Grass-Fed Beef Test Project

René Featherstone is a freelance writer and works with Lentz Spelt Farms (http://lentzspelt.com).

First published in Wheat Life Magazine. Reprinted with permission from the author. ©2008/Serial Rights, René Featherstone.

“In 1908 farmers got 90 cents of every food dollar.” Spoken strong, Joel Huesby’s words echo in the empty chamber of the killing floor, stainless steel surfaces gleaming. We’re inside a 53-foot trailer hooked to a semi truck that serves as a USDA-inspected mobile slaughter plant. Only a handful such self-contained units exist in the nation, Huesby remarked, noting that his family built it themselves. “Ours is the largest in the United States.”

Exactly a century after their forbearers settled at Walla Walla, the Huesbys’ Thundering Hooves business supplies a growing premium market with “Pasture-Finished Meats,” which term they have trademarked. After on-farm slaughter they truck the beef to their butcher shop in town where the prime and subprime cuts are vacuum-packed “case-ready.”

“We direct-market to neighborhood buying clubs and to universities and hospitals,” Huesby said. “About a third of our sales are to restaurants. We love it when they put our name on their menu.”

To think that Huesby used to be a grain farmer. “I haven’t grown wheat since 1995,” he said. Determined to reclaim his rightful share of the food dollar instead of the skimpy single-digit percentage of that dollar normally left for commodity producers, Huesby shed all the strands of conventional ag “segmented” thinking.

“I knew what I was not going to do, and that’s be normal,” he quipped.

He’s been rather successful. In 2005 Thundering Hooves was honored with the Vim Wright Stewardship Award, and by 2007 their Web site attracted 400 visitors a day while Huesby traveled across the country delivering keynote speeches at farmer conventions, and, the nation’s largest natural foods supermarket chain, Whole Foods, has come asking for their product. “We’re moving up the marketing tree,” he put it.

Huesby’s acreage is irrigated, yet he was approached recently by a group of dryland producers, WSU researchers and representatives of environmental and organic farming organizations. He agreed to participate in a pilot project that explores how Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) land management practices can be used in grass-finished beef production for local processing and regional high-end marketing. Conservation Reserve Program is a federal fund that pays growers to not till soil that erodes easily.

Accoring to Cheney rancher Maurice Robinette, Eastern Washington organizer of the Washington Sustainable Food and Farming Network which serves as fiscal agent of the $81,000 project grant, “the concern that CRP may not be funded indefinitely needs to be addressed.”

Over one million acres in the state are currently in CRP, Robinette pointed out. With the commodity markets riding high right now, much talk is of cropping the program acreage when CRP contracts end, a lot of them in 2010.

The question is, how long will commodity prices enjoy an upswing, Robinette asks. “We suspect that dryland wheat will not have as rosy a future as the high wheat prices now would lead you to believe. The fact that there is less oil does not bode well for wheat, because input costs will continue to climb. I’m thinking that there is a better way than raising wheat and CRP.”

The pilot, he projected, will prove the concept of replicating CRP an advantage to the emerging grass-fed beef industry, at the same time benefiting the environment in various ways, and, of course, creating opportunity for the dryland farmer. “Gregg Beckley and I have been working on this for two years,” Robinette said.

Gregg Beckley makes time for us in his farm shop on Beckley Road by Benge up in the 12-inch to 14-inch annual rainfall area of Adams County. His family farmed wheat since settling here in 1913. “I know nothing about cows,” he remarked.

And he’s not about to become a cattleman, he emphasized. But he thinks a new approach to the dryland farming business needs to be explored. Since CRP started in 1985 he’s scaled down to 1,000 acres of wheat ground, with 5,000 acres now in CRP. “When wheat stayed around $3.50 a bushel I took inventory of my operation, and it didn’t look good. You farm and you farm, and the money is just enough to pay back the bank, and you’re back to zero.

“The CRP has been a real blessing, but it’s also caused tremendous problems for rural towns; places like Washtucna and La Crosse are turning into ghost towns. Then came (CRP) sign-up 13, I think it was, and some of my neighbors received no offers to renew their CRP contracts. That was a wake-up call.”

Aside from its economic impacts, CRP suffers from environmental degradation in wide areas, Beckley noted, riffling through a stack of photos, dealing them out onto the table. “I have a custom mowing business,” he related. “I’ve been on CRP acres all over Adams County. Some of those acres may look nice from the road, but you get out there and it’s really bad, there is soil erosion and crusting, the crust as hard as concrete.”

