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Is grass-fed beef better?

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Image Credit: KCL Cattle Company Ltd.

Eating well is no simple matter. Our global marketplace offers a world of choices, and the information available on those food choices can be contradictory and complicated. In today’s blog post we explain the difference between grass-fed and grain-finished beef and explore their nutritional values and environmental impacts.

Grass-fed and grain-finished beef explained

All cattle eat grass and forage for most of their lives. This means they graze in the pasture during the summer months and are then fed forages such as silage (fermented grass crops) or hay during the winter.

Some cattle are grass- and forage-fed for their entire lives.

Other cattle are slowly moved to a diet consisting of grains such as corn or barley, for about three or four months before they go to market. This diet helps the cattle put on weight faster, and produces a higher quality, more marbled meat. This generally takes place in a feedlot.

A nutritional comparison

According to Canada Beef, grass-fed beef is leaner than grain-finished beef by about two to four grams of fat per 100 grams of trimmed meat. Dietitians agree this is an insignificant amount in the context of the amount of fat we consume on a daily basis. 

Both types of beef contribute nutrients such as iron, zinc, vitamin B, calcium and potassium, as well as small amounts of omega-3 fatty acids, and both contain the same amount of cholesterol.

You can read more about the dietary impacts of beef in your diet in ‘4 ways proposed changes to the Canada Food Guide could be bad for our health’.

Environmental impact

Beef production, perhaps surprisingly, benefits the environment in many ways, because the industry is helping preserve Canada’s natural grasslands. Pastures help maintain watersheds, sequester carbon, prevent erosion, support biodiversity and provide habitats for a variety of different species.

That being said, grain-finished beef has a lower carbon footprint than grass-fed beef because of the higher efficiency of this finishing method. Grass-fed cattle are typically harvested at between 20 to 24 months of age, and at a weight of 1,000 to 1,400 pounds. Grain-fed cattle, on the other hand, are harvested at about 14 to 18 months of age and at a weight of about 1,400 to 1,500 pounds. 

Because the grain-finishing phase is so much more efficient than grass-finishing, resulting in more food in less time, grain-fed beef has a lower carbon footprint than grass-fed.

‘4 things you should know about beef production and the environment’ explains more about the environmental impacts of the beef industry.

How Project Clean Cow is reducing cattle methane emissions by up to half

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Cows require an exceptional digestive system to thrive on a diet of grass and other plant materials.

These ruminants have a stomach with four compartments, the first of which is called the rumen. Micro-organisms in the rumen ferment the food and start the digestive process. Each time the cow regurgitates and re-chews the food, this microbial activity breaks down cellulose, fibre and carbohydrates into usable compounds.

An unfortunate byproduct of this digestive process is methane. Cows have been identified as a significant source of greenhouses gases, and the beef industry is committed to minimizing its impact.

Project Clean Cow is a 10-year research project that holds promise of a solution.

Spearheaded by DSM, a global science-based company and a world leader in the field of animal nutrition, the project has developed a feed additive that reduces the methane created through the digestive process of cattle.

“The current Clean Cow project started in 2007, as part of a bigger initiative at DSM called the Climate Change Induced Innovation Project,” said Hugh Welsh, president, North America, at DSM. “Our goal was to develop a feed supplement for ruminants which would reduce methane emissions by at least 30 per cent. This would substantially lower the GHG footprint of cattle, and potentially have a meaningful impact on global climate change-related emissions.”

The project started with input from biologists and chemists at DSM’s research and development unit in Switzerland, as well as experts in ruminant science and animal nutrition. It has since expanded to include an international scientific network.

The result is a feed supplement that consistently reduces the methane produced by ruminants (dairy cows, beef cattle and sheep) by 30 to 50 per cent.

What happens next?

“Our next step is to work hand-in-hand with industry and the scientific community for product launch,” said Hugh.

As a starting point, DSM has commissioned a large-scale field trial to demonstrate the viability of feeding the compound in backgrounding and finishing operations. Field tests by Viresco Solutions, an environmental consulting firm based in Calgary, AB, should be complete by the end of this year. Cattle will be fed with flaked corn, flaked barley and standard barley, in addition to the supplement, to see if there are any effects on animal performance, health or carcass quality.

