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Jolley: Five Minutes With Bill Kurtis And Government Subsidies For Grass-Fed Beef
03/26/2010 09:30AM
Bill Kurtis is the most famous proponent of an all natural diet. Using the fame and fortune he gleaned from decades as a newscaster and a voice second only to Walter Cronkite's in its gravitas, he's thumped the natural foods tub ever since he bought the Red Buffalo Ranch in the Flint Hills of his native Kansas.
Although he's even more enthusiastic about the growth of natural foods than he was when he first became a cattle rancher, there are some ominous thunderclouds popping up on that distant Kansas horizon. The word 'natural,' for instance is being redefined in the marketplace and some say the new definition is a perversion of the original intent.
Meat&Poultry magazine recently published a story about this most critical problem. Arwen Kimmell, senior ethnographic analyst with The Hartman Group, Bellevue, WA told the magazine's editors that with no standardized regulatory definition for what may and may not be labeled as "natural," some consumers are coming to the conclusion the claim is meaningless.
"(Consumers) would like for natural to mean nothing artificial — no preservatives, short, clean ingredient lists," Ms. Kimmell said. "But there is this divide between what they would like it to mean and what they assume it means when they see it on a packaged product. They don't really believe it means anything on a packaged product without further investigation."
If Kurtis' Tallgrass Beef had a label it would say merely "Beef, grass fed." No hormones, antibiotics, injected liquids that were 'added for moisture or taste enhancement.' Nothing. It's an issue the normally mild-mannered and controlled newsman can get excited about. Ask him about it and he'll throw down an imaginary soap box, step up and preach to the assembled multitude.
He has no problem swimming against the tide of the beef industry's public opinion, either. He easily accepts the usual villains – Michael Pollan, Oprah Winfrey and Food, Inc. – as important forces in bringing healthy eating into the mainstream.
Last week, Kurtis attended Family Farmed Expo, a five year old event at the University of Illinois-Chicago. The expo promotes slow food, local food, sustainable agriculture; the important things of the anti-big ag movement. He participated in a first day seminar on financing the pieces and parts of this re- emerging industry and made some incendiary remarks about modern agriculture and food production.
When I heard about his comments, I knew it was time to visit with him again and find out what the heck he was up to. If you haven't read the first interview from 2006, click here and read it first.
Q. It's been four years since I interviewed you about your new career as a Kansas cattleman. What's happened with the ranch and Tallgrass Beef since we last talked?
A. Tallgrass Beef Company has grown substantially. It enjoys a healthy E-Commerce business as well as distribution coast to coast. We finish most of our cattle on the Red Buffalo Ranch near Sedan, Kansas.
Q. You're marketing premise was based on selling 'Tallgrass all natural, grass-fed beef from finished cattle.' Looking at the amazing growth of 'all-natural' products since you started, I have to say you made a pretty smart decision. Can it continue its growth and make the jump from niche to mainstream?
A. Making the jump from niche to mainstream will take time. But you're right, the interest in natural products is growing much faster than I expected. In fact, the marketing is being done for us. Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, the Food Inc. documentary and book and numerous Oprah shows on eating healthy have elevated "grass-fed beef" to a level of awareness that an ATT campaign couldn't do. People know the brand and they ask for it. Soon we'll be challenged to keep up with the demand. But we'll try.
Q. You made some interesting, potentially controversial comments at the Family Farmed Expo in Chicago. First, let's talk about the Expo. The Sun-Time's Bill Hammond asked you about the event and you said it was "a kind of Bedouin market, where you can go from one stall to the next, with great smells and great information. It's a chance to look farmers in the eye." What did you see during your visit?
A. Yesterday was a workshop day. So the typical booths weren't set up. But I expect to see real farmers with their goods. Baked goods. Organic produce. Buffalo samples. Jellies. All of which is an inspiring experience to those who believe that a return to a natural way of living is preferable to having a food source that is over-processed, over-sugared and over-salted.
Q. Let's get into some of the details. You took part in seminar that looked at venture capital opportunities for family farms and called for subsidies for grass fed beef to offset the advantages that corn fed beef enjoys. How much of an advantage does corn fed really have?
A. Corn fed commodity beef has an enormous advantage. But the economic model is flawed. In 1933, the New Deal Administration knew we had to save farmers to keep our food supply flowing during the Great Depression (the other one). They instituted subsidies to insure that farmers would not lose money on the "big five" crops: corn, sugar, soybeans, wheat and cotton. The good news is that it worked. Farmers kept producing. But the subsidies were intended to end when the market returned to normal. They didn't and they are still with us today. Corn farmers get paid up front for planting and harvesting corn.
It's the unintended consequences that we're dealing with today.
