Grass-Fed Beef Buying Guide

Hey there, it's Blaine with Seven Sons. It's a cold January day out here, but you can see the cattle don't think anything of it. They're just lying down in the tall grass, relaxing, with their thick winter hides.

The reason I wanted to shoot this video today is that this is harvest day on the farm. I want to talk to you about how the process leading up to harvest can have a direct effect on the quality of the meat you buy. Let me give you a couple of examples that will make a lot of sense once you hear them.

First of all, if an animal is scared, stressed, or traumatized leading up to harvest, it will have far more adrenaline in its bloodstream. That directly affects the flavor of the meat itself. And if an animal is tense, the muscle fibers will be tense and closer together, which affects the tenderness of the meat as well.

So caring for these animals and giving them a good life isn't only the right thing to do. It also affects the quality of the meat, especially leading up to the time of harvest.

In this video, I want to share the steps we take and the great lengths we go to so the welfare standards we maintain here at Seven Sons are carried out all the way up to harvest. I also want to talk about how we make sure our product is traceable all the way through the food chain. That way, when you sit down to eat our food with your family, you can eat with confidence, knowing the integrity was maintained through every step.

A harvest day starts with bringing the animals up closer to the corral. We're dealing with much smaller numbers, so we take much more time with each animal. On a typical harvest day, we'll load up maybe five to ten beef animals and maybe 15 to 20 hogs, and we keep them as calm as possible during that whole process. We're in control of loading the animals and delivering them to the harvester in our own truck and trailer.

Once the animals arrive, we make sure they're comfortable, they have water to drink, and they remain calm. One of the most important things we can do as a farm is partner with other family businesses that will carry out our welfare standards. They're businesses we can trust to maintain the integrity of our animals and our product through each step of processing. We work with two different processors.

It starts with the harvesting facility, a family business called Pease Packing in Scotts, Michigan. It's located on another farm, and it's open to the public, with a little on-farm store and butcher shop you can visit. It's very important that we partner with someone we can trust. We want to make sure the facilities are clean and up to date, and the staff is well trained, so harvesting is carried out efficiently and as pain-free and humane as possible.

Once the animals are harvested, traceability comes into play. Immediately after harvest, each carcass is tagged with an ID that includes information about the animal, so we can track it back to its health records. That ID tag stays with the carcass every step of the way.

Next, we transport the carcasses about 45 minutes north of Scotts to Byron Center Meats in Byron Center, Michigan. It's another family-owned company that's been great to work with, and you can visit them too. If you walk into their shop, you'll first see a glass window where you can watch the steaks and roasts being cut. You can see the cleanliness of the facility and the integrity of their work.

Once the carcasses arrive in Byron Center, each one is re-identified, and the tags and weights are double-checked to make sure everything checks out. We've also asked the folks at Byron Center to photograph every single carcass that comes through, with its ID tag next to it.

The carcasses are then dry-aged, which is unique. Very little beef in the US is dry-aged these days, but we dry-age ours for about five to ten days in a controlled environment. That helps the tenderness of the meat as well as the flavor.

After dry aging, the carcasses are railed into the cutting room, the same room you can see if you stop in. That's where the craftsmanship and skill of the folks at Byron Center come in, and they do a great job carving the steaks and roasts and trimming everything just right. Each package is then labeled, weighed, put in a case, and flash-frozen.

Every week or every couple of weeks, one of the Seven Sons staff members, or maybe one of my brothers, drives up to Byron Center Meats in our delivery van. We pick up all the beef, pork, bison, or lamb we're processing that week and bring it back to the farm. There, it stays in our custody and control until it's packed in a box for delivery to your door.

There you have it, that's the entire process. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have and to share the transparency behind every step. I hope you've enjoyed it and learned a lot about buying quality beef.

Hey, it's Blaine with Seven Sons, and today we're going to have a lot of fun talking about the most important factors that affect the quality of the grass-fed beef you buy. I want you to take this information so you know what questions to ask and what to look for when you're searching for the best grass-fed beef.

