100% Grass-fed Beef

Larga Vista Ranch cattle are rotated through grass-alfalfa pastures to fatten them, producing flavorful marbled “low-choice” grade beef. The meat is lean but still marbled with enough fat to be good tasting. Our cattle are never on prairie pastures and thus have no gamey taste.

100% grass-fed beef has less total fat than grain-fed as well as the proper amount and ratio of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. Omega-6 fatty acids are much higher in grain-fed beef, and excess omega-6 intake has been linked to chronic inflammation, a contributing factor to many deadly diseases.

The fat of pasture-fed beef contains conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), which has strong anti-cancer properties. CLA also encourages lean muscle build-up and helps prevent weight gain. CLA disappears from beef when cattle are fed even small amounts of grain, as does the proper ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids. That’s why we never feed grain to our cattle. 

Feeding corn to cows also causes their rumens to become more acidic, which is a problem when consuming meat from such animals. Almost all of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow that might get into the meat are usually killed off by the acidic environment in the human stomach. Not so with E. coli 0157:H7, which has evolved in the acidic rumen of corn-fed cattle. This new acid-resistant strain of E. coli (never seen prior to 1980) is deadly to humans. Cattle finished (fattened) on grass, as opposed to grain in a feedlot, do not pose this problem.

Beef fat is a good source of palmitoleic acid which has antimicrobial properties.