyes from all the fish lol.
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I wonder what you guys think about rotating herds in the way Joe Salatin suggests...
Salatin's method is basically management intensive grazing, which is the gold standard among grass farmers. It can grow a cow or steer to slaughter weight relatively fast (say 18-24 months relative to other grass-based methods that might require 36 months or more), and in my mind that's where it fails. Anytime you're raising an animal with the intention of slaughtering it ASAP the meat will miss out on the many phytochemicals that accumulate over years of diverse eating. This is a point that Derek (aka Sabertooth) noted in his initial post, and it's something that I think is hugely important. This is why tribal hunters went after large adult animals primarily, because they recognized that their meat and organs were more nutritionally valuable. Of course they'd take a little one if it was easy, but the hunters who brought back fawns weren't the ones who were revered. The revered hunters were those who could bring back older adults.
Salatin's method is also grass-based in a literal sense, which means the forage he offers cattle is mostly grass rather than a more even mix of grass and other herbaceous vegetation. Limiting forage to grass makes sense economically because the protein and sugar content of the forage is higher and you'll end up with a 1,000 pound animal sooner, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll end up with better quality meat when the animal goes to slaughter. Basically, management intensive grazing systems are designed to find a middle ground between a desire for somewhat higher quality meat (which comes from allowing cattle and other grazers to forage on pasture) and a desire to make money. The fact that financial concerns are involved in the tradeoff means that grass farmers will deliver lower quality meat than if financial concerns weren't part of their management decision making.
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How does Salatin limit forage? I thought he just allowed his herds to graze on whatever forage naturally occurs on the land.
About the money aspect, it seems to me that it could be possible to run an operation where most animals are slaughtered young to sell cheap meat, and some are allowed to mature to the point where the meat has the highest levels of nutrients, but you sell that meat for a higher price, one that is enough to cover your extra costs. That could be a potential solution.
It's interesting what you mentioned about hunters. Generally wild predators go for young or old prey because they're the easiest to kill, and avoid healthy adults as they're the hardest to kill.
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Also another question, for whoever feels like answering it, is it too hard to manage adult bulls without the use of neutering? And if so, would you only allow cows to reach full maturity?
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How does Salatin limit forage?
If he's like most grass farmers, his pastures are fairly heavily managed. He probably seeds with whatever forage he'd like to see dominate on a yearly basis, and if a pasture drifts too far from his ideal species composition he might plow it under and start again or use a broad-spectrum herbicide to kill everything and start again. If your goal is to make money in grass farming, you can't just waltz into a field and graze cattle. You need to manage the field for particular species that your cattle can digest and that allow the cattle to gain weight as fast as they can.
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Eric I do not understand how I disagree with you so much. Honestly I do not know exactly what Salatin is doing, but he was doing MIG nearly 40 years ago. He is on to bigger and better things. They haven't planted a pasture seed on their farm in over 50 years! The cows eat mostly grass because that's what cows naturally eat mostly and that's what naturally grows back there. They no longer use MIG (which they sort of invented) they are much closer to HM, Holistic Management. They have always sweat their crop diversity.
Eric I disagree with your northeast assessment. I think your condemnation is an omen to anyone who lives in the North East that they should gtfo because there is no other sustainable agricultural model to replace that industry. Sure grazing livestock evolved in the dry lands so they do better in the west, but they do much worse in the south and not much better in the mid west.
I fervently disagree with your idea that plants that are high in sugar or protein are not nutritious and cause nutritional shortfalls. That is exactly the total opposite of the truth. Perhaps they are growing the wrong forages for the stock they are raising. Perhaps their methods are not sound. Protein is not a problem in the North East, if you are having a protein problem on pasture in the north east, there is something seriously wrong with that pasture. There are only energy problems, carbohydrate problems. Protein problems do not happen to ruminant livestock on decent pasture. Never heard tell. Plenty of decent pasture in the north east, it's only problem is it's low in sugar, over watered and the season is short.
The problem with grazing operations in the North East is that THEY FEED HAY. Hay is the biggest economic factor on the majority of beef farms in the U.S. But making hay is generally highly unprofitable in the U.S. Make the animals do the work and then you have profit. Animals that work for a living are profitable. Animals you have to haul feed to are probably not!
Young cattle is not a new problem. This started back in the great depression. It used to be you raised a steer for 4-5 years and local farm beef was almost always an old cull cow, 4-5 year old steers were marched into cities. So farmers were eating meat that was usually 8+ years old and city people were eating 4-5 year old. This is what they used to call "aged meat" back then. Then the great depression came along with the dust bowl and STEERSMEN (an old somewhat extinct type of farmer) could no longer afford to keep their cattle for so long, while grain was plentiful and cheap, the tradition of feedlot and grainfed took root in America.