The reason there's so much quality variation within grass-fed beef is that it's truly a lost art form. Many producers just haven't learned the art of raising cattle out on grass. It's very different from raising cattle in a feedlot, where they're fed grain in a controlled environment.

Number one, the first thing we focus on at Seven Sons is the welfare of the animals themselves. An animal that isn't treated well or isn't in good condition will be stressed. A stressed animal isn't going to gain weight, grow, and thrive, and that has a direct effect on the quality of the meat.

Something else we focus on is the nutrition of the grass the animals are eating, and that all starts at the soil level. The animals here are benefiting from over 20 years' worth of regenerating these soils. We're growing higher-value, more nutrient-dense plants for these animals to eat, and that helps them thrive here on our farm. That takes years of effort at the farm level.

There are also things we can do every year as we plan our grazing cycles and our stock densities. We move our cattle to fresh pasture every day, and we want that pasture to be in the optimum phase of growth. That's when the grasses, forbs, and legumes have the most nutrition and energy. As you can imagine, it takes a lot of planning to move the cattle in a pattern where they're grazing the grass at the right length and point in its growth cycle.

There are also things we can do every day. For example, we don't move our cattle to fresh pasture until about 11 o'clock or noon, later in the morning. By then, the forages and grasses have had more time to absorb energy from the sun, so the plants have more energy and nutrition for the animal.

The third thing we focus on is patience: letting these animals grow at their natural rate and pace. We don't want to rush the process. One of the worst things we could do is take an animal in for harvest when it's too young and hasn't had a chance to grow out and put on quality meat.

A lot of our customers have told us they can't believe our beef is grass-fed because of the marbling they see. That's the result of patience, of managing our soils over the years, and of growing higher-quality plants for these animals to eat.

The last thing, which I'm not going to cover in this video, is genetics. The type of animals grazing on our farm matters from a quality standpoint and from a welfare standpoint. Believe it or not, a lot of modern genetics have lost the traits that allow animals to thrive in their natural environment, and I'm going to cover that in the next video.

I hope you've enjoyed learning about what goes on here at Seven Sons to produce the highest-quality grass-fed beef we can for you and your family.

Hey there, it's Blaine with Seven Sons, back with another video. We've been talking about how you, as a consumer, can arm yourself with knowledge to find the highest-quality beef to feed your family, so you're not paying more for something that doesn't matter.

When it comes to genetics and beef breeds, there's a lot of misinformation from the marketing side of the beef industry, and it has confused a lot of consumers. If you go to a restaurant or walk into the grocery store, you've probably seen labels that promote a certified breed program, as if it's going to be a better-quality eating experience for you. And of course, most times, the price tag goes up when you see that.

Here's something to know as a consumer. These days in the United States, because of the commercialization of breeding programs, the breeds have been so diluted and intermixed that they've lost their genetic integrity and purity. Fifty years ago, the Angus breed had specific traits that contributed to higher-quality beef, but that's no longer the case here in the US.

Cattle breeds have been hybridized, with producers crossing different breeds to get as much hybrid vigor as they can, and the genetic purity of the commercial breeds has been lost. One of the most saddening things about the beef industry is that breeding has been managed in such a way that cattle no longer thrive in their natural environment. Cattle have been bred for feedlots.

One of the most important attributes a cow must have out on pasture is enough stomach capacity. It needs to be able to fill up on forage and then ruminate the rest of the day so it can gain weight. If an animal doesn't have enough stomach capacity to eat enough to nourish its body, it's not going to do well in a pasture environment.

That's the unfortunate thing about the feedlot industry. They've bred cattle with small stomachs, because on a feedlot, cattle don't need a large rumen. They just need to stand there and eat high-energy, high-starch feeds, so many of the attributes that allow cattle to thrive in their natural environment have literally been bred out of the animals.

So we're looking for very specific traits, and one of those is gut capacity. When we look at a beef animal from the side, we want to make sure it's one-third leg and two-thirds body. That's a visual attribute we look for, and it makes a big difference.

