Best Steaks of All-Time

[cowman]

Now cswilson...I hope you aren't saying you're eating the neighbors steers? Not sure how many trees are in your part of Saskatchewan...but if none the neighbor might have to use a handy power pole! LOL

[cswilson]

I'll take the fifth on this one lol.

[kpb]

grassfarmer, since almost all of the beef in this country is finished on silage and grain, can I assume you're saying that Canadian beef does not taste good?

We've always fed silage and grain here to our calves and fattened and eaten a few ourselve and given the odd one to our friends and neighbours and I venture to say they always tasted pretty darn good to me. I must also not read the Stockman Grassfarmer closely enough because I don't recall them knocking silage-fed calves. In fact I thought in general they were favorably disposed to silage feeding as long as you use a wire to feed off the face of a pile. In Allan Nation's books he doesn't seem opposed to feeding silage, at least in my memory.

kpb

[grassfarmer]

kpb, we are maybe talking about slightly different things. The cattle that are fed in Western Canada are usually fattened on what, 80% barley 20% grain silage? In the UK cattle are often fattened either on straight grass silage or grass silage and maybe 3-8lbs of grain. The silage is usually above 70% moisture and fairly acidic. That's the beef i'm talking about that doesn't taste so good.

It's Gearld Fry that writes about silage fed beef having an off taste - he of course reckons that grass alone is what they should be fed on.

[kpb]

grassfarmer, yes, that makes a huge difference of course. I didn't realize that so little grain was used to finish in the U.K.

Is that due to a relative shortage of grain there? Or traditional practices? And, surely, it must take quite a while to finish a steer with just 3 to 8 pounds of grain a day and the rest silage???

[grassfarmer]

We don't have the huge arable landbase over there to grow the grain but the weather allows regular crops of high quality grass silage. Yes it takes longer to get cattle to slaughter weights like that but remember that part of the income comes from subsidies that until recently paid on the basis of you maintaining the animal. One scheme on steers paid out $x claimable once when the animal was aged between 7-12 months and $X again between the ages of 20-24 months. This was to encourage less intensive production and lower the beef supply I think originally. Typically spring born calves will be fattened off grass in their second summer (18 months) or out of barns up to 2 years old. Quite a lot of bulls are fed out on an intensive grain system like your feedlots here - we did that for a while, killed bulls at 12-14 months -again because we could make the subsidy work better for us that way.