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If he's like most grass farmers, his pastures are fairly heavily managed. He probably seeds with whatever forage he'd like to see dominate on a yearly basis, and if a pasture drifts too far from his ideal species composition he might plow it under and start again or use a broad-spectrum herbicide to kill everything and start again. If your goal is to make money in grass farming, you can't just waltz into a field and graze cattle. You need to manage the field for particular species that your cattle can digest and that allow the cattle to gain weight as fast as they can.
JOEL DOESN't OWN A PLOW AND IF HE DOES IT's FOR DECORATION. HE DOESNT PLANT PASTURE SEEDS, IF HE DOES THAT'S NEWS TO ME LOL
He doesn't use chemicals rofl...
Joel doesn't use shit, they don't vaccinate, they don't use chemical wormers, they don't spray fertilizer, they don't till fields, they don't plant seeds, they don't cut down the forest, they don't use pesticides.
Pretty sure I told you in the thread I made that Polyface was practically a permaculture farm. They are like 90% there and a lot closer than most so called permaculture farms.
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Fascinating posts, sabertooth, RogueFarmer and Eric.
I wonder what you guys think about rotating herds in the way Joe Salatin suggests, which is to allow the grasses to spend the most time growing at their maximum growth rate, which seems to be somewhere around the middle of the growth cycle, as when the grass blades are too short, they grow slowly as they can't capture much sunlight, and when they're long, they spend more energy flowering and developing seeds and so stop growing as much. But maybe those later stage processes are useful to feed your herds some more protein.
That's old stuff he doesn't do that anymore.
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RF, what do you see as the difference between management intensive grazing and holistic management? I think of holistic management, as defined by Allan Savory, as being one type of management intensive grazing. I don't see them as being overwhelmingly different.
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But they are, MIG is producing what they believe to be the highest yield per acre with grass. HM is using animals as a tool to manage landscapes. Generally but not always MIG will yield more initially but over time HM will yield more. Only in the most ideal grass growing environments should MIG be able to surpass HM I believe.
The economics of MIG are kind of totally thrashed by the fact that you generally have to replant pastures which is an insane economic burden, even planting a couple of acres was always somewhat daunting to me. And I bet it is really daunting to those who do it. I mean it's not easy to kill everything in a field and plant it to new seeds and expect to get something better than what you started with. That's an art in and of itself.
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RogueFarmer, what is old Salatin stuff and how has that changed now?
As far as the financial aspects, what I'm looking at is yield per dollar invested, not yield per acre, as I don't own any land as of yet and am looking to buy some in the future, after I learn how to farm. But different land in different areas has a different price per acre, so that needs to be accounted for. And yield should really be defined as yield in quantity times quality, not simply quantity. I liked what you said about raising different type of livestock together, as that will allow you to maximize the natural resources each of them can utilize. As long as the bigger ones don't displace the smaller ones and get all of the best grasses.
Would it be too complicated for a small commercial farm to raise various kinds of grazers along with pigs, chickens, rabbits, and perhaps a few others; along with bees, and some garden vegetables and fruits? Some people have told me it's easier to just specialize on one thing. But I think there are also plenty of benefits to be gained from doing multiple things at the same time. For instance the bees can get nectar and pollen from your own flowering plants, anything that rots you can feed to your pigs or your worm farm which will in turn feed the chickens, and the chicken manure can in turn supplement the pigs' diet. Also once customers get to know your farm and they know you sell top quality foods, they can buy all of your products, and not just one or two. That way even with a relatively smaller number of customers you can get plenty of sales.
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Something else that's been on my mind:
For a dairy farm (whether it's cows or sheep or goat or all of the above), if you're roating your herds along different areas, it seems to me that if your grazing area was big enough, it could make some sense to have a mobile milking parlor, rather than a fixed one where all your herds have to be dragged to every day, as they go back and forth from the grazing lands to the milking parlor.
Also I've seen a documentary once where they showed dairy cows willfully entering the milking parlor and hooking themselves onto the automatic milking machines (the hooking was automatic with the movements being controlled by a computer) without being led there. I found that very suspicious. Do you think that happens with organically raised cows who have to be kept constantly pregnant or with a young calf, or is it something that just happens with cows that are given huge amounts of hormones to increase milk production?
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I like where this discussion has gone.