There's a list of about ten different attributes we look for in the animals we raise here on our farm, and that's how we continue to better our genetic quality year after year. Again, it's less about the breed itself and far more about the genetic traits within a breed. That's what we select for here, which is why you see a variety of different-colored animals out here.

We care about the genetic traits that allow the animals to thrive here on our farm. Ultimately, that's what lets them thrive in this environment and produce higher-quality beef for you to consume.

Hi, it's Blake with Seven Sons. Well, it's winter here on the farm, and we're going to spend a little time talking about a question we get asked fairly often this time of year: what do you feed the cattle during the wintertime?

Because we're Seven Sons Farms, we're 100% grass-fed, so the cattle you see in the background spend their entire lives out here on the pasture. We're in Indiana, so the grass is only green and growing during the warm season. So, being 100% grass-fed, what do the cattle eat? It's a great question.

There are two ways we feed our cattle in the winter. The first is that we make hay during the growing season. Through May, June, July, and August, we'll bale some of our pastures and store that hay. Then we can take it out to the cattle in the wintertime, when there's snow on the ground and it's a little harder for them to get down to the grass.

That's one way, and we have a video on YouTube where we're out in the pasture showing you how we set out the hay bales to feed the cows. The other way, and the preferred way, is what we call stockpile grazing.

It works like this. In August, we set aside a certain percentage of our pasture and let it keep growing through late summer and into the fall. If we get enough moisture, it'll grow to about 12 to 15 inches tall, and the grass you see behind me is about 12 inches tall. We can let the cattle keep grazing that grass after it goes dormant.

It's mid-December right now, and you can see the grass is kind of brown with a green tint to it. Believe it or not, it holds a really good amount of nutrients. We select certain fields with the types of grass that do a better job of holding their nutrient value during the cold months.

The cattle behind us will spend the winter outside here, rotating through the stockpiled forage we have. If we get down here for a look in action, you can see there's a lot of dense grass for the cattle to go through and graze. It's really neat.

Not only is it better for the cattle to be outside grazing grass year-round, but this thick grass is kind of like a blanket over the soil. That blanket helps keep the ground temperature warmer. If we were grazing it all the way to the ground, with bad management practices and overgrazing, we'd be leaving the soil bare and exposed to colder ground temperatures.

Having this nice blanket on top of the soil allows the life in the soil to stay active more days of the year and build healthy soil. As we build healthier soil, we grow healthier grass, and in turn, we have healthier animals.

What we're doing behind us is mimicking how the bison roamed the prairies for hundreds of years and survived without any human intervention. We're just mimicking nature. I hope this video helps explain how we winter the cattle here on the farm. Thanks for watching, and have a wonderful day.

Hello, people of the internet. My name is Brooks Hitzfield with Seven Sons, and in this video we're going to be talking about steak. If you don't eat a lot of meat or don't consider yourself a steak connoisseur, knowing which cut to buy, or even what makes a good steak, can be pretty confusing and sometimes even intimidating.

It's like eating at a fine dining restaurant where you can't pronounce anything on the menu. You know you could spend a lot of money and still come away with a very poor experience. I want to make sure that doesn't happen to you the next time you shop for steak.

I have the grill firing up here and six different cuts inside, so let's take a close look at each one. We're going to learn something and take the stress out of this once and for all. And yes, there are slight showers behind me, but I've been waiting all winter for grilling season, and I'm sure some of you barbecue pitmasters can share my excitement.

All right, I have the cuts here on this barrel, and we'll go through each one. But first, I want to quickly address two common myths about grass-fed beef.

At Seven Sons, our cattle are raised out on pasture. I know you've heard it said by a family member or a friend that grass-fed beef is too lean. Unfortunately, that could have been an experience they had, because early beef marketed as grass-fed was often just old dairy cattle. That would have been much lower quality and could have been leaner, because those animals are bred for milk production, not beef.

