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Beef Fat is often seen as a useless product. However, grass fed beef tallow is so healthy and useful that it’s a shame to waste it. We like to save the beef fat from our cattle and render it into grass fed beef tallow.

Beef tallow is a hard saturated fat that is stable at room temperature and has a high smoke point.  This makes it a great option for cooking!

Is beef fat good for you?  Yes it is!   One of the biggest benefits of tallow is how healthy it is.  What are the tallow health benefits? Grass fed beef tallow is high in conjugated linoleic acid, B vitamins, Vitamin K2, Niacin, Selenium, Iron, Phosphorus, potassium and riboflavin.  Since we now know that natural saturated fats are healthy and important, tallow is a great option to use for pan frying vegetables, pan searing steaks and more.  I tend to use it more in savory foods since the flavor profile works well for them.  If you’re going to fry foods the high smoke point of tallow (400 degrees Fahrenheit) makes it ideal.  You can make some excellent french fries or donuts fried in tallow.  French fries and donuts are not the healthiest foods, but if you’re going to make them why not fry them in an oil that is healthy, rather than frying in toxic vegetable oils.

There are many other uses for tallow. You can use it to make soap, candles or salves and balms for skin health.  In fact, send some of our tallow to Lancaster Handcrafted Soap Company to make beautiful artisan soaps.

So how do you render tallow?  First you will need some beef fat, so talk to your local farmer.  Here are great instructions on how to render tallow.  One tip I have learned for rendering tallow is to keep the lid cracked while redering and occassionally check for water droplets on the lid.  If there are still water droplets or you see steam when you lift the lid then the tallow isn’t finished yet.  It’s important to render until all the naturally occurring water is gone from the tallow.  This ensures your tallow will last a long time.

In the modern world, perennial pasture based agriculture is not the norm.  Here are 10 reasons to choose perennial pasture based agriculture.  It’s better for the consumer, for the land, for the farmer and for the animals.

1. Better tasting food.  Have you ever tasted grain-finished beef without any seasoning?  No?  Neither have I.  There just isn’t any flavor to taste.  However, pasture raised meats are packed with great flavor!
2. Nutrient dense food.  Perennial plants build deep root systems allowing the plants (and animals) access to more nutrients and minerals.  This leads to food with a higher nutrient density, keeping your body healthy.
3. Chemical free food.  Properly managed perennial pastures don’t require synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and other toxic chemicals.  This results in food that is safe and healthy to eat.
4. Less runoff. Remember those deep roots we mentioned earlier?  They help water infiltrate into the soil rather than running off and sending fertility downstream.
5. Less evaporation.  With perennial pastures soils are always covered which keeps water where it’s supposed to be, in the soil.  This leads to healthier plants and prevents desertification.
6. Deeper richer soils.  Every year, properly managed perennial pastures build new topsoil.  Massive amounts of carbon are also stored in soil as new topsoil is built.
7. Increasing soil life.  Remember those chemicals that don’t need to be sprayed anymore?  It turns out the soil comes back to life when toxic sprays are removed.  All kinds of important ecology and critters can live in perennial pasture based systems.
8. More productive land.  Perennial pasture based agriculture builds soil rather than destroying it.  This leads to higher production on the same amount of land.  It’s almost like free land for farmers who protect the environment!
9. No need for constant replanting.  Farmers no longer need to replant every year since perennial pasture plants come back year after year on their own. It’s not cheap owning expensive planting equipment, buying seed and replanting each year.
10. No need for expensive harvesting equipment.  Have you ever priced out a combine?  They’re not cheap (right around half a million dollars), but you won’t need one in a perennial based system.  Your animals can do your harvesting for you.  And they love it!  Just watch a cow out on pasture some time.
11. It turns out perennial pasture based agriculture can save the farmer a lot of time and money.  In addition to the above time and money savers, the farmer no longer needs to spray and fertilize. No need to buy the sprays and fertilizer either.
12. Happier animals. Which leads to healthier animals.  Which leads to better productivity and a higher quality product.

I’m sure there are a lot of other reasons to choose perennial pasture based agriculture as well.  Feel free to leave them in the comments below.

Is there such a thing as a 100% grass-fed chicken?  Hopefully I’m not bursting anyone’s bubble, but there is no such thing as a 100% grass-fed chicken.  It’s a common misconception among consumers that there are pastured chickens that are not fed grain.  When farmers say their chickens are pastured, the chickens are still fed large amounts of grain in their diet.  Could you produce a chicken or eggs without grains?  Possibly, but first we need to understand what a chicken is designed to eat.

Unlike cows and other grazing animals that are designed to only eat plants, chickens are omnivores.  Chickens can eat plants and animals.  Those ‘vegetarian fed’ chickens you see at the grocery store are not a good thing.  Those chickens are probably miserable their entire lives.  A chicken should have access to bugs, meat, pasture, seeds and more.  If you know anyone who has chickens, ask them what a chicken doesn’t eat.  There are actually very few things that a chicken will not eat.  Vegetable scraps, yup, they love ’em.  Meat trimmings and old soup bones, they’ll chase you around for those.  Clover, grass, and weeds?  They eat those as well.  Bugs? They love them.  Mice? They’ll fight over them.

