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Home on the Free Range

This Minnesota couple went from running a conventional dairy to owning an organic alfalfa and grass-fed beef business. The change in their farm—and the lives of their animals—has been dramatic.

by Julie Besonen

Photos courtesy of Jim Knapp

Cows just want to have fun, according to Luverne and Mary Jo Forbord, who manage 50 head of beef cattle on their organic farm in Starbuck, Minn. How else to explain why nearly half of their herd recently jumped into a pond and took off swimming just to see what was on the other side? “They do things they aren’t supposed to when you aren’t watching,” Luverne says indulgently. “They’re quite adventuresome.”

Borrowing from the Buffalo

The morning following the swimming excursion, the cows are focused on eating more than thrill-seeking. On the Forbords’ 480-acre farm, called Prairie Horizons, the cows get to graze on a fresh acre of alfalfa and three kinds of grass every day. They are never fed a kernel of grain.

“We’re using our cows to mimic what the buffaloes used to do,” says Luverne. “It’s much easier to deal with them when they’re happy and it makes their meat more tender. They live a good life while they’re here.”

It’s not hard to imagine buffalo roaming across Prairie Horizons’ green, hilly landscape where the lush grass grows knee-high. The couple’s property includes 55 acres of soy beans, a two-acre orchard, fields of strawberries and raspberries and 100 acres of native, never-farmed prairie seeded about 10,000 years ago. The rocky soil makes it unsuitable for most crops but ideal for grazing. Water lines run to all parts of the farm so the cows always have access to fresh drinking water.

The cows come when Luverne calls them, knowing he means fresh food. He strings poly wire across the driveway to direct their route. They run ahead of him to the far end of the pasture to find the boundary, defined by a high-tensile electric fence. He lets them explore, to a point. Every once in a while a deer will tear through a section of the 14-mile fence surrounding the property. When Luverne’s back is turned the cows will take advantage of the opportunity, wandering as far as a mile from home.

Meanwhile, Mary Jo, a registered dietician and nutritionist, rises at 7 a.m. and goes to work three days a week at the University of Minnesota, at the nearby Morris campus. She is overseeing a grant project on the changing physical environment of food. The previous day she attended the opening ceremony of a Native American garden planted by students from various tribes who researched what their ancestors ate. From a longstanding farming family herself, she is well-versed in Minnesota’s agricultural heritage as well as progressive movements concerning food production, animal welfare and the environment. She has read Michael Pollan and heard Temple Grandin speak about slaughterhouses, and the Forbords have made their own decisions about how to slaughter their animals.

A Deliberate Approach to Life and Death

Cows1 It is one of Luverne’s tasks today to separate out four steers for butchering. They will be hauled to a small, custom slaughtering plant where there are no long, stressful passageways the animals have to navigate. They are shot in the head and drop immediately.

The way the animals live and die has proved to be of paramount concern for the Forbords’ customers. With her background in nutrition, Mary Jo thought their main selling point would be the high omega 3 benefits of grass-fed beef. Not so.

“Our customers buy from us because they know the cows had a good life,” she says. “We have an open-gate policy on our farm and they want to be able to look around and know the people. They want to see a grass ecosystem. They value having food produced locally and having those dollars stay in the community.” The couple does all their own marketing, selling 30 to 40 head a year to a local market, a food co-op, a restaurant and private individuals who commit to buying one-fourth of a cow at a time.

“The flavor comes from the grasses, water and sunshine—that’s it,” says Mary Jo. “It reminds people of beef from years past; they have a food memory that matches our beef taste. It’s very rewarding. Even vegetarians have come to our farm and decided it’s okay to eat our beef.”

Because the ruminant’s four-chambered stomach was built to metabolize grass, the Forbords’ cows don’t have digestion problems, nor do they require antibiotics to prevent infection. Visits from the vet are rare.

The Transition from a Conventional Dairy

More Cows The Forbords didn’t start out as free-range farmers. Until 2002, they had a conventional dairy, injecting their milk cows with bovine growth hormones and spraying the crops with chemicals. The cows were often sick.

“I remember cows dying of things like sudden-death syndrome, things we’d never heard of,” says Mary Jo. “I remember Luverne cradling one of his favorite cows in his arms as she was dying.” The growth hormones triggered the cows to produce 100 pounds of milk a day. The Forbords felt they were demanding too much of them.