A major problem are CRP grasses, Beckley has documented. Ungrazed, the stands wilt and lodge in the winters, and eventually form a thick thatch of debris. “That thatch keeps fresh grass from growing, and then you get weeds coming through. I’ve mowed areas where the weeds were taller than my tractor cab. In my opinion, CRP stands are good for only about five years.”

Unfortunately, no simple grazing solution presents itself, Beckley acknowledged. Turning cattle out on CRP is not only against regulations, but also meets with stiff opposition from groups such as the Western Watershed Alliance whose campaign to get cattle off public lands has publicized the enormous extent of cattle damage to shrub steppe.

Beckley is well aware of this. “Overgrazing is a real problem.” Cows bunch up, stay close to water, single out grass species, compact the soil — all of this resulting in weed-prone decline averse to wildlife.

Enter the grass farmer-stockmen with their method of intensive grazing on rotational paddocks. Modeled on New Zealand and Dutch grass-based operations, the concept gained farmer support mainly in the southern United States at first. By the 1990s a couple of Columbia Basin growers and also a dairy in the Yakima Valley had adopted the practice.

“I’ve done a lot of reading on it,” Beckley said, holding up a book by Allan Nation of the Grass Farmer-Stockman Magazine. The idea, Beckley explained, is to manage cattle to maximum benefit of the grass.

“They’re moving the cattle a lot, it’s like parking cars,” he put it.

Beckley got involved in the pilot project by happenstance. A few years back he’d seeded a little bit of his CRP grass mixture on a piece of ground outside the program acres, thinking that he might use the 15-acre tract for horse pasture. That never came to pass, so he asked a rancher neighbor if he wanted to graze his cattle there. “He told me that they’d kill to get their cattle on a stand like that,” Beckley recalled.

He started talking with Maurice Robinette about intensive grazing. They used electric fence to divide the 15 acres into 11 paddocks. “We ran the water over there from the barn, and moved the trough with the cattle. A neighbor brought over eight bred heifers.”

And Robinette brought his “Pasture EKG” kit to monitor the grass stand’s vital signs. Beckley now has a kit like that, too: “I went to school for three days to learn to use it,” he said.

“The EKG kit has a 100-foot transect, with meter hoops every 25 feet. You go out there with clippers and a little scale, and baggies to put your clippings in. You weigh the clippings and compute the dry matter. You fill out the card with all kinds of information, you record how much bare soil there is, and how much litter (residue), and you measure ‘activity’ — how many beetles there are, or voles. And you count the ‘pedestaling’ plants, if any. It’s really extensive monitoring, it takes about two hours.”

Beckley said that the spring months when they pastured had been relatively rainy, with adequate grass re-growth for the eight cattle to graze each paddock twice in 73 days.

Tom Platt, extension agent at Davenport, wrote up a report on the economics of the trial, citing 2.5 pounds of weight gain per animal per day. Figuring a value of 25 cents per pound, times 73 days, Platt computed a grazing value of $46 per acre, “in a good year.” Platt concluded his report with the observation that “a positive return from forage beats a negative return from farming.”

Beckley said that the $46 are approximately the same as the CRP payment.

The catch, of course, is that a $46 per acre income is realistic only when the farmer owns the beeves [plural of beef]. If he’s growing grass to lease to stockmen, the value per pound of cattle gain has to be considerably better than 25 cents a pound. “This is where Joel Huesby comes in,” Beckley said.

He’s looking forward to the pilot project expanding the experiment. As his understanding grows about the relationship between ruminants and grassland, he’s especially fascinated with the “hoof action.” As farmer, he noted, “I’m used to dropping that subsoiler into the ground, that couldn’t be more different than the impact of the hoof on the ground. Millions of bison used to be on the prairies, and all that grass had grown back tall when the herds came back a year later — it makes you think.”

The pasture mix of grass species certainly plays a role; to evaluate species performance under local conditions, Beckley’s growing a strip of many plots. “Some of the plots are common CRP grasses like Sherman big blue, big blue bunch wheatgrass, slender wheatgrass. But we have all kinds of other grasses here, too, and forbs, to see how they do.”

Phasing their private trial into a funded project now is timely, Beckley summed up. “In a perfect world this grass-based concept is feasible. Right now it’s just a test. But if it works out, it would be great to hit the ground running when the CRP ends. “We could become a link in the organic beef production chain.”

Already he’s certified acreage as organic, although, in order to do so he fallowed for an extra year just when wheat prices rose. “I haven’t had a single grain of wheat for sale for a year. This spring I’m planting 500 acres of organic wheat.”