“Viresco took the lead in applying to Emissions Reduction Alberta to share in the risk of testing at commercial scales”, explained Karen Haugen-Kozyra, President at Viresco.  “We call this ‘on the road to low carbon beef’ – if combined with regenerative ranching, increased feed efficiency and testing new feeding technologies, the entire sustainability story for beef production in Alberta becomes really attractive. We are proud that DSM chose Alberta to test their innovative approach.”

As we learned in a previous blog post, ammonia is another greenhouse gas emitted by cattle. Emissions research, conducted in Lethbridge by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, is helping us to understand ammonia’s environmental impact, and find ways to minimize it.

4 ways proposed changes to the Canada Food Guide could be bad for our health

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For 40 years, Health Canada has urged Canadians to follow its dietary guidelines, and using the Canada Food Guide is considered a basic reference when it comes to healthy eating.

As we learn more about nutrition and health, it makes sense that recommendations will change over time, and the Guide should be kept updated. But recently proposed changes have many people, including doctors, worried.

Of particular concern to Canada’s beef industry is a recommendation that Canadians eat less meat. They are encouraged to replace animal proteins with plant-based proteins, partly for health reasons and partly for environmental considerations.

Why 717 Canadian physicians disagree with Health Canada

In July 2017, a group of 717 Canadian physicians and allied health professionals sent an open letter to the Canadian Office of Nutrition Policy and Promotion expressing their concerns about several aspects of the new Guide, including the recommendation to eat less red meat. These health professionals have been successfully using food and diet to help reverse disease and made the following points:

    • The Guide continues to recommend reducing consumption of saturated fats, despite “essentially overwhelming evidence now that saturated fat is not harmful in the diet and does not cause heart disease, but rather that the low fat dietary pattern has very likely caused harm”.
    • The caution against red meat does not stand up to “rigorous clinical trial data which does not demonstrate any negative health consequences from eating meat.” The physicians cited a recent review which shows no negative influence on cardiovascular risk factors with red meat intake of more than 0.5 servings per day.

“The advice to eat less red meat may already be having some unintended consequences. A recent report by Public Health England shows that 25% of working age women do not have enough iron in their diet, and that almost half of teenage girls are at risk of iron-deficiency anemia. Encouraging all population groups to eat less red and processed meat … is not helpful and places women at risk of iron deficiency and related anemia.”

You can read the full letter here.

Four ways the new Guide could be counter-productive

    1. The Guide plans to eliminate the meat category and replace it with a proteins category. The implication that all proteins are created equal is misleading – red meats are the best source of high-quality, dietary protein relative to caloric intake.
    2. Red meats are an excellent part of a balanced diet because they are so rich in nutrients such as zinc, iron and Vitamin B12.
    3. Saturated fats are now known to play an important role in a healthy, balanced diet.
    4. Dietary guidelines should be first and foremost about nutrition, rather than environmental considerations.

Why environmental considerations don’t belong in nutritional recommendations

Nutrition and the environment are diverse issues that should not be confused. According to Tom Lynch-Staunton, issues manager for the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, “it’s absolutely important for us as an industry to look at ways to improve our environmental impacts, but the food guide should be about nutrition; about human health, which is complex enough.”

“The Guide should provide recommendations for a variety of different diets so that people can get the best nutrition possible, and not confuse that with other issues such as the environment.”

Tom also explained that the environmental impacts of agriculture as an industry are incredibly complex.

“It’s very misleading to look at one measurement, such as greenhouse gas emissions per pound of beef,” he said. “Although the data suggests that cattle produce the most methane emissions of any livestock, we also know that cattle can provide great benefits to the environment – they use food sources that we can’t use, such as feed grains or crop residues, and they are able to graze natural grasslands that aren’t very well suited to farming crops or vegetables. We also know that grasslands promote biodiversity, providing wildlife habitat, a water filtration system and nutrient dispersion, as well as storing huge amounts of carbon.”

You can read about some of the research into greenhouse gas emissions in these blog posts: