One Woman’s Quest to Cook a Quarter Cow
By Abigail Chipley
Photo by David Jensen
In a church parking lot in southeast Portland, my husband and I surveyed the contents of the cooler in front of us: 147 pounds of vacuum-packed frozen cow parts — a quarter-cow to be exact. There were long tubes of ground meat, sinewy-looking hunks of chuck, flat flank steaks, thick-cut rib eyes, large roasts with unfamiliar names like “arm roast,” and piles of meaty soup bones.
Along with a handful of other Portlanders, we had just picked up our share of grass-fed beef, delivered direct from a Wallowa, Oregon ranch in a small U-Haul trailer. At home, we loaded the chest freezer in the basement, exchanging dubious glances. How could our family — two light meat eaters and one 26-pound toddler — consume such a bounty? I got out my calculator and did some quick figuring. I kept dividing the numbers until they became less frighteningly large. Finally, I came up with the answer: We would need to eat a mere 2.82 pounds of beef per week to get to the bottom of it within a year.
I’d ordered the meat because I was convinced of the nutritional and environmental value of eating grass-fed beef. But the bargain hunter in me also liked the price. At less than $3 per pound, the beef — fattened on nothing but green grass and hay from the Wallowa Mountains of eastern Oregon — was cheaper than supermarket ground beef. Cheaper, by far, than the premium steaks I inevitably succumbed to at expensive butchers and high-class grocery stores.
I was ready to accept the challenge. I would cook all 147 pounds of this animal, if I had to make vats of Bolognese sauce and invite the whole neighborhood to dinner.
This culinary adventure began last August, when my husband and I discovered a small stand at the Portland Farmer’s Market—it was Carman Ranch, selling Wallowa Valley Grassfed beef. There was no product on hand, merely a young woman with a sign-up sheet. In an uncharacteristically spontaneous move, I agreed to buy a share. I dashed off a deposit for $100, and we left the market. To taste our first grass-fed meat, we would have to wait until fall.
It turns out I wasn’t the only one who’d made a gamble. Portlanders are ready for grass-fed beef, if the crowd of 55 families in the church parking lot two months later was any indication. Says Cory Carman, who, along with her husband David Flynn, operates the grass-fed program at Carman Ranch, “The amount of knowledge that my Portland customers have is just amazing.” In fact, she expects her Portland customer base to triple in size this year.
My amount of knowledge, on the other hand, was paltry. In recent years, I’d sampled some expensive steaks from gourmet butchers and grocery stores labeled “pasture-raised,” and “grass-finished,” but as I’ve since found out, these aren’t the real McCoy. These cows might spend more time on pastureland than the average cow, but they are nevertheless shipped off to feedlots to fatten on grain for a minimum of 90 days before slaughter.
As usual, the federal government has stepped in to try to clarify the issue for consumers. Last fall, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) issued a new rule about meat that can be labeled “grass-fed,” requiring that these animals eat nothing but grass and stored grasses and have access to pasture during the growing season. However, according to the American Grassfed Association, which represents many raisers of grass-fed animals, the definition of “growing season” means that animals could be confined for long periods, and kept off of pasture even when there is grass growing. They could even end up in feedlots, as long as they were consuming hay instead of corn. The new rules also do not restrict the use of antibiotics and hormones in the animals.
Carman betrays a certain amount of skepticism when I ask her about the new rule. She says that she will probably eventually jump through the hoops to get an official label, but it isn’t a high priority. Like many small farmers, Carman isn’t eager to pay the USDA’s costly certification fees for the privilege of a label.
Carman and her husband are committed to doing things their way. Start to finish, raising a grass-fed cow takes about 18 months. At Carman Ranch, mother cows give birth to about 150 calves each March. Until the snow melts in the spring, the calves — a mix of Herefords and Angus — eat stored hay. Then they spend the rest of the year grazing on a rich diversity of green plants, or what we lay people would call “grass.” After another season to fatten on hay and grass, the cows reach their “finished” weight, usually about 1,500 pounds, and the slaughterhouse comes to them. That is, a local guy comes to the ranch to process the cattle.