In the big picture a change in America’s beef production is likely, so we find out from Don Nelson, the WSU Extension Beef Specialist at Pullman who wrote the grant for the pilot project. Nelson’s background spans several livestock industry aspects — “I wanted to get my arms around the whole system,” he related.

After earning his Ph.D. at Ohio State University, his positions included that of general manager at a ranching corporation in California, then executive vice president of the American International Charolais Association in Houston, Texas, and a job with a branded beef company in that state, and, at Denver he was vice president of policy coordination for the National Cattlemen’s Association.

“My epiphany was when I realized that I needed to develop the ability to bring people together in a shared vision,” Nelson related.

He’s been at WSU since 1989, a faculty member in the department of Animal Sciences. He’s on the leadership team of the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources. “Not everyone welcomed it,” Nelson said of the center’s inception in the early 1990s. But mindsets changed to where their Biologically Intensive Organic Agriculture program (BIOAg) garners respect, and WSU now actually offers an organic agriculture degree.

“I’m trained in holistic management,” Nelson remarked. In contrast to the conventional, segmented approach, holistic science embraces the entire scope of an ag system, economically and environmentally and socially. “It’s a transformational change when a ‘recovering commodity producer’ adopts that mental model, that paradigm,” Nelson said. He perceives the transformation as four concentric circles. “The outer one is the new paradigm, then comes behavioral change, then strategy, and at the core, action.”

On his office wall hangs a quote from Charles Darwin, he said, paraphrasing: “It’s not the strongest or the smartest who survive, but those who’re best at adapting.”

Nelson predicts that holistic ways are the future because conventional systems cannot last. “The inputs, especially synthetic fertilizers, are not sustainable,” he emphasized. “We have to shift from chemical addiction to natural systems. One beautiful thing about the use of grazing as a tool is that carbon is sequestered and aquifers are replenished.”

Conventional American beef production has relied on Contained Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), but that may well change with an end to surplus feed grain and an end to cheap oil. “Already the CAFOs want heavier cattle, they want to cut down their time in the feed lot because of higher cost of grain.”

Grass-finished beef production has evolved to highly precise practice, in part thanks to the EKG method of measuring grass stand vitality, Nelson said. “It comes down to controlling time, how long the cattle remain in one place, and how long the period is before they come back.” Concentrating the herd on small areas assures “even utilization” of the various grass species present.

Divvying up dryland pasture into paddocks may require a bit of infrastructure, especially in regard to water, Nelson allowed. “To begin with we’ll get the water there with a truck.” Later on a system could be designed that pumps water up to a ridge from where pipelines run down to the different paddocks.

“With the pilot project we want to provide a learning site,” he pointed out. “Part of a total system will have to include pasturing the cattle on irrigated acres for part of the year.”

Economically, producers will have to switch their focus from production to profit. For example, larger weaning weights do not necessarily lead to larger profits because of the associated increase in input costs. “I know people who did okay with 350 pounds weaning weight, but went broke when they increased production to 600 pounds weaning weight.”

Nelson is convinced that the conventional cattle industry has arrived at the wrong cow. “We need a cow that fits the environment. We overshot that mark when we went to bigger and bigger frame size. That size increase is mostly from belly to ground, and how much does that pay? I want a cow that for 10 to 12 years has a calf a year.”

Joel Huesby couldn’t agree more. “We stay away from modern genetics, we want nonwelfare cattle, our cattle have to make a living,” he put it. “In the segmented beef industry the male traits of cattle have been emphasized. We want a body type with the male and the female traits in balance. The ideal size cow is between 1,050 and 1,200 pounds, not the 1,400-pound cows common today. Remember the FFA trophies in the 1950s? Those stocky cattle [are] what we want.”

In fact, emulating his grandfather’s ways is half of his philosophy, Huesby related. “I’m a progressive traditionalist. The progressive part is how we market the meat.”

Like Nelson, Huesby believes that the conventional timing of calving season is a disadvantage. “When do the deer and the buffalo have their young, and when did cattle calve before we had balers? Not in February and March, but in June. That’s when we’re calving.”

Huesby has come to view his “from soil to sale” system as an art. “There are so many variables to manage, the seasonality of grass and nutritional variability, the requirements of the cattle, and also the timing of when to butcher and to market.

“This is not a solo act,” he emphasized. “Between our families there are eight adults involved in this.”