Let us not quibble over trifles, and recognize that there are no "economically viable" strictly paleo way to raise animals in intensively grazed and managed plots of land...compared to all the optimal qualities of wide open wild free ranging beast. True, there are some exceptionally ethically run Grass and foraged based farms that offer phenomenal quality, but these seem to be the exception to the rule. In order for fenced fields to handle such intense grazing, of typical commercial operations, many compromises are being made that drastically affect the taste and quality of the final product.
https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/forages/publications/ay98.htm (https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/forages/publications/ay98.htm)
Where I live the bane of my existence is Fescue hay. The butcher I apprenticed under took me out to farms and pointed out how much of the grazing land has been overtaken by fescue....much of the land I surveyed was covered in it, with little else other than some briers and other noxious plants that the voracious cattle passed over for some reason. Tons of Engineered Fescue was planted all over the united states, for the very reason that it could withstand such intensive grazing operations of confined pasture operations. Even pastures which have been gentrified by ethical grass operations are still greatly depleted from the kind of wild forage variety of untouched and wide open lands. Generations of cutting fields down for hay and and over grazing has taken a toll, the occasional brush fires which did so much to rejuvenate the land have been BLM-ed out of existence. Fescue has a symbiant fungus which it has evolved to prevent animals form being able to over graze. It is my theory, this Fescue fungus along with other detrimental molds, metastasize in the cut roll bails that many grass operations use to supplement their animals, overloading the animals detox capabilities and causing the God awful, piss poor flavor, of a lot of the Grass Fed Labeled meat on the market.
The confinement of animals to a fenced pasture, though in no way nearly as abhorrent as fed lots, still can be a problem. Truly free animals would never remain in such a confined range, with so dense of numbers per acre. Many "grass fed" operations have limited land and so have to constantly rotate the animals and in many situations large numbers are kept in small paddocks and fed hay while the fields recover. In these crammed conditions they begin to become inundated with their own waste manure. This leads to problems with worms, other parasites, and infections, that are often treated with chemical wormers and Farmaceuticals. These problems are indeed only problems for capitalistic humans...for nature parasites, infections, infertility, starvation in overgrazing situations are all intelligently crafted solutions to the biological problems caused by imbalance in the ecosystem. I worked at a plant that did Grass fed that processed for Whole Foods, many if not all of the animals as far as I was told had been dewormed and vaccinated at sometime in their lives. Many of these animals taste badly, and harbored obvious signs of ill health.
The Land is a living being, and what we see as independent plant and animal phenomenon, "competing for the right to survive" are in reality components of a much larger interconnected and interdependent organism. Manure waste needs time to break down and be recycled..... the vegetation needs time to recover from the onslaughts of the herbivoreian hordes of grazing animals....The animals evolved to comb over and manicure and fertilize the entire eco-scape, spreading the seeds of life and fertility far and wide. A well balanced arrangement between these dynamics, is the basis for the evolution of a thriving world. Through the evolution of this natural order, much higher, complexities and intelligence's emerge....as an accumulative pattern which contains the all and everything, each "eminence front" becomes much more than the sum of its parts.....
Any sincere quest for the optimal health and vitality, would benefit from considering these larger than life inter connected relationships present in every living system. Our ancestors ascent into technological realms of consciousness, and away from the intrinsic biological understanding was governed by the natural order... I believe, when technology is used intentionally to alter the dynamics of the eco-scape, against the inclinations of the biological imperatives, and toward the aims of Domination, there is an establishment of the interference pattern which obscures any chance of reconciling technological with the biological.
Human intervention no matter how slight it may seem, can dramatically alter the dynamic of the these living systems in dramatic ways, that are barely recognized. Animals forced to live on confined pastures in intensive farming operations overburden the land, the bio toxins and parasites in the manure act as gentle repellent, which encourages the animals to move on, instinctively, giving the land time to recover. Many highly nutritious plants with sweet and tender shoots will if threatened begin to excrete biological agents and the free ruminators can go from area to area nibbling on the shoots and moving on before the repellent chemicals are secreted, while the confined pasture animals are often forced by hunger to eat all parts of the plant. When the capacity of the land to support one strain of life form, reaches its limit nature begins to react.
Tragically to the determent of ourselves as well as the living earth, man kind is using technological methods in efforts to hack these environmental systems without paying heed to natures warning. The industrial scale, Applying of unproven technology, corrupted by market economics, toward meat production, while willfully ignoring the primacy of quality in favor of monetary profit has created a desperate situation in many parts of the civilized world for those who seek the best quality meats under the sun.
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Something else that's been on my mind:
For a dairy farm (whether it's cows or sheep or goat or all of the above), if you're roating your herds along different areas, it seems to me that if your grazing area was big enough, it could make some sense to have a mobile milking parlor, rather than a fixed one where all your herds have to be dragged to every day, as they go back and forth from the grazing lands to the milking parlor.
Also I've seen a documentary once where they showed dairy cows willfully entering the milking parlor and hooking themselves onto the automatic milking machines (the hooking was automatic with the movements being controlled by a computer) without being led there. I found that very suspicious. Do you think that happens with organically raised cows who have to be kept constantly pregnant or with a young calf, or is it something that just happens with cows that are given huge amounts of hormones to increase milk production?
These exist in several forms including massive trailers that cows actually load up into to be milked. Yes some organic farms do use robotic milking equipment. These artifacts allow cows to milk themselves whenever they desire. I'm not a big fan, especially since those units run about a million dollars per one, however there are some advantages.
