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By Root 440 0

way. A typical SGF ad announces, “Get the Hay Out! If Bermudagrass or Bahia is your forage base and you are tired of making and feeding hay, then this unique Stockman Grass Farmer grazing school is for you!” A classified ad reads, “America’s #1 source for powerful, easy-fleshing, beautifully uddered, maternally efficient Angus cattle.” Its pages are filled with practical articles, a surprising percentage of which are about how to build the right kind of fences. But there are also uplifting accounts of the small prairie victories that go unnoticed, like the letter to the editor entitled “Evangelizing Grass-Finished Beef,” submitted by a rancher who stunned pretty much everybody when two of her grass-fed cows were so marbled they graded Prime. (This is something the feedlot world will tell you is simply not possible without grain.) The SGF echoed many of the lessons I’d learned during my travels, like the fact that very young cows have no flavor, a concept the editor, Allan Nation, expressed thus: “Fine wines, whiskies and cheeses all have to have time to age. Exceptional flavor always requires what the wine maker calls ‘the fullness of time.’ This is why older animals taste better than young ones.” It made for exciting if oddly discouraging reading, as the subtitle to every story may as well have been, “There are no easy answers.” Raising delicious steak on grass, I learned, requires numerous kinds of expertise. You have to know your soils. You have to know your grasses. You have to know your cattle breeds. And you have to know how to get cows to eat the right grass at the right time until they become so fat as to appear inflated. The detail was complex and delivered in quantity that was sobering.

I phoned Allen Williams, the disillusioned meat scientist I had met back in Kansas, hoping he could put it all in more straightforward terms. Finishing cattle, he explained, is simple in theory: it’s merely a matter of putting energy into them. The problem with grass is that it can have enormous amounts of energy or puny amounts, depending on factors like soil type, soil quality, the amount of rainfall and sunlight, and the time of year. Even the time of day can make a difference. A good grass finisher, he said, knows that on a sunny day a field of, say, bromegrass will have more energy in the afternoon than in the morning, and that it would be inadvisable to turn cattle out on it before lunch. In a month’s time, however, that bromegrass could be dried out and woody, at which point the gamagrass might be entering its prime. Different grasses have different growth curves. A grass laden with sugars in May will be desiccated by July. To finish cattle, you need to provide at least one kind of grass in its lush, sugary prime at all times. In other words, to grass-finish cattle you need to be, above all, an accomplished grass farmer.

Grain, by comparison, could not be more simple. Grain is energy in a bucket, a bucket that contains the same nutritive value in February as it does in August. A moron can walk up to a cow and pour a bucket of grain in its feed trough. Grass isn’t so easy. Williams likens finishing cattle to playing guitar. “Feeding grain,” he explained to me, “is like knowing a few chords and playing an easy song. Finishing on grass is like being a virtuoso.”

The problem with the steak I was eating is that it was made by amateurs who thought they were virtuosos. It was the meat equivalent of bad homemade wine. It was like an edible version of garage-sale art: an intimate glimpse of heartfelt ineptitude.

One snowy winter day, I visited a farm where the farmer was letting the wrong kind of cows eat the wrong kind of grass. The farmer and his wife were salt-of-the-earth types—three dogs, five kids—and lived in a hundred-year-old farmhouse. Most of their cows were fed corn, but a few of them ate grass and only grass, because growing numbers of precious foodie types down in the city had been clamoring for healthy, earth-friendly grass-fed beef. I drove back to the city with a grass-fed sirloin and grilled it that night. When