At www.1328farms.com we farm with just enough Black Angus cattle that the land can sustain. We don’t add super phosphates to the land to improve growth (We can’t use Organic as we are not yet certified). We also don’t feed grain to increase fat content and weight. This makes our meat slightly more expensive as we can carry less animals per acre. What you do get is great quality beef with a deep distinctive taste of the environment. In our meat you will taste the earth and character of http://visitmanningvalley.com.au/. Grass-fed beef? There should be no other kind. ..........
Cattle are ruminants, with four stomachs (rumen, reticulum, omasum and abomasum) specially evolved for grass. The grain and countless other supplements (including meat-meal and meds) of the typical feedlot’s dietary regime are designed to induce rapid weight-gain. All too commonly, however, high-grain diets also produce the low-pH, low-fibre and high-stress stomach environment that can cause abomasal ulcers and other conditions such as liver abscesses.
We provide Black Angus beef from natural diets. At its heart is an extraordinary life-giving plant called grass. Grass-fed beef? There should be no other kind. “Grass fed” (meaning the animals have only eaten grass, ever) is still a small percentage of the meat we eat. Most are “finished” in feedlots which, in accelerating cattle towards market, shorten their lives and so (it is sometimes argued) reduce their lifetime methane emissions. But this argument is more than countervailed by the carbon-saving and nature-healing of grass.We tend to think Australia was naturally forested, making grass an exotic substrate for exploitative grazing practices and destructive hooves. Wrong. Grass is native and, combined with hard hooves, has an extraordinary capacity to build soil, store water and sequester carbon. This is regenerative farming.We don’t know our continent’s pre-human condition but we do know, from Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth and Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, that pre-colonial Australia offered vast tree-dotted savannahs of waving waist-high grasses; soft-soiled game parks managed by Indigenous peoples for eons.
We also know that these native grasses, unlike the annual exotic pasture-plants still favoured by most graziers, were mixed-species perennials.That small difference is actually huge. Being perennial, Australian grasses are seasonal growers. Some, like kangaroo grass, are summer growers; others, like microlaena, grow in the cool-season. These mixed grasslands naturally sustain permanent ground cover, with all the soil-retaining, microbe-nourishing and nutrient-releasing benefits that brings.
And there’s more. Grazing doesn’t require treelessness. Indeed, pastoral ruminants delight in paddock trees for shade and fodder. Compare your average paddock of chickpeas or soy, a clear-felled monoculture that requires annual ploughing (denaturing the soil and killing its microbial culture) and broadscale poisoning of “weeds” before planting, not to mention petroleum-based fertilisers. Fifty years of this and what soil remains is thoroughly dead.Regenerative grazing, by contrast, can produce beef that is carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative. Managed into intensive but fast-moving grazing, cattle eat grasses without killing them, trample nitrogen and fibrous dung into the soil, then move on. Because the grasses are perennial, this deepens soil instead of destroying it, from 300mm to 1500mm in a few years, multiplying water-holding capacity by eight and sustaining the complex microbial ecosystems that release soil nutrients and exchange them with plants for sugars.A recent US study found that “adaptive multi-paddock grazing” sequesters so much carbon that “emissions… were completely offset". NSW practitioner Martin Royds says this not only benefits the environment but can increase profits by 230 per cent. Plus, you get the odd hamburger.