Collecting 100 pounds of milk a day was also too much for the couple. “We were so dead tired,” Mary Jo recalls. They started work at 5:30 a.m., did two hours of chores and milking before feed work, then milked the herd again at night and finished at midnight or so. What became more untenable was not making any money.

With the advent of large, industrial dairy farms in the 1990s, the surplus of milk drove the price down. “It became imperative to change,” Mary Jo says. “We saw that our size farm was going to be a dinosaur. We would have had to go into large-scale farming, which would cost $2 million—very unappealing to us. We were not proud of our milk product, but we didn’t want to go into bankruptcy. We knew we had to stay.”

They devised a solution to save the farm, manage their grasslands and feel proud of what they were doing. They sold off their milk cows in 2002 and started over with 13 Lowline Angus heifers, a breed that was developed at a research station in Australia and introduced to the U.S. in 1997. The cows are relatively small, designed to produce a high yield of beef with just enough fat. Lowline Angus mature to 1,000 pounds at 22 months. Bigger, grain-fed breeds reach 1,500 to 1,600 pounds in 15 months.

“Some people believe beef is beef and milk is milk and that is certainly not true,” Mary Jo says. “We weren’t born organic, we transitioned to organic. No one can tell us there’s not a difference.” The Forbords witnessed their conventional dairy cows dying by the age of three, confined to a barn on a floor of cement. Their free-ranging, grass-fed cows can live to be 10. They are never indoors.

Luverne discovers a newborn calf on his rounds. He does not do pregnancy checks on the animals and can’t identify which cow the calf came from.

“Okay, who did it?” Luverne says. He approaches the calf to see which cow seems the most worried. The affinity a mother feels for her newborn is the only way to tell. Calves are mostly born in the middle
of the night.

Luverne ear-tags the calf, the purpose being to mark its blood line. “If the animals don’t gain weight real good I’d just as soon eliminate them rather than propagate them,” he says.

The rest of Luverne’s day is devoted to cutting hay. His work won’t end before dark. Mary Jo comes home from the university and they walk the farm together.

“It’s pleasurable,” she says. “We don’t know the difference between work and enjoyment, so much of our fun is managing the diversity of the land and welcoming customers and students to the farm. I like weeding the orchard. Even picking
rocks doesn’t feel like work. My heart is
in farming.” |SFM|

Grass-fed vs. Grain-fed

Prairie Horizons is certified organic, but for grass-fed beef the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has no official definition, labeling system or third-party certification program. The free-range label applies only to poultry raised for meat, not eggs. The free-range and cage-free labels you see on egg cartons is not audited by the USDA and does not guarantee the birds access to the outdoors for any duration of time. Neither does it regulate the type of feed they’re given nor address stocking density or flock size.

Currently, the National Organic Program (NOP) stipulates that ruminants must be allowed access to pasture and can be fed grain during a “finishing period” limited to one-fifth of the animal’s total life, or 120 days, whichever is shorter. In 2010, as it was drawing up guidelines, the USDA welcomed comments from organic beef producers, state government agencies, animal-welfare organizations, consumer organizations and trade associations. One proposal it acknowledged but did not adopt was for a three-tiered labeling system: “Organic -- Grass Fed/Grain Finished”; “Organic -- Grass Fed/Finished on Pasture with Supplemental Grain Feeding”; and “Organic -- 100% Grass Fed/Grass Finished.” Such labeling would reflect the diversity of current practices, but no further rulemaking is being pursued at this time.

Studies have shown that there are nutritional differences between pasture-raised and feedlot-raised animals. Grass-fed meat is lower in fat and two to four times higher in omega 3 fatty acids. Tests have also shown it containing higher traces of vitamins E, C and beta-carotene than other meat. When the animals are fattened or “finished” with grains before slaughter, their store of beneficial fatty acids and vitamins diminishes each day they are kept on a feedlot diet.

Tell us: Do you sell grass-fed meat or use it in your foodservice recipes?

Julie Besonen is the food editor at Paper magazine, writes a weekly restaurant column for nycgo.com and has contributed to The New York Times and the New York Daily News.

This article was featured in the September 2011 issue of Specialty Food Magazine. See other articles in this issue at: September 2011 Specialty Food Magazine.