Backyard Beef

Image Gallery Photo : F.SCHUSSLER/PHOTOLINK/ PHOTODISC/PICTUREQUEST

HOMESTEADING

You don't need a ranch to raise your own, healthy, pastured beef. Just a little patch of grass and some fencing will do the trick just fine.

In the tiny village of Vanlue, Ohio, Pat and Sheila Kinley operate Sunny Side Meats, a sort of mom-and-pop butchering business that serves small-scale farmers, gardeners and homesteaders who raise a calf, lamb or pig for their own meat. Although there's not much public hoopla about this kind of meat production, the number of people involved is surprisingly large and growing. Sunny Side is overwhelmed with work.

"We have to turn people away," says Pat, as if he barely believes it himself. Sunny Side, like thousands of similar shops, is regularly inspected and is as clean as any commercial meat processing plant. But its meat can't be sold commercially. Each package of meat must be stamped a "not for sale," a mysterious turn of the bureaucratic mind, which seems explainable only as a form of protection for big meat packers who don't like people providing for themselves.

Sunny Side butchers for people who raise their own meat, mostly pasture enthusiasts who avoid antibiotics and hormones. I understand the attraction. As a producer of homegrown meat raised on pasture grasses, I believe mine is healthier than the commercial stuff—and I know it tastes better. As Brad Billock, whose trailer I use to haul my beef to Sunny Side and who raises two steers every year says: "When we first raised our own meat, I could hardly believe how much better it tasted compared to what we were buying in the grocery stores."

And all you really need is a little grass.

GOOD STARTS

On our 20-acre farm our focus is on the rotational grazing method, which is gaining interest now because of its cost, health and environmental benefits. (See "Pasture Perfect," Page 46.) We wanted to raise our beef like we raise our lambs, entirely on pasture and mother's milk, producing what is called baby beef. Our calves are born in the spring and weigh about 650 pounds when we butcher them in late fall. Not having to keep them over winter is a savings, although somewhat canceled out because we do have to maintain the mother cow over winter. But all our feed is homegrown.

Our operation starts with a beef cow or beef-dairy cross. We used to breed our cows artificially, but in recent years we have just turned them in with our neighbor's bull (with the neighbor's permission, of course). In our experience calves raised on pasture, nursing their mothers and never weaned, require no antibiotics, since they never get scours or any other disease connected with early weaning stress. We never administer hormones, since we are not interested in speed-fattening the calf for profit. We try to breed our cow so the calf comes when spring pasture season is getting underway, so the cow has plenty of good forage to make ample milk for the calf.