Dori Zook wrote:

> Q. Yes, but why are they put in feedlots at all?
> A. The only reasons buffalo are put into feedlots are to be fed corn
> or other grains to change the color of their fat, and to maintain a
> consistency to the meat. (Grass fed animals have yellow fat that is
> not pleasing in the marketplace.) They are fed for 90 to 120 days
> when the animals are 18 months old and about 900 to 1,000 pounds
> each.

That is the whole problem right there. Why would anyone on this list
want to eat a meat was so perfect, but had all of the special qualities
degraded for four months before slaughter? If it's changing the color of
the fat I'm sure it's not just a color change, but also a nutrition
change. Vermont Beef Company, which is up here near where I live, takes
the opposite approach: Their beef is raised on a mixture of fresh
pasture, hay, and grain, but for the last six months of life it is
exclusively fresh pasture. They do that to build up the conjugated
linoleic acid and alpha lipoic acid, and to improve the n3:n6 and
pufa:mufa:sfa ratios. Even that approach seems less than ideal to me. It
seems possible that these two approaches would meet somewhere in the
middle in terms of nutritional quality, but for now I'll stick with beef
that was pasture finished rather than bison that is feedlot finished. In
spite of all the marketing hype this bison thing doesn't seem all that
different from the usual beef practices of range-raising and
feedlot-finishing. I've been buying meat from a local organic dairy
farmer who says their diet is mostly pasture, and maybe 20% grain. He
occasionally puts one down, eats the meat himself and sells the excess.
But I'm looking for pasture-raised pasture-finished meat, preferably
local.

Hilary McClure
Danville, VT