Meet Your Meat: Grass-Roots Movements

One of the biggest grassroots trends in the production animal industry is literally a grass-root trend.

If you get meat at the vast majority of grocery stores and restaurants, chances are you're getting meat that has been industrially produced. No, this doesn't mean your meat is grown in a factory, it just means it's mass produced, but we'll get into that later. What I want to talk about today is the meat served at "specialty" restaurants and supermarkets (and for some stores, their "specialty" sections).

I'm pretty positive you've all seen evidence of the trend, unless maybe if you're a recluse who lives under a rock and eats dandylions for sustenance, but then I don't know why you'd use the internet. Anyway. Most of the issues with organic and natural production are based around crop production--that's fruits, veggies, and fiber products--that are grown without the use of chemical pesticides, herbicides, and lab genetic modification. Animal agriculture has its own version of the trend too.

According to the Agricultural Marketing Service of the United States Department of Agriculture (AMS and USDA respectively), organic livestock production has six main standards: animals must be raised in organic settings from the last third of pregnancy and from the second day of life for poultry; feed must be 100% organic, but vitamins and minerals may be supplemented; dairy animals must be managed organically for at least 12 months before their milk can be sold as organic, and during this 12 months they may be given fodder from fields in the third stage of organic transition; no growth-producing hormones and absolutely no antibiotics; vaccines and other preventative measures must be used to keep animals healthy, but those that appear on a list of prohibited medications may not be used; and animals must have access to the outdoors unless they are sick, in certain production stages, or if there are adverse affects on soil and water quality.

That looks like a lot of stuff, but basically (in laymen's terms) what organic animal production does is raise animals rather like pioneers did. Feed them a diet of grains and silage that has not been treated with chemicals (because pioneers didn't have chemicals, and they probably didn't know about vitamins and minerals either), growth hormones and antibiotics hadn't been discovered yet, and call in a vet if something is seriously wrong. The whole organic field/environment requirement means that if your animals are supposed to be organic, your pastures must be too. That requires a three-year transition period from modern to traditional methods, and the reason it's important is because a lot of fields used pesticides before the organic movement really started picking up.

Now that you have a basic idea of how to grow organic animals, say you want to sell them. The AMS has labeling protocols for organic products (we'll go into marketing scams in a later post), that imply for "organic" labeled meat products, your pastures and methods must be certified organic. Unlike the processed organic foods, you can't have a "70% organic cow" and list the non-organic ingredients. A possible exception to this could be some pre-packaged meat meals (frozen foods, hamburger patties stuffed with cheese and other goodies, etc), but in general when you are just selling some brisket...yeah, it's either organic or not.

After organic, we've got "grass fed" meat claims. Grass fed is actually different from organic. For organic diets, your animals can be fed pretty much anything to give them their nutrients, as long as the "anything" is organic. Grass fed, especially beef, means you cannot feed your animals ANYTHING besides grass, legumes, browse, or pre-grain cereal crops (like wheat, but before the grains develop on the stalk). Hay and silage (fermented grasses), vitamins, and minerals are also "acceptable" foods for the grass fed claim. Note, too, that grass fed can also be referred to as "forage fed." 

The third grassroots movement (slightly less grassrootsy than "grass fed") is the claim of natural or naturally raised meat. This term is commonly confused with organic, but it takes organic a couple of steps further--offspring are raised with their dams, and no animal products or byproducts can be used in animal fodder. It seems to me like this is more of a marketing claim than the other two, because this one is not yet recognized as an official standard by the USDA.

This post is already hugely long, but I think it's extremely important for consumers to realize what type of meat they are buying. I'm going to do more posts about different marketing claims that take advantage of consumers' ignorance (most of these are in the poultry industry), and I hope that ya'll will be able to make more informed choices about the types of meat you're getting.