Salatin no longer uses MIG. I don't know exactly what he does but it's pretty much HM. MIG tells you to graze grass in it's most rapid growth spurts. HM says exactly the opposite. HM says allow forages to reach sexual maturity before grazing them and if you don't allow them to reach sexual maturity before they are grazed a second time. Do not graze one field more than once before allowing every desired species to reach maturity. HM utilizes STOCKPILED forages (tall yellow grass generally with weeds growing up in between).
HM is not always more healthy for livestock than MIG, MIG is generally healthier for your herd, however in the long run, HM will produce superior forages and superior animals and superior yields. Using HM allows pastures to evolve in the most similar way to natural probably still possible in most parts of the world today.
The first 5 years of HM perhaps Sabertooth, would be inferior to truly free range wilderness. But after those 5 years of good management, most farms will surely be superior and produce superior produce to most of the wilderness left on the planet.
I don't even think it's just a problem of farmers wanting more money. Like you guys say, few of them make much money. I don't think this is because farming isn't profitable. I think it is because humans in general are kind of stupid and aren't very good at making their own decisions. They watch what their neighbors do and they follow suit. Organic farms typically largely resemble their conventional neighbors and can only be told apart from a distance by discerning eyes. Farmers who have trouble running their business generally shoot for a better quality of life, so they make farm decisions based on whatever it is that suits their needs. Like only buying a farm with a really nice house, getting some horses to ride around on, buying a great big tractor and a bunch of new hay making equipment. How about a SILO. All of those things could by themselves make a farm unprofitable! Joel Salatin calls SILOS "bankruptcy tubes".
HM is different. Practicing HM forces the farmer to create a grazing plan. It forces the farmer to learn everything he can about his farm and how to improve it. It forces the farmer to think about his farm and ever way it impacts the earth and the local community. Using HM allows the farmer to know when to sell animals or when to buy animals to manage the available forage on his land. Generally utilizing HM, land can support as many as twice as many animals in the second year and as many as 5 times as many animals or sometimes even more in as little as 5 years.
Holistic management forces you to consider things that almost no one ever does. It forces you to consider everything involved in your life and your environment. Similar to Permaculture, many claim holistic management but fewer truly practice it. Most are limited by land space like you said. When you graze for grass instead of grazing for cattle, really amazing things start to happen. Diversity and pasture quality skyrockets. Turns out cows and grass were meant to be together.
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Using HM even fescue dominated pastures can be turned around in as little as one grazing! Fescue is a double edged sword. There are some really good aspects to fescue and the endophyte is not always a problem. Fescue though low in nutrition and high in toxin, is basically free and also happens to be about the most cold resistant perennial grass that grows in the midwest. This means stockpiled fescue is basically the most economical winter feed for cattle herds in much of the eastern United States and elsewhere. There is little endophyte toxicity in this winter growth.
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When Farming an Ideal one may assume as one wishes, but should avoid impossibilities. When speaking of "impossibly" high standards for mass food production, one must avoid falling into relativistic comparison based thinking. Many farmers are perfectly happy producing higher than the average quality, and being able to eek out a decent profit.... but this thread is focused on seeking out the Supreme, and I find many practices which are implemented for economic reasons to be a determent to the kind of qualities I have attuned my senses to seek out.
Even so called low endophyte loads in supplemental fescue adversly affect the taste and quality of the meat. In Kentucky it is a big problem for me personally, I see the huge roll bails out in the fields which are a main staple for many operations. The Kentucky climate is naturally conducive for molds and mildews so this rolled hay often contains high toxic loads which may not kill the animal , but it affects the taste of the meat, and most likely the health and vitality of those who consume it.
Economics are at the core of these issues, because of personal property and the limitations being set by the BLM and other systems of control, the open range land is not being utilized to its potential. There are parts of the west that are open range, where property owners have to fence out livestock, instead of having them fenced in. An enlightened approach to establishing large scale open ranges would be Ideal in boasting the production of sustainable, ethically produced, and economically viable meat production....sadly the system is crippled with ignorance and greed to the core. Over the years since agenda 21 governmental entities have taxed and regulated most of the large scale free rangers out of business, in effect deliberate subverting and subsiding open range operations, while at the same time actively subsidizing feed lot cesspool production operations. Even Farmers who want to produce the best quality and the costumers who are willing to pay extra for it are being cheated by the structure of the system of land management , ownership, and control which works to seems to deliberately stifle independent and sell sufficient enterprises, with a kind of modern day feudalism
Perhaps for the majority of the people in the world, sour tasting fescue fed meat is a healthy alternative to commercial GMO finished meat, but for someone who eats over two pounds give or take, each day, it is of paramount importance that I find something beyond.