On the grain-finished side, the animals are raised in confinement feedlots, so they're not getting a lot of exercise compared to grass-fed cattle. Their muscles aren't being worked, and they're being fed high-starch diets, mostly corn and soy. That's how the fat content is achieved on the grain-fed side.

We can be a lot smarter about the way we raise grass-fed and grass-finished animals out on pasture, and we need to be selective about a couple of things. The first is the forages we're raising. The grasses out on pasture need to be higher-energy grasses with a higher natural sugar content.

We also want to be selective about the rotation of our cattle through the land we're grazing. We want to make sure they're grazing that grass at the optimal time, when it has the highest energy. Without getting too technical, that's typically before it goes to seed head, before you start to see the seeds at the top.

That way, on the grass-fed side, you can achieve a higher fat content that still tastes great, with that rich flavor from the marbling, and it's very tender. We've even had people look at our beef and accuse us of feeding the animals grain. They're used to that old dairy grass-fed beef, which would have been much leaner than what we're able to achieve. So that's myth number one.

Here's myth number two: grass-fed beef tastes gamey. Again, this one's easy. We go back to early grass-fed beef, which a lot of times would have been dairy cattle. Those were older animals, and they could have had that gamier taste, similar to deer meat or venison.

So those are the two myths, and I'm taking a stand for grass-fed beef for obvious reasons. Now we can go through each cut and make sure you learn something new.

Here are the different cuts we have. I want to talk about a couple of things we look at that determine the tenderness, and really the quality, of the steak. You heard me talking earlier about fat marbling, and I'll pick up this one to show you what I mean.

The fat marbling is the intramuscular fat, these specks throughout the muscle. That's what breaks up the muscle fibers and the connective tissue and makes the steak very tender. This is an excellent cut right here.

The other thing you're looking for is something you can't really tell visually: the amount of connective tissue in the muscle. That's usually determined by how much the muscle is used. If a muscle on the animal doesn't get worked very often, it's going to have less connective tissue and therefore be more tender.

On that note, I want to highlight our most popular cut first, and that's the filet mignon. A lot of times you'll hear it called a tenderloin steak, because it comes from the tenderloin of the animal. It's a muscle the cattle don't use much, so there's not as much connective tissue, and it's very, very tender. This is usually going to be your most expensive cut, but you can't go wrong with a filet mignon.

The next one I'm going to highlight is the Delmonico steak. It's often called a ribeye, or a rib steak if it has the bone in. It has a lot of that intramuscular fat and marbling, and it's one of my favorite steaks.

Another great thing about the ribeye is that it's usually cut very consistently, so no part of the steak is thinner than the rest. That means it's much easier to cook evenly. You can't go wrong with a ribeye.

The next one, which is usually around a similar price to the ribeye, is the New York strip. It typically has some great fat marbling too, and it's easy to identify because of the fat belt along one side. Depending on who you are, you might want to cut that off after it's cooked, but a lot of people like it as well. It has lots of flavor, and since it runs along one side, it can help hold in the juices.

In my opinion, the Delmonico is going to be more tender, but the New York strip is a very popular cut. It's very consistent in size and easy to cook.

One thing about the Delmonico: it's often called a ribeye, but you're going to see it on our website as a Delmonico. We also sell it with the bone in, and at that point we call it a tomahawk ribeye. The bone comes out of one side, so it has the shape of a tomahawk.

Those are three of the most popular steaks, and usually the highest cost. As you start moving down the line, we have a steak in the middle, and that's the sirloin. This one is probably the most popular cut in North America.

The sirloin is usually more economical than the first three we mentioned, but it's still very, very good-tasting beef. It doesn't have as much intramuscular fat, so not as much marbling, and it's not quite as tender. But the thickness is even, so it's easy to cook as well, and it's a very good cut for the value.

I'm going to talk about these last three cuts last, and they're less popular. If you can tell what they are by their shape, I'd consider you a meat connoisseur. You don't get as much of them from each animal, so a lot of times you'll only see them in butcher shops. They're not nearly as common to find, but they're excellent cuts of beef.