So why is it important for a chicken to be on pasture?  When a chicken is on pasture it has access to all kinds of things it doesn’t have access to when it’s in a cage being fed only grain.  The chicken can select plants, bugs and even occasionally animals to eat that meet it’s nutritional needs and stay healthy.  Another reason we should be concerned about purchasing real pastured chicken or eggs is for the better taste and much higher level of nutrition.   It’s amazing how much more nutritious pastured eggs can be than factory farmed eggs.  When tested, pastured eggs can have levels of certain nutrients 2 or 3 times higher than conventional eggs.

One last thing. You’ve probably seen pastured or cage-free eggs & meat in your supermarket.  Unfortunately, this is usually a marketing scam.  Often the chickens have ‘access’ to pasture, but in reality get almost none of their diet from the pasture.  The result?  Eggs and meat that is nearly identical in nutrition to conventionally raised.  Not good.  Even ‘Organic’ chicken and eggs can have nearly identical nutrient levels to conventional.  It’s not a bad thing for products to be organic since the toxin load will be lower.  However, if the product is raised in the same way, you aren’t necessarily getting any better nutrition.

So what’s the solution?  You need to know how your eggs and meat are raised.  There is no surefire way to tell how an animal was raised by just reading a label.  Go find a farmer and ask him to show you how his animals are raised.  This is the best solution for finding the highest quality food.

I hope this article has been helpful.  If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below?

Is a candy bar healthier than whole wheat bread?  It’s sounds crazy, but you won’t think so after you read Wheat Belly.

I recently picked up a copy of Wheat Belly by William Davis.  I highly recommend this book.  There is so much interesting and detailed information in this book about how modern wheat can cause many health problems.  The good news is that through eliminating wheat from your diet you can reverse many of those problems.

Did you know that whole wheat bread raises blood sugar more than table sugar!  This leads to weight gain, insulin resistance, diabetes and more.  And that’s certainly not the only problem with wheat.  What we’ve been taught about whole grains being healthy is unfortunately very misleading.  Wheat products, even whole grain wheat product can be very damaging to the body.  In addition to raising blood sugar dramatically, modern wheat includes foreign proteins that very commonly cause an immune response in the body.

Wheat can cause or make worse all kinds of chronic disease like arthritis, IBS, schizophrenia, osteoporosis and many other health conditions.

Due to its high sulphuric acid content (only oats are higher in sulphuric acid), wheat consumption leads to weakening of the bones, osteopenia and osteoporosis.

Wheat consumption can trigger sever acne outbreaks and a whole host of skin conditions.

Wheat can cause your triglycerides to rise and increase small LDL particles leading to buildup of plaque in your arteries.

So why have wheat and whole wheat products been labeled as healthy and ‘heart healthy’ despite their damaging effects on the body?  I’ll leave that for your to find out in the book.  Enjoy 🙂

Fly control for cattle is something that many farmers need to think about.  On our farm we stay away from chemical treatments so I’ve been thinking about way to control flies naturally.  Perhaps nature is the best natural fly control for cattle.

I have noticed over the past several years an increase in bird population on our farm.  Lately when I go out in the mornings to check my cattle I notice swallows and other birds swooping through the air catching flies and other insects near the cattle.  I enjoy seeing this each day because nature is keeping a good balance so that flies do not get out of control.  See the video below to watch swallows on our farm naturally controlling flies all around our cattle.

Dung beetles are another way that nature controls fly populations naturally.  I haven’t seen any yet on our farm, but I expect to see them in the future as the biology of the soil recovers from conventional agriculture. Dung beetles take manure and quickly incorporate it with the soil which minimizes fly larvae activity in manure patties.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the biology on the farm continue to improve and bring problems like flies into balance.

“Your burgers are the best I’ve ever tasted”.  That’s something one my customers told me recently when they came back to buy more burger patties.

Our customers love our burgers because they taste great!  Our burger patties are made from 100% beef with no filler or flavorings.  You will notice that our 100% grass-fed burgers have much more flavor than a conventional burger.  Most burgers require toppings to get a great flavor.  Our burgers have a great natural taste!  I still enjoy a burger with bacon,ketchup, mustard and pickles, but a burger should have great flavor rather than almost being tasteless.

Why is our beef so jam packed with great flavor?  Our cattle are raised only on pasture and grass which gives the beef a great flavor.  The flavor of beef even varies based on the land the animal was raised on.  In a similar way to the ‘terroir’ of wine, beef takes on unique, distinct flavors based on the environment it was raised on.

We offer two sizes of pre-made burger patties 1/2 pound and 1/4 pound.  You can also make your own burgers from our ground beef.

Interested in purchasing 100% grass-fed beef burger patties?  Click here for our purchasing options.