The corporate farms used their subsidies to buy out the smaller farmers. The subsidies kept the price of corn low which guaranteed a cheap supply of feed to cattle. That led to giant feedlots which "industrialized" the beef industry and increased the national "herd" from approximately 35 million head to over 90 million between 1955 and today. More cattle needed a market. Hence, fast food.
The corn fed beef did more than lead to a new market. It reduced the nutrition inside the animal. It allowed feedlots to speed up the process of 'fattening' cattle which shortened the life span of the animals from two years to 14 to 16 months. Growth hormones were added to speed it up even further. The conditions inside the feedlots were crowded and foul, certainly unlike the grazing pasture where ruminants like cows evolved.
The livestock got sick. So the feedlots administered antibiotics to keep the animals alive long enough to harvest. If they weren't 'harvested' at sixteen months they would bloat up and die anyway.Waste lagoons seeped into acquifers fouling water supplies. The conditions became an easy target for animal welfare groups.
Now, the industrialized, confined animal operations are under seige. Constant E-coli recalls invite stronger legislation for food safety. Groups like PETA put videos on Youtube of downer cattle being abused. And scientific research reinforces claims that the growth hormones may be causing early puberty in young women. Legislation has passed the House of Representatives to restrict the use of antibiotics used for humans on livestock.
But the corn fed beef industry continues business as normal, looking for ways to correct the problems after the beef leaves the feedlot, allowing the economic model driven by government subsidies to flow uninterrupted. Acting after the fact ignores going to the source of the problem—corn feeding.
The natural and organic movement could be an alternative. Grass-fed and grass-finished cattle are an even better alternative. By leaving cattle in the pasture eating only grass and forage, the natural nutrition returns and they become a health food.
But right now it's a difficult economic model. First, the grass-fed farmers receive no subsidies. It takes longer and is more expensive to raise a cow from calf to harvest at two years. So we have to charge more for our product. We're competing against a corn fed product that is paid for by the government and is sold at an artificially low price. It's not a level playing field.
Unintended consequences? More beef with high levels of saturated fat and cholesterol have contributed to diseases associated with the Western diet. We know the "red meat" problems. But cardiologists are now putting grass-fed beef back on the menus of their heart patients.
It's time for the government and non-profit Foundations to step up with grants or subsidies to encourage the natural alternative of farming. The consumer wants it. Any new industry, especially one competing with a sixty year old industry needs help to establish a market, a supply chain and give new young farmers a chance to do it right.
Ultimately, the consumer will demand it. And when the consumer speaks, it means they will also vote. Those who appropriate the farm bills and special grants will listen. It's starting to happen.
Q. How would a subsidy for grass fed be structured to level the playing field?
A. One way is to give tax credits to farmers who raise grass-fed and grass-finished cattle. Another is a cash allotment. We could carve out a sliver of the hundreds of billions of dollars in the 2009 farm bill to incent the study and research of grass farming. The structure is there with programs like the Conservation Reserve Program. It wouldn't be hard.
Q. I'm not sure if you were dead serious or had a little tongue-in-cheek action going on when you said "Grass fed beef makes all the problems with cattle go away" (except economics). I'll assume absolute seriousness and ask how does grass fed makes all those problems go away?
A. It certainly makes most of the current problems go away. Grass-fed and grass-finished beef never receive growth hormones or sub-therapeutic antibiotics. Since they live most of their lives in the pasture, they don't experience the conditions of the feedlot—so the humane treatment issues go away. There is research to show that by feeding grass to cows only 5 days before slaughter, we could reduce the risk of E. coli by 80%. Now, this has been challenged within the industry but isn't it enough to encourage further study? It's based on the notion that corn within the stomach of a cow creates a more acidic environment, spawning a bacteria, E-coli 0157 that can survive the acid in the cow's stomach and then the acid barrier in a human's stomach to infect us.
Even the charge that cows in the pasture emit more methane that contributes to climate change becomes specious. First the methane that comes from grass does not have the fire power of corn fed to concentrations of cattle. Second, the carbon footprint is less than the industrialized model. And third, the actions in the pasture of cattle eating growing plants, allowing them to take in more carbon as they grow back actually fights climate change. It's the perfect sustainable circle. The sun causes the grass to grow. We can't eat the grass but the cows can. They transform it into a protein—beef—that we can eat. They fertilize the pastures for next year's crops and the circle starts all over again.
Q. Thousands of people read cattlenetwork.com. What would you like to say to them?
A. Don't be afraid of grass-fed and grass-finished beef. We're simply an alternative to the current model. We're decaf coffee trying to carve out a niche in the marketplace. If we make it we'll give ranchers another option to market cattle at a higher price, since we pay a nice premium. Which means the producer will have more independence—a result of the competition. I'd say it's about time we take the handcuffs off the people who are producing the food in this country.
Chuck Jolley is a free lance writer, based in Kansas City, who covers a wide range of ag industry topics for Cattlenetwork.com and Agnetwork.com.