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RogueFarmer, where do you live? And are you currently farming? And if not, are you looking to get back into it?
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I live in Southern Oregon and I am doing some amount of farming.
Sabertooth, I am not at all trying to say fescue hay is ever suitable feed however in certain growing conditions even kentucky 51 endophyte fescue can be pretty much the best perennial forage that is actually still green in most of the United States. Now if you are planting pastures, you could instead use meadow fescue which is more palatable and does not have endophyte as well as endophyte free fescue and even "friendly" endophyte fescue which has a special endophyte which does not produce the toxins associated with regular endophyte Kentucky 51 tall fescue. As far as I know there are few other perennials that can replace fescue in quality for a winter forage in the midwestern united states. In order to do better I know of two ways, one would be to plant a crop of winter rye, winter wheat or triticale for winter grazing which produces some of the most nutritious grass possible on earth and two to have some kind of a grazing vineyard of honey suckle, which retains it's leaves and protein content long into the winter.
Bison are adapted to eat native stockpiled forages. Buffalo grass, big and little blue stem, indian grass and switch grass all make excellent winter feed for bison but are inedible to cattle after they grow too tall and throughout the winter. As well, bison's metabolism in winter slows down more than cattle, deer and elk, even more so, lessening their dietary requirements to make it through harsh winters. This is the biggest advantage of native livestock in the Americas.
It is extremely difficult to displace fescue once it is there. It is basically the hardiest cool season grass because of the symbiotic endophyte and because of it's spreading and crowning root system it is difficult and sometimes impossible to eradicate without use of harmful chemicals or great effort in machinery and cover cropping. Using Holisitc Management, fescue can literally be clobbered so hard by cattle hooves and manure that diversity is naturally forced onto fescue pastures. It is possible with one heavy grazing to increase biodiversity many times over. Fescue toxicity stops being recognizable after fescue is reduced to a smaller proportion of fescue domination. Traditional grazing as well as MIG encourages fescue. Fescue LOVES MIG, if you use MIG in the fescue belt of the midwest and southern united states I bet you will end up with a field of at least 90% fescue in less than ten years. Using HM, native grasses are able to compete against fescue and start to naturally establish themselves, the seeds somehow brought in by birds or stored in the ground, waiting for the right conditions.
You can base your beef farm off of fescue pastures, but that doesn't mean your finished product has to ever have personally eaten any fescue. How much will feeding a beef cow fescue harm her calf if her calf only ever eats improved pastures lacking in fescue?
I think it's important to remember why we grew beef cattle in the first place. Beef cattle are probably the most or second or third most economical source of meat on the planet. A beef cow can live off pasture that would starve all but the hardiest animals. A beef cow can survive and raise a calf where little else can be grown. Over 70% of beef cattle are in the tropics or sub tropics where grass grows incredibly lush but low in nutrition. There are parts of Africa where most livestock and humans die within months of living there in the wrong season due to a particular species of fly, but native cows can survive there.
I think there is good beef grown on fescue pastures. I raised my livestock for 2 years on fescue based pastures, their meat and milk was incredibly delicious, my cow in August in the middle of a drought was in better condition than most of the jerseys I visited that year at the Ohio State Fair.
I also fed my livestock kelp and they ate a lot of other things besides fescue.
I did feed my livestock fescue hay one year because it was almost impossible to find hay that year and I will tell you I will never do that again however, that year I also managed to only feed hay for a month and three weeks and my jersey cows grazed and dug through snow and grazed all winter long that year.
I think what eric said about high sugar and protein forages being lower in overall nutrition. Now those crops can be extremely nutritious in ideal conditions however, if conditions are not ideal those crops will be inferior quality. A better solution to building a better diet would then be to plant a higher diversity instead of trying to rely on a few high yielding and superior nutrition forages. What people forget is that these "superior nutrition forages" generally can only match but not surpass many of the "weeds" growing in their pastures in nutritional quality. However there are some super nutritious crops that have ludicrous quantities of sugar, protein and minerals. Most of them are weeds and as I am trying to explain, many that have excellent soil requirements, so often fail to meet expectations.
I think there are farms that produce good quality beef on fescue pastures, but perhaps you wouldn't like their quality either, you should try Polyface beef and Green Pastures farm and see how their beef tastes if you can.
You should also probably go to NZ because their whole beef production model is basically grass fed beef fed so well that the meat is so tender you can cut it with a butter knife.
I think the best compromise would be to buy a really quality piece of land, raise the best economic beef business you can that earns you money, which will also allow you to feast on your retired bulls and cull cows.
