Should we be careful about “absolutes” in our marketing?
Direct beef marketing can sometimes feel like a competition for the strongest marketing claims. For example, we claim that, “Our beef is 100% grass fed and finished, never given antibiotics or growth hormones, born and raised on our ranch”. It is a true claim by the way; we think that the most important thing we can offer our customers is integrity. If anything about our production were ever to change, we will absolutely let our customers know! But we wouldn’t have to stop there. We could get AGA (American Grassfed Assocation) certified, or get an Organic certification, or dozens of others related to everything from humane animal treatment, to being bird friendly, predator friendly, or regenerative. And if it makes sense, we may actually pursue some of these certifications in the future. However, when producers make these claims, I think we start reinforce customers in a way to see these certifications and claims as important and necessary, and while I don’t necessarily disagree with any of the above programs on most things, they are of course limited. In my mind, they are a way of trying to build trust with customers when customers don’t know enough about you or have enough of a relationship with you to trust you otherwise. And like all labels and claims, they are limited, don’t really tell us everything we need to know, and at times could even be counterproductive. There is a lot of nuance in food production, and I hope I can show that there could be times where breaking some of the above claims, including some of the claims we make, could be the best for the animals, environment, and people. I hope that customers will work to find producers they trust, and then trust them if they need to bend the “Rules” every now and then.
The “antibiotic free” claim
For an example, lets take a look at our “antibiotic free” claim. All of the beef we sell to customers is, and is marketed as, antibiotic free. It is a “never-ever” claim. And for now, we will continue to do so, as it is not difficult for us to manage, and there are avenues to market calves that we have to doctor. We don’t direct market every single calf on the ranch, some calves still get sold on the commodity market where the “no antibiotics” claim isn’t essential. But what if we did direct market all of our animals? We might have to reconsider our “never-ever” claim. Would it be ethical to withhold an antibiotic to a calf with pneumonia and let it die, or let it suffer from an infection after an attack from a predator when we could save them with a common antibiotic? And if we did doctor it, would it be ethical to “waste” that meat, and, even though it was more than a year after the withdrawal date for that antibiotic, refuse to butcher it for meat? That’s a more difficult question. Personally, I think that I care more about “no subtherapeutic antibiotic use” than I do “no” antibiotic use. (only giving antibiotics to sick animals that need it rather than administering it constantly in low doses in feed or water to improve growth or health in otherwise unhealthy conditions) In fact, much of the beef I feed my family has been doctored with antibiotics. Why? When we have a beef animal that gets get sick, we sometimes go ahead and doctor it, but we notch its ear and pull it out of the program and may end up butchering and eating it ourselves. As long as we wait the required withdrawal time I am comfortable with it, and think it is still a healthy, nutritious option for my kids. And if I wasn’t ok feeding it to my kids, would it be ethical to market it elsewhere and ask another family to feed it to theirs?
All of this is simply to say that NEVER EVER using antibiotics may not be the best management. However managing in every way you can to reduce sickness, reduce the need for antibiotics, and only using them when necessary may be.
The 100% grass-fed claim
For the most part, I think that a cow is at her best when she is out grazing grass, producing nutritious food for us by upcycling forages from undisturbed rangelands. I think it is probably better for the environment when we are asking ruminants to harvest these otherwise in-edible forages than when we are subsidizing farmers to use large amounts of fertilizers, herbicides, and tillage to grow monoculture crops at vast scales with carbon intensive equipment, and then hauling that feed to cattle in feed lots. And what about health and nutrition? For the record I think meat, including meat from grain-finished animals, is healthy and nutritious. As far as I can tell most research implicating meat in cancer or heart disease is very weak, and the best studies have found that meat was at worst neutral and at best protective against these health issues. (See the “Sacred Cow” book I mentioned in a previous email) That being said, I think that there is some evidence that grass-finished meat, and meat from animals grazing a more diverse diet, has a higher nutrient density, more diverse phytochemicals, and may be even healthier for people. (Check out this research from Fred Provenza, or his book “Nourishment”.)
So I think there are good environmental and health related reasons to raise, purchase and consume grassfed livestock. However, I think that too may not always be at its best in an “all or nothing” model. What do I mean by that? Here are some examples:
I have been having quite a few conversations with some other grass finished beef producers recently, and while we have mostly used our heifer calves for our grass finishing operation, I talked to one rancher that had raised a lot of grass-fed steers. With steers, when they were grazing in the late fall and early winter, this producer had issues with some of his steers getting “water belly,” which is a painful blockage of the urethra similar to kidney stones. There was a simple lick tub, making up less than 2% of the calves diet, that cleared up the issues they thought were related to a mineral imbalance, but the tub would technically have not been allowed under AGA (American Grassfed Association) standards. Now there may be other ways to prevent it available, but if there weren’t, would it be better to have provided a small lick tub supplement, even though it was technically not “100% grassfed”, than to either let the calves suffer or give up winter grazing and put them on a more expensive and energy intensive feeding of hay?
Or what about a situation where a small amount of protein supplement, say from brewers grains, or a lick tub like mentioned above, allowed a rancher to extend the grazing season? So far, we have used alfalfa as our protein source allowing us to extend the grazing season and reduce our hay harvesting and feeding. We haven’t found a grain based lick tub or cake that works so much better that it is game changing, so we are happy to stick to it. But what if there was a protein supplement, that technically came from grain, molasses, or something, that was a game changer? What if, by feeding a small supplement (2-3% of the total diet) it allowed us to continue grazing all winter, and quit haying all together? Haying is an equipment, fuel, and time intensive process connected to plenty of emissions. Would 2-3% of the diet coming from a grain based source, used only in the winter, have a significant impact on the nutrient density of the meat? Probably not. Could the product be justified if it could prevent all the haying? I think so.
Finally, brewers grains and other “by-products” are interesting enough to mention again. We don’t use them, but if a producer had access to a source of them, turning a “waste” product into feed for animals makes a lot of sense. Even if brewers grains produced meat that was a little higher in omega six fatty acids, wouldn’t the environmental benefit outweigh that? Or, for example, if left over food from our restaurants, grocery stores, and kitchens could go to feed pigs and make pork instead of being anaerobically digested to produce methane in a landfill, wouldn’t that be a win? Even if the feed wasn’t organic?
Its worth taking a look at the pictures below, and realizing that the one on the left could still be considered “organic and grass-fed” if the hay was organically sourced, and the one on the right might be neither, if 100% grass-fed was the claim. (notice the little lick tub they are eating out of) However, the one on the right looks much more like the “regenerative grazing on diverse forages” to me that I think is most environmentally sustainable, and produces the healthiest beef.
So, that is a rather long winded way of saying, I don’t think that strict certification programs should be the be-all and end-all of what makes for healthy sustainable food, and I hope that consumers understand that there is a lot of nuance in trying to raise food sustainably. Currently it works just fine for us to guarantee that our beef is 100% grassfed, and never-ever treated with growth hormones or antibiotics, and I don’t see us changing this any time soon…but if we ever had a need or a compelling reason to adjust, if we thought that both animals and environment would be better off if we did, I hope that we could have enough trust built up in our relationship with customers that they would continue to support us, even without the “absolutes” in our marketing.
Have any questions or comments? Please feel free to reach out, post a comment, or send me an email at logan@mannixbeef.com. We’d love to hear from you.