The first one here is the skirt steak. If you know your cuts, you can usually tell it by the distinct shape of the muscle fibers, which run perpendicular to the cut. The skirt steak is very thin and a longer cut, so you've got to watch yourself when you're cooking it, because it's a lot easier to overcook.

As you can see, there's a lot of fat on this one, and I might trim some of the larger chunks off. They can leave something in there that's a little more chewy or sinewy, and this one has more fat on it than usual. But it still has great intramuscular fat and it's a very, very tender cut.

The skirt steak is my favorite cut of steak, and I believe it's incredibly underrated. Again, it can be harder to cook and also harder to cut. With most of these other steaks, the muscle fibers run with the steak, and that makes them easier to chew and easier to cut.

It's the opposite for the skirt steak, and a lot of times you'll see people struggle with it. As long as you know what you're doing, you'll want to cut this steak perpendicular to the grain of the meat. The muscle fibers are all running this way, so if you cut across them, it's going to be much more tender and easier to chew. Since it's a long steak, I'll usually cut it in half first, which makes it easier to slice.

Moving on, over on the other side here is what we call the hanging tender. It's a smaller one, and its size will often vary with the size of the animal. Again, we don't get very much of it from each animal, so it's pretty rare to find.

The hanging tender is another great cut of beef. It's similar to the skirt steak in that the muscle fibers run lengthwise, and it often has a lot of intramuscular fat, so it's very, very tender. It's thicker than the skirt steak, so it can be a little more consistent to cook. But as you can see, the shape isn't very consistent, so some sides can dry out while others are still medium-rare, and you want to be careful.

The last one we're going to highlight is what we call the flat iron. As you can see, it still has great intramuscular fat that runs lengthwise with the cut, and it's a very tender cut. It's going to be around a similar value to the skirt and the hanging tender.

A lot of people enjoy the flat iron, and it's very versatile. Many people like to marinate it and season it different ways for different dishes. Some folks slice it and put it in cheesesteak sandwiches and stir-fry. It's very versatile, and you've always got to love the flat iron.

All right, those are the different steaks I had to highlight for you. Of course there are many more, but we got to see a selection of the higher-cost cuts and a selection of the lower-cost cuts. We've learned that fat marbling is the main thing you can see that helps determine tenderness, and we saw it on both sides.

In my opinion, they're all great cuts of meat. The main difference is how easy they are to work with, especially on the grill and on the plate. The New York strip, Delmonico, and ribeye are more consistent, so they're harder to overcook and easier to cut.

If you're just getting started with steak and don't have a lot of experience, I'd recommend starting there. When you're ready to branch out to something new, with more diverse flavors, some of the other cuts we mentioned are a great place to explore.

I hope you learned something and feel more confident the next time you approach steak, because that was the goal of this video. Now I'm getting hungry, so we're going to throw some of these on the grill. I'll leave you with a couple of cooking tips.

When you pull a steak off the grill or the burner, be sure to let it rest for about 10 minutes. Cooking puts meat under a lot of stress, and if you cut into it right away, you'll lose a lot of that moisture and juice. I know it's tempting, but let it rest for 10 minutes, and the experience is going to be much better.

Also, whatever internal temperature you're shooting for, whether it's medium-rare or well-done, pull the steak off 5 degrees before it reaches that point. It's going to keep cooking afterward, and that's something that's easy to miss.

If you're cooking a steak inside, be sure to look up the reverse searing method. That's where you use your oven to help bring the steak up to temperature, and it's an excellent way to do it if you can't use a grill. Again, I hope you've learned something. I really appreciate you watching, and until next time.

Hey there, it's Blaine with Seven Sons. I'm out here in the cattle pasture today, and we're going to talk about how, at Seven Sons, we're using cattle, of all things, to improve our environment. We're using them to sequester carbon at a very fast rate and put it back into the soil.