I have mostly heard 4 different influences on flavor and eating quality of beef. 1 the faster the animal is growing the more tender the meat will be and as soon as growth slows toughness onsets. 2 a mixture of forages is important for a balanced fatty acid profile and improved flavor and forage quality throughout the grazing life of the animal. 3 the way the animal is killed and the way the meat is stored and preserved after slaughter 4 the older an animal is the more flavor it has. The best tasting beef according to the editor of the stockman grass farmer was from a 20 year old cow. this is my experience as well, the best hamburger I ever ate was from my friends beef farm (which happens to be fescue based) from his 20 or 30 year old cull cows!
Finally, you may find this hard to believe but before he died, Bob Evans had a 2000 acre permaculture farm. Yes Bob Evans from the restaurant chain that serves breakfast foods and sells sausage! He was even quoted to say that if had learned about managed grazing when he was younger he never would have gotten into the sausage business!
Bob Evans managed to graze his cattle in Rio Grande Ohio all but 2 days out of the year. He was working on a system to utilize honey suckle for winter pasture when he died.
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Wheat grass is usually a sham. Wheat grass to be truly high quality, must have 1 leaf per grass plant. As soon as the wheat plant makes a second leaf, the nutrition drops off incredibly.
Sabertooth, if you want your holy grail of forage, the best soils in America if properly minerally balanced can produce oat grass with blades 14 inches or more, single blades that are the most nutritious food ever recorded growing on land supposedly.
Another really good thing is Eastern Gamma grass which is basically perennial native corn that produces epic amounts of superior quality summer forage, is flood resistant and if properly managed can live for over a thousand years.
I am really interested in this website. I want to compile a seed mixture to plant native flowers and herbs and whatever I can add to quality pasture seed mixes.
http://www.edenbrothers.com/ (http://www.edenbrothers.com/)
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Damn. You boys know your grass and grazing.
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I will agree that knowledge of cultivated and wild pasture grasses can be crucial for optimal cultivation of livestock on confined, managed and limited pastures, when going beyond Grass fed isn't an option
I believe one of my reasons for preferring sheep to most beef, is that when given an option, sheep typically avoid eating fescue and other sub quality forage if given the opertunity. In general sheep are more picky than cows and I've even noticed that when given supplemental roll bails sheep tend to pick out what they want and leave what they dont, unlike most cows which have bred to eat practically anything. Perhaps by choosing sheep from small scale operations which do not typically over graze or seed their fields, I have been able to avoid some of the down sides of farmed meat which seems to affect much of the beef I have come across.
Ideally, I like the Idea of giving the animal a wide enough free range that they have the opertunity to decide for themselves what they like best, leaving human judgement out of the picture as much as humanly possible. The trend of taking highly domesticated breeds and confining them to domesticated pastures artificially implanted with cultivated grasses, goes against the more extremist principles of paleo nutrition. That being said, domesticated beggars cant be free ranging choosers, and the entire scope of meat production has long ago shifted away from wild ranging, toward confinement livestock and subsistence cultivation of supplemental feed grass, so many farmers have to do the best they can with the methods available.
The fact that farmers under the newfangled regime arbitrarily micromanage the constitution of the lands bio dynamic make up, as well as selectively breed livestock to fit into contrived production models, seems to go against the natural order, which many people like my self are seeking to reestablish. Trans-generational epi-genetic adaption have given us breeding stock which have become more and more dependent on these artificial conditions, and less and less able to thrive without human interventions. After generations of being artificially overfed unbalanced diets combine with inbreeding, the survivalist mechanisms which allowed for the tweaking of metabolic function, to enable animals to eek out through periods of famine, have been conditioned out, in order to allow for ultra fast growing traits to be established, no matter the consequences to other qualities, so that now much of the domestic cattle cannot thrive without these chronic and extrinsic human interventions.
As is above so is below, and these trends to domesticate and breed out wildest and most tenacious characteristics of our livestock, while at the same time limiting the variety of forage to a small range of highly cultivated pastures of primarily cultivated grasses...must have an effect on those of us who are on the other end of the food chain. No matter the good intentions of grass based operations, many are still guilty of trying to change the environmental imperatives to suit the needs of economics, instead of adapting the economics to fit the environmental imperatives.
I am beginning to explore the possibilities of sustaining myself on more on the wild side of the food chain....The wild long horns from Arizona that thrive foraging on desert plants like the Jojoba bush, and have much different qualities than the mowed pasture beef of the south east where I live. Wild heirloom cattle have been less-adulterated by human intervention to evolve and thrive within their own environmental niche. Cultivated breeds of confined pastured animals are not given the same chance to naturally adapt in the way open range animals are. If an open range animal does not gain weight at the same rate as a cultivated cow, it isn't an issue... since there is little or no cost to let it grow in accord with its own seasons, there isn't any reason to selectively breed for fastest growth. On the contrary if there is a bad year for cultivated pastures and the animals dont grow as fast there is huge economic pressures to supplemental feed sub-optimal grasses in order to get the animal to slaughter weight as fast as possible. Such methods totally negate the cycles of the seasons so never give the animals the chance to grow and adapt to the rhythms of the natural world. These animals become accustom to and dependent upon artificial means for survival, to the point where they can no longer evolve in sync with the earth. They have never been allowed to starve out a few famine seasons to test their ability to survive extremes like their open ranging counterparts, and so never developed the metabolic adaptations which would allow for survival under more environmentally natural situations.
