Cattle Breeds for Grass-Fed Beef: Why We Raise Lowline Angus and Red Devon

If you're trying to figure out what makes cattle breeds for grass-fed beef different from the ones you see at a feedlot, you're asking the right question. Most beef cattle in this country were bred for one thing: getting big fast on grain. We raise the opposite. Our herd at Dirty Dog Farm is the star of the farm (and definitely our Instagram), so we wanted to lay out exactly which breeds we raise and why.

Our breeding program is designed to produce animals that thrive year-round, get fat outside eating grass, and never need a feedlot. That means we focus on two breeds:

1. Lowline Angus
2. Red Devon

Like most farms there are some outliers (we've got a Hereford cross who leads the herd, and a couple British White cows we were given by a neighbor).

Why Lowline Angus Are Perfect for Grass-Fed Beef

Our original herd was Lowline Angus. We bought them years ago from a neighbor who raised grass-fed beef when he wasn't busy running Vermont's largest garage door company (it's a long story).

The Lowline Angus breed was developed in Australia by taking a herd of champion Angus cattle and selectively breeding for quality and small size.

That breeding gives Lowlines a few key advantages for grass-fed beef production:

1. Because they're short and stocky, they have an enormously high ratio of gut space to body size. That matters because cattle need serious stomach capacity to digest the volume of grass and forage required to actually get fat on pasture.
2. Their small frames also mean more resources go into filling out instead of growing up. That feed efficiency improves the carrying capacity of a farm, so we can raise more animals per acre (even accounting for their lower individual weights).

A side note: this is a big reason grass-fed beef used to have a lean or gamey reputation. People would take cattle with feedlot genetics (a big frame meant to fill out on the dense calories of corn) and throw them on pasture. Not a recipe for success.

A farming mentor of ours once said "I'm growing apples, not wood" when we asked him about his orchard full of scraggly trees. That's pretty much how we feel about our stocky little Lowlines: no wasted space.

We caught a huge break when we happened on them as our starter herd, and we couldn't be happier with the results.

Why We Add Red Devons to the Mix

The second breed we include in our program is the Red Devon.

The Devon is a near-perfect type of animal for grass farming. Its breed remains the same as it was before anyone had ever heard of a grain-finishing feedlot. Conventional farmers hate them (they get fat too fast on grain, which sounds like a compliment but is actually a problem in a feedlot system), but they are perfect for a grass-only operation.

Because of that genetic purity, Devons are an ideal candidate for cross-breeding with our Lowlines to take advantage of "hybrid vigor."

For those of you who didn't just take 10th grade biology, hybrid vigor is the superior qualities you get in an organism by crossing two purebred parents (provided the purebred parents have good genetics themselves).

For us, that means the hybrid animals grow 10–15% faster and larger than their purebred cousins. In farming you take every bit of help you can get, and 15% is a huge payoff for a little bit of breeding discipline.

What's Next for the Herd

We love the small size and feed efficiency of our Lowline Angus, so we keep evaluating breeds that could complement them. One we keep coming back to is the South Poll. South Polls are similar in size to Lowlines but red in color and more tolerant to heat. A cross with our existing herd would produce a fast-growing, moderately framed cow with a huge gut and less heat stress in the summer months. On paper, that's the perfect grass-fed beef animal.

The breeding program is a long game. The cows we put on the ground today are the steers we'll be processing two to three years from now. Every decision compounds.

How Breed Choice Shows Up in the Meat

Breed selection isn't a vanity project. It's the foundation of everything that ends up in your freezer. The right cattle, finished on the right pasture, dry-aged the right way, produce beef that tastes nothing like the grocery store version. (For more on that, see The B.E.E.F. System, which lays out the four pillars behind how we raise every animal.)

If you've ever wondered what a freezer full of beef from cattle bred specifically for grass actually looks like, the answer is in our Half Share cut breakdown. The dry-aged ribeyes, the brisket, the 75 pounds of ground beef. None of it tastes like supermarket beef. That's not a marketing line. That's the breed, the pasture, and the dry-aging doing their jobs.

Hopefully this gives you a little more insight into how intentional the process of raising 100% grass-fed beef actually is. Next time you drive by or like one of our farm posts, you'll know exactly which breed you're looking at, and why we picked it.

Your Farmer,
Josh