© Gary Hubbell, Ranch Real Estate Broker, 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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ORGANIC BEEF AND NATURAL BEEF PRODUCTION
Cattle are tricky animals. In order to get any real production out of them, you need to grow a lot of them, and if you keep a lot of them together, they can catch diseases that communicate rapidly to each other, and your whole herd can conceivably be wiped out. Ranchers using best-practice management techniques will vaccinate a calf for up to 8 different diseases at birth, branding (two months), and at weaning (8-9 months). Many ranchers inject a time-release growth hormone into a calf’s ear. The little capsule costs a buck or two and usually results in 20 pounds of extra gain for a feeder steer. Cows and calves are pastured on fertilized fields and fed hay, grain, silage, and other feeds that are conventionally grown using nitrate fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Animals are de-wormed using conventional anthelminic pastes and solutions to rid animals of hookworms, roundworms, tapeworms, grubs, bots, and other parasites. Sick cattle are treated with antibiotics.
 Once calves are weaned off their mothers, typically at 9-10 months, they’re usually sold as “feeder calves” to a feedlot. Weights are typically 500 pounds on the low end to as much as 750 pounds on the high end for feeder calves. They’re then “backgrounded” to about 1,000 pounds in a feedlot or on a “yearling operation”. When the cattle reach 900-1,000 pounds, they’re sold as fat cattle, and they’re “finished” for a couple of months in a feedlot until they weigh 1,200-1,300 pounds. While they’re in the feedlots, they’re in a confined environment with many other animals, and truckloads of new calves are constantly coming in from farms and ranches all over the country. The potential for a devastating disease is high, so animals are treated with a steady low-dose application of antibiotics and other disease-killers.
Last fall feeder calves sold for as low as 89 cents a pound for 650-pound conventionally raised non-organic calves that had just been weaned from their mothers. Let’s do the math: it takes 10-11 months and about $400 in expense to raise a calf that brought about $580. To make an average living of $50,000 a year, you’d have to sell 278 calves a year. Given the cost of ranch real estate, it simply doesn’t pencil out to buy a ranch and start raising beef.
Perhaps raising organic beef or natural beef can make the difference. If you notice the prices of organic burger versus regular hamburger, there’s a dramatic difference. Again, the yields are less and the costs are more, but you’re raising a higher-priced product.
Let’s look at the concept of organic beef. To be certified “organic”, cattle can’t be fed any feed that has been grown with commercial fertilizers, herbicides, or pesticides. They can’t be treated with antibiotics if they get sick, and they can’t be treated with hormones. Raising a healthy beef steer to a 1,300-pound slaughter weight using only organic practices has got to be very difficult.
That’s why the concept of “natural beef” has evolved. Cattle may be fed conventional feeds that have been grown using pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. Antibiotics are not used in natural beef. If a calf gets sick and has to be treated with antibiotics, it is then put in the “regular” herd.
Certain vaccinations are actually considered organic because they are derived from a natural substance—i.e., a virus—and are therefore “kosher”. Other vaccinations are not considered organic, so a grower must be very careful about which vaccinations are used.
My neighbors began cattle ranching in the 1980’s. They bought a ranch from an old-timer who used very few, if any, vaccinations or de-worming applications, and they got to work. That first year, they ran their herd of 500 cattle on a high-elevation grazing permit over the summer, and their herd was mixed with animals from several different herds. They lost 50 animals to disease.
Those unacceptably high losses caused them to seriously investigate vaccinations and de-worming, which they have since conducted on a regular schedule.
Other than the growth hormone that they give their calves and the fact that they fertilize their hayfields with nitrates, their beef is pretty close to being organic—except for de-worming. If you’ve ever seen bot grubs inside an animal carcass, it’s pretty damned disgusting. Personally, I want to eat beef that’s been de-wormed. The thought of eating beef that may have flatworms, roundworms, bots, tapeworms, or any of the myriad of parasites that feed on beef is simply unappealing to me.
It’s when calves are weaned from their mothers that organic husbandry becomes challenging. Myself, I wouldn’t want to try it in a feedlot situation. You’d be asking for disaster, with cattle penned up in close quarters so that disease could go through the herd in a couple of days. If a rancher has a big spread of grazing land, such as in southeastern Colorado, near La Junta, for example, that might be a place where it would make sense to raise organic yearlings. Cattle won’t be clustered up against each other in confined situations, so disease spread can be minimized. You’d sacrifice the rapid gains that you get when calves are fed grain in a feedlot, but then again, your input costs would be less. The most efficient way to feed a beef animal is through grazing.
Ultimately, organic beef production may be the answer for some ranchers, depending on their individual situations. According to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, total beef prices in supermarkets averaged $3.48 a pound in 2007. The price for natural and organic beef averaged $5.23 a pound, or approximately 50% higher. Total volume of organic and natural beef sales is hovering at a little over 1%, though it is growing slightly quarter after quarter while overall beef sales are down.
One of the biggest differences in organic, natural, and conventional beef production is in the use of slaughterhouse wastes as a feed supplement to feedlot cattle. Slaughterhouses generate a lot of waste that can be used somewhere, somehow to feed something, so blood, bone meal, and ground-up spinal cords and such offal are mixed with cattle feed as a small percentage of the total feed. This ready source of protein helps the animals gain weight, but it’s also considered to be a prime factor in the spread of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE—“Mad Cow Disease”. Every time a North American cow is discovered to have been afflicted with BSE, exports of US beef to Europe and Japan take a nose-dive. Since organic or natural beef cattle have never been exposed to BSE through feeding of slaughterhouse wastes, their meat is considered “clean” and sales of organic and natural beef tend to jump, not fall, when BSE is discovered.
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