What about mistakes? “Oh, yeah, we’ve made mistakes, but you learn from your failings. Remember, Michael Jordan missed more shots than anybody but he also made more shots. Commodity ag has become so systemized that we (direct marketers) have all the time to get it right.”

Fear has no place, Huesby remarked. “It’s human nature to fear what the neighbors think, but that’s really not the lens through which you want to see the world.”

Better to think clearly. “Everybody is complaining about the high price of nitrogen. The fact is that over each acre in the world there are 36,000 tons of nitrogen up in the air. There are three ways to get that nitrogen, either by green manure biomass, or by growing legumes, or by raising livestock. In the end, farming is a form of energy production, we get it from the sun.”

Ultimately there won’t be a choice but to get back to traditional farming, Huesby believes. “We’ve been driving beyond our headlights for the past 60 years,” he said of commodity monoculture reliant on chemical inputs. “We’ve pushed the environmental costs off into the future, and sooner or later that’s coming back to bite us. In the old days, farms were based on the grand model in nature — grass and ruminants go together.”

The nicest aspect is that Huesby has no need to push his viewpoint on the market, instead; consumer demand for local organic goods is a huge pull.

For example, the Puget Consumers Co-op (PCC) Natural Markets in the Seattle area put so much emphasis on Northwest-grown organic that some of their representatives joined the replicated CRP Pilot Project as collaborators.

Goldie Caughlan, PCC nutrition education manager, noted that the co-op has been “engaged in” the WSU sustainable ag program for a decade. “As a provider it clearly behooves us (PCC) to support the development of good sustainable practices.” She said that PCC is the largest and oldest member-owned co-op in the country. “The co-op incorporated in 1953. We now have 40,000 member families, and eight markets; we’ll open our ninth this summer.”

About 93 percent of their produce is certified organic, Caughlan said. The organic percentage of their meats is less than that, but all meat at PCC is grass-finished and free of artificial hormones and antibiotics.

“People are concerned about what in the world is happening to our food supply,” she put it. “Every time there is another meat recall, people become more and more aware that the whole concept of confining cattle on a grain diet (i.e., in feed lots) is not how meat is meant to be grown. Grass-finished beef is no longer a small niche, it’s a huge trend. People want ethical treatment of animals, they want stewardship of the land, they’re greatly concerned about global warming.”

Caughlan has served on the Washington State Organic Advisory Board, and for five years she sat on the National Organic Standards Board which meant working closely with the USDA, she related.

She is also a board member of the PCC Farmland Trust that was established nine years ago. A nonprofit organization, the land trust is an entity legally separate from PCC markets — “speaking for the land trust I’m wearing a different hat,” Caughlan said. “We rescue farmland; part of that land we lease out.” Farmland Trust acreage is bound by conservation easement “to be farmed organically in perpetuity,” she explained.

Joel Huesby is leasing 174 acres from the PCC Farmland Trust. “We were the second farm in that program,” he said. The acreage had been judged vulnerable due to its likely use as alfalfa seed field. “Alfalfa seed gets sprayed 10 times a year, and this particular field is located directly upwind from a lot of organic acres,” Huesby elaborated.

A field day at the Farmland Trust acres drew 126 people, “mostly customers from Seattle,” he said. “It’s clear to me that organic and local is getting bigger and bigger. Even the Washington State Beef Commission now says that one in five consumers is interested in grass-fed, local beef; a decade ago it was one in 10 consumers.”

That natural foods retailers become involved in ag research and projects is “unusual,” Huesby said. “In the case of PCC it’s not surprising, they’ve been on the cutting edge for a long time, ahead of anyone.”

The giant Whole Foods now also makes grants available to farms, maybe because “they got a black eye” when it was publicized how much the company relied on centralized corporate organic production and overseas organics, Huesby remarked. “Their global meats coordinator told us that the demand for local organic is enormous.” Whole Foods defines “local” as less than six hours’ road travel away from the store.

Huesby stressed that the trend could become a rejuvenating boon for our rural communities. After all, little towns thrived in the era of local agriculture. “Every town had a flour mill,” he reminds us. In a very small way Thundering Hooves is already reversing the rural economy slump. “We now employ six full-time butchers outside the family.”

Does he feel left out now that wheat’s riding a super steep price wave? “Not at all,” Huesby answered. “For the first time I’m growing wheat again, I’m planting 300 acres organic spring wheat; we’ll be fully certified in June. Grain Millers of Eugene quoted me a 50 to 60 percent organic premium above the conventional price.” §