Steak - Mark Schatzker [126]
Williams liked a lot of what he was seeing. But what he liked most of all wasn’t in this field but over in the next one. There, a small convention of about a hundred forage aficionados, whose connoisseurship in the arena of delectable grasses surpassed that of Williams, were standing in a group and delighting audibly in the sugariness of long green leaves. Most were red Angus, but there were a few shorthorns and Herefords, and as they chewed they stared over at us, lowering their heads from time to time to reload. We walked over, and, as though picking up an old and ongoing conversation, Williams and Maytag began singling out the fattest ones. Williams pointed at a tubby red Angus steer. “That’s a nice brisket,” he said, fixing on its chest. Maytag called attention to the “buttons”—fat deposits—that were growing at the base of its tail. Then he pointed at a black heifer with a white face and commended the deposits in her ribs, which had disappeared under a layer of fat. The heifer was so plump that she looked as if she’d been inflated with a bicycle pump. “She’s ready for sure,” Williams said, nodding his head.
What she was ready for was eating, but before that could happen, she and the rest of the herd had to be moved off this field, which had been grazed for three straight days and reduced in height by more than two feet. The good forage—“ice cream,” in grazier talk—had all been picked off, and now it was time to move into the next field. But only if that field was ready, of course, if its grass was sweet to the taste.
On this subject there was little doubt. It was 3:30 p.m., which meant the grass had been basking in solar radiation ever since the sun had peeked its head over the top of the Wet Mountains, its leaves photosynthesizing sugars. The refractometer rated it an eye-popping 21, whereas the field they were leaving was (a still very respectable) 16. The gate would be opened, the cows would roll in for three days of grazing, and then a different gate would be opened and they would move on to yet another field at the pinnacle of sweetness. Eventually, the field they were now about to leave would revitalize, and the cows would return to fill their rumens with grass and their briskets, ribs, and buttons with soft fat.
There is a term for when cows eat like this: managed grazing. It is the key—or, more precisely, one of a set of keys—to finishing cattle on grass. Williams explained how it works: “Cattle want the highest-energy feed,” he said. “They’re like me or you. They like their food to be sweet. On a grass plant,” he explained, “the top growth is the sweetest and softest. That’s what they always go for first.” The problem with cattle is that, left to their own devices, they’ll eat down the sugary parts of the grass, and then, when the grass becomes less sweet, they won’t eat a thing. They’ll just stand there, almost as if they were on a hunger strike, or they’ll wander too much, as though the land itself were distracting them from eating. When you cordon off a big field into many little paddocks, however, and move cattle from one paddock to another, a mob mentality seems to take hold. They will eat everything, mowing the field almost