WHY ARE WE ALWAYS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING BETTER??

Meat’s been in the news in the last few days & I’m trying to figure out how we fit in on our farm. Maybe we can work through it here together!

First there were milk alternatives, like almond and soy. Now those are old news & oat’s the way to go. I know that lactose intolerance is a real thing & can be devastating to live with, so I completely understand people wanting options. This isn’t a post about raw milk, so we won’t even go there! We love our raw milk customers, but we never make claims about the product. You guys know what you’re buying & why, and we strive to provide the tastiest, cleanest, healthiest milk around.

For years on the meat side of things the only choice you had was whether you purchased from a local farmer who raised a few to sell halves on the side, or bought your meat at the grocery store. Then grass-fed became the buzzword, and now grass-finished makes a bigger distinction between conventionally finished feedlot beef & the product we sell.  Have you heard that roughly 85% of the grass-fed beef sold in the United States is imported??

In the last couple years plant-based beef has been on the market to mixed reviews.  The anti-animal agriculture people think it could be the answer to climate change & global obesity. If you’ve ever read anything I’ve written on the subject, you know we take the complete opposite stand on that. People who are more apt to read labels before they put something in their mouths have been a little slower to adopt “Beyond Meat”! Ingredient lists longer than five, and full of words you can’t pronounce are never a good thing. Just last week the FDA approved meat-based meat alternatives to move forward with testing. Huh?? This meat is actually cultured from the cells of animals, and then grown in labs. It can be formed into whatever cut you want it to be, and they say that it has the taste & consistency of muscle meat. Who am I to disagree? I have to admit I’ve never tried it…

I just don’t understand why we can’t leave nature alone? We see examples through the history of modern agriculture where humans thought we were improving something & ended up doing damage that may take years to fix, if it can be done at all.  For example, after World War II the technology and factories that had been used for the war effort were turned to synthetic fertilizer production. Farmers were sold on the efficiency of using the new science, and the benefits to the plants & soils. Now fifty + years later, soil health scientists are realizing that we actually have been creating an environment of dependency in our plant species that makes them weaker & unable to utilize the natural systems around them.   I’m sure you can think of examples of this in your own lives.

All of this to say, as a culture & population we’ve got to start thinking critically! There are a growing number of consumers who are aware of the upside down nature of nutrition in America. Animal fats & natural cholesterol should no longer be the enemy, they’re absolutely necessary for the proper human diet! Eat eggs (if you can find them!), eat lots of fatty beef, eat bacon, drink whole milk, use butter & stay away from seed oils… the list goes on.

I’ll get off my soapbox for now & go back to caring for our cows. As close to the way nature intended as we can! Thanks for listening.