In the spirit of re-wilding, going beyond grass-fed, and in the quest of the holy grail of the purest flesh under the sun, I seek take the next step that hopefully could lead back to a personal primordial paradise. I have located a Ranch in Western Kentucky, which is about as wilderness as I can find in my home state, and is only miles away from where my grandfather was born, so it is very indigenous to me on a genetic level. It is a forage based operation that supplements with a minimal amount of their own rye grass in the winter. I picked up 10 pounds of suit from a 4 year old cow that was absolutely delicious. The family that runs the ranch of about 300 head, actually adopted a cooked paleo diet, after a few of the members used it to cure digestive issues which seemed similar to my own.
The issue I have is, do I want to put down the money to buy a half of a cow, and then have to commit to eating one animal for about a three month period? Also, I have the option to choose between a 10 year old cow and a 11 year old bull? I am extremely curious about the bull meat, but am not familiar enough to be sure about committing to it, especially if I have to share it with any co investors. They have a family owned Amish butcher so I am sure I could get them to save all the parts, hopefully some blood as well. I like the idea of a long term experiment with all the bull fat, organs and flesh I could possibly eat?
My supply of Arizona meat will soon be out and a decision will have to be made soon. I may get a sheep, or an other short term option would be to order more Jojoba from the rancher, then have my friend who gets free air fare to mule back 50 pounds or so to tide me over until I set up the slaughter?
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Get the bull.
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Wild animals are less picky than domesticated animals. It is the domesticated animals who have been bred for almost a century and often much longer to eat out of a feed pail or trough who are picky.
Of course because nature is no longer truly natural wild animals are probably to some extent more picky than they used to be.
Cows are not bred to eat just anything, they evolved to eat all sorts of flowering plants. 27 million years ago, 2 million years before grass evolved! They are adapted to be efficiency eaters, who fork in large quantities of bulk food. Goats and deer are the other end of the grazing spectrum, they select the most sugary tips of as many different kinds of plants as they can seemingly manage.
Icelandic sheep are much less picky than regular sheep or any other livestock I have experienced raising other than perhaps bison and definitely donkeys (donkeys as far as I know are the only grazers that seem to prefer grass stems to fresh foliage). My ewes would frequently stop to graze as they travel and would seemingly excitedly gobble up just about anything in their path, including dry yellow dead grass, when many green options were available. They were also keenly interested in the cedar swamp where i lived, where little vegetation grew and my goats would bypass as a means to get across the farm, rather than a place to find things to eat.
Goats and Deer can AFFORD to be picky because of their lifestyles. Deer are woods recluses that hide their babies in thickets when they go out to eat. Goats do the same but are additionally reside in cliffs on caves and in abandoned human settlements. Goats find a good hiding space that they return to each and every night. In humid climates goats must be within 15 miles of the ocean or a natural salt deposit for them to survive.
Large herds of grazing animals like sheep, cows, bison, water buffalo, antelope, these animals in the wild could not afford to be picky, they were constantly alert of their surroundings, on the move to avoid predation and to get enough food as they were competing with countless of their own kind as well as other herds of grazers.
They relied instead on the natural system that they themselves had created! They were their own gardeners, they created the environment in which they lived, grass evolved in response to cattle!
The American Indians, burned the forest and brush, to make room for grass to grow for more bison and thus grew more topsoil than any other people in history. Without those ten thousand years of history prior, America would not have become the super power in the world it is today.
Holistic management is attempting to mimic nature. This is an absolute necessity for the survival of mankind today, for as the land the animals created who are now mostly dead, gives way to waste land, there are not enough wild animals alive today to save us, to bring back the fertile soils we have destroyed. Our only hope is to utilize the domestic livestock we still have to improve the natural conditions so that nature can even beguine to recover, in our lifetimes.
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All my livestock were pretty much friends. The goat kids would climb on the cows as they were napping. The goats could eat the seed heads on the grass and the shrubs and cut branches, the sheep ate all the weeds, the cows ate all the grass. Every day I would move the fence to new pasture, all of the animals would immediately tromp into the new fresh pasture, all of them except the donkeys who were content to much on the stems that were left behind. Studies show sheep and cows raised together yield the farmer 20% more than either alone. Approximately 10% of that was estimated to be because of superior pasture utilization, while the other 10% was estimated to be as a result of "unknown factors" that cause sheep and cows to grow faster on average when raised in conjunction on pasture!
