Protocols

There’s a broad spectrum of what the term “grass-fed beef” means in the marketing world. All cows eat grass—from the ground or as hay—at some point in their lives. They’re ruminants, which means that they function best when consuming and digesting a plant-based diet. The grass-fed label is not so all-encompassing that it could be applied to all cows, but it allows for some flexibility in interpretation.

In a conventional cattle system, calves in the yearling stage are removed from pastures and shipped to a feedlot, where their diet shifts to a corn-dominated ration in an attempt to pack on weight and fat cover in an accelerated time frame in the “finishing” stage. This is how the majority of the beef in the U.S. gets on grocery store shelves.

“Grass-Finished” provides the other end of the cattle diet spectrum, and that’s where you’ll find Osage Creek Farms. Grass-Finished is a distinctive qualifier which means the animal has only consumed grass in its lifetime. We like the simplicity of that definition. Our animals don’t know that grain exists. They’ve never smelled it, let alone tasted it. We’re proud of the fact that our cattle are 100% grass-fed and grass-finished.