I bring this up because you hear a lot these days about how cattle production is harmful for the environment. It always makes me sad when I hear that, because it means we as humans are trying to blame these critters behind me for doing what they've done for thousands of years. They're grazing ruminant animals, just like bison, buffalo, and antelope.

If you go back just a couple thousand years, there were literally millions of these grazing ruminant animals grazing and migrating across the prairies throughout the world. These animals were once an integral part of healthy ecosystems. So it begs the question: why would these animals all of a sudden be harmful for the environment?

The answer is that it's how we as humans choose to steward and manage these animals that will cause them to have either a positive or a negative effect on the environment.

Here at Seven Sons, you'll see a lot of green, growing grass, and as this grass grows, it sequesters carbon and puts it in the soil. What these animals are doing is speeding up the rate at which the grass grows here, which speeds up the rate at which carbon is sequestered. We do that through management-intensive grazing, using the portable fencing you can see behind me to manage these animals so they're not overgrazing or undergrazing.

That keeps the grass growing at a very, very fast pace. As the grass is pruned back by the animals as they graze, the grass gets a chance to grow back while we move the cattle along. That creates a pumping action that's literally pulling carbon back into the soil at a very fast pace.

Now compare that with a different management practice known as feedlot production. There, cattle are taken out of the natural ecosystem they would otherwise have been in for thousands of years and put in a feedlot. That means they're not out here doing what they should be doing, grazing green grass. What's happening here is exactly the opposite.

So it all depends on how we, as humans and as farmers, steward our land and our livestock in a way that mimics ecosystems that are healthy for our environment. I just want to share that with you so you can have confidence knowing that the animals we raise here at Seven Sons have a great life. They're raised ethically, and in a way that improves our environment.

That's it for now. I'll share some more information below this video so you can learn more about regenerative agriculture practices and how they present a lot of hope for the future. I encourage you to like the video and share it with your friends, and I'll be back with another video soon.

Hey there, it's Blaine with Seven Sons Farms, back with another fun and educational video about how your support of regenerative farming practices can have a big impact on the environment and the world around us. It's our mission and passion at Seven Sons to raise clean, ethical food you can be confident in when you feed your family. That's what gets us out of bed every day to do this work.

Last week, I shared a very interesting video, and you could go back and watch it if you missed it. It was about how we're using holistic planned grazing practices with our cattle to sequester carbon and create cleaner air. What I want to talk about today is how that increased carbon we're putting in the soil is also creating a cleaner water supply, because the increased organic matter lets our soils absorb far more water each year.

We measure that every year, and here's how it works. Every year, we send soil samples off to a lab to measure many different things, and one of the major things we're looking for is soil organic matter levels. Most conventionally farmed land here in the Midwest will have soil organic matter levels of just 1% to 2%. On our farm, after years of regenerative practices, we've increased soil organic matter levels to 5% to 6%.

So we've gone from 1% to 2% up to 5% to 6%, and here's why that's so impactful. For every 1% increase in organic matter, we increase the amount of carbon we're holding by 10,000 pounds per acre. So when we go from 2% organic matter to 6%, that's an additional 40,000 pounds of carbon sequestered in the soil.

That converts to up to 20,000 gallons of additional water-holding capacity for every 1% improvement in organic matter levels. So with an organic matter level of 6%, we're holding 120,000 gallons of water in every acre.

It's no secret that we have water quality and supply issues in our environment, from lakes, rivers, and streams to algae blooms and the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. That's being caused in large part by all the runoff and all the rainwater that doesn't stay in place, because there's not enough organic matter in conventionally farmed soils. Why? Because the carbon has been released through tillage, conventional farming practices, and chemicals.

That creates an environment where the water doesn't stay in place. It washes off and carries chemicals, soil nutrients, and literally topsoil into our rivers and streams, and that's not a good thing.

The opposite is happening here. When it rains here, the water stays here, creating a healthier ecosystem and a healthier environment. That's it for now, and I hope you found this video fun and educational.