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Thinking about the original title of this post, another thing I've grown interested in is raising and eating insects. The book Edible, by Daniella Martin, offers instructions at the end for raising crickets, mealworms and waxworms. I want to try doing that. I think it would be a great way to gain access to very high quality protein and fat, and I could enhance the omega 3 content of the insects by feeding them omega-3 rich plant foods that I might not be able to digest and utilize as well, like flax seeds.
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All this has made me decide to only choose farm animals designed to endure a cold climate. Fortunately, in Austria, it is possible to buy wild deer, wild hare and wild boar etc., so that won't be a problem.
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Thinking about the original title of this post, another thing I've grown interested in is raising and eating insects. The book Edible, by Daniella Martin, offers instructions at the end for raising crickets, mealworms and waxworms. I want to try doing that. I think it would be a great way to gain access to very high quality protein and fat, and I could enhance the omega 3 content of the insects by feeding them omega-3 rich plant foods that I might not be able to digest and utilize as well, like flax seeds.
If we really wanted to intelligently utilize the grain that gets grown, we'd feed it all to insects, then feed the fresh/raw insects to chickens/turkeys/pigs, instead of direct feeding grain. Lower yield, but MUCH better quality meat.
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Why not just eat the insects?
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Why not just eat the insects?
I'm not against it. It would take some time to convince the general population, though.
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Wild animals are less picky than domesticated animals. It is the domesticated animals who have been bred for almost a century and often much longer to eat out of a feed pail or trough who are picky.
Holistic management is attempting to mimic nature. This is an absolute necessity for the survival of mankind today, for as the land the animals created who are now mostly dead, gives way to waste land, there are not enough wild animals alive today to save us, to bring back the fertile soils we have destroyed. Our only hope is to utilize the domestic livestock we still have to improve the natural conditions so that nature can even beguine to recover, in our lifetimes.
Its hard to generalize many of these trends, because have had different observations regarding the pickiness of domesticated animals. Living in thoroughbred country Ive seen the cream of the crop of cultivated live stock, the Kentucky race horse. The most spoiled thoroughbreds will grass in fields heavy with Kentucky bluegrass and be given premium hay blends of timothy, orchard grass, alfalfa...then supplemented with oats. They are the royalty of domesticated animals and the most spoiled ones will turn their nose up at sub quality hay, especially if it is moldy. Ive helped move hay for farmers who said their horses wouldn't eat it, and had to give it over to the cows who didn't seem to mind. Bad hay will kill a horse, but I've seen cows mow down yellow mildewy fescue bails without qualm....Sheep can be picky in regard to how many will avoid eating fescue and Ive seem them pick through hay bails and only eat the sweet tops, leaving the stalks.
We do seem to be the inheritors of a legacy of environmental atrophy which began when the large wild foragers where either wiped out or fenced in. The great herds were a driving force behind the evolution of a living landscape. Land that was once shaped by mega fauna gave way to smaller and smaller animals which continued to shape it according to their own needs. Even smaller animals like the beaver had a huge impact upon the bio dynamics of the escape. The little oasis's created by these creatures made much of north America lush and apealing to the great herds. With the decimation of the busy beavers, the wiping out of the buffalo hoards, the extracting of the lands life force though mono crop industrial agriculture, the establishment of mans unnatural order is suppressing the living systems of natural regeneration, which requires free movement of biologically diverse organisms to work optimally.
My nutshell vision of what an enlightened solution would be is to open the land up to the mega herds. Get the army core of engineers to build mini damns and reservoirs throughout the land, and allow for the free ranging of mega herds cattle and buffalo to roam the vast wilderness. Let us re-wild set loose the ruminants upon most the land which is currently designated as off limits for grazing animals in the name of phony conservationism.
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whole foods grass fed meat is absolutely vile. Its color is pale. It gives me digstive discomfort.
I dont know if the meat is simply crap or theyre doing something to it before i get it.
Other supermarkets with grassfed like fairway are just as horrid.
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interesting thread...
There is a very big focus on cattle and bigger animal, in general, not only in paleo circles, but among cooked meat eaters as well.
Would be nice to diversify also, with fowl, hare, deer, and any other local animal that can be hunted or that could be eaten, including insects, squirrel, ducks etc...
Big animal such as cattle are heavy, and walk on the soil creating a certain habitat, with certain plant to thrive. But that also mean that other plants would not be able to grow there, because they are more fragile and would be crushed by the weight of the animal. Fukuoka, a japanese guy into natural farming once said that he wouldn't allow an animal heavier than a chicken on his grounds and gardens, other animals would crush and stamp the soil, making harder and more compact, destroying a variety of plants.
Diversification or desertification...?
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I've bought wild hare carcasses many times in the past, and, despite the fact that the farmers/hunters usually get rid of part of the guts, leaving only kidneys and heart and a bit of liver behind, there is always enough meat and blood left to satisfy 1 RVAFer for many days.