Does Stressed Cattle Actually Change How Beef Tastes? (A Farmer's Trip to a Temple Grandin Workshop)

Does stress affect beef quality? Yes, and here's what a farmer learned about it from a workshop with Temple Grandin, the person who wrote the actual book on humane cattle handling.

This morning we got to do one of the coolest cattle farmer activities possible.....

We met Dr. Temple Grandin.

Who is Temple Grandin, and why we drove everything to hear her

If you don't know who Temple Grandin is, where do I even begin. She's the animal scientist who basically wrote the book on humane livestock handling.

I mean that literally. She wrote the actual book. Well, technically, several of them.

She is a living legend who has done more to advance our understanding of cattle psychology and handling than anyone. She's a best-selling author, a professor, and the subject of a movie that won a pile of Emmys. And she's one of our heros. If we got our pick of anyone in the agricultural industry to meet, she would probably have been the choice.

So we were VERY luck to be invited to a low-stress cattle handling workshop she was leading at Sky High Farm.

Now, you might think there's nothing left for us to learn about moving a cow from point A to point B or putting them on a trailer.

But there is infinite nuance. Positioning. Timing. How having a working dog in the mix changes things. There's always more to learn, and the opportunity to ask TEMPLE GRANDIN a single question is a "drop everything and go" situation.

Why does stress affect beef quality? (The "dark cutter" problem)

That's true for a few reasons.

One is that we love our animals and want us and them to have better and less stressful lives.

Another (big) reason is that a stressed animal makes worse beef. Not "worse" in a vague, feel-good way. Measurably worse.

When an animal gets scared or agitated, adrenaline dumps into the muscles and burns through their energy reserves. The chemistry of the meat literally changes: it ends up darker, drier, and tougher.

The industry even has a name for it.....

"Dark cutters."

Butchers and graders can spot a stressed animal's beef on sight. In the industrial system that's the kind of stuff that gets discounted and winds up in your Taco Bell burrito.

Obviously we don't want to do that. I don't even know anyone in Procurement at Taco Bell....

The DDF practices that come from Temple Grandin's influence

So we are pretty fanatical about raising our cattle handling game wherever possible.

It's why we invested in a portable corral with a Bud Box (a specific cow-psychology friendly style of pen) included. Why we load steers slowly, like we've got nowhere else to be. Why we drive 40 the whole way to the butcher while the people passing us get judgmental.

Every one of those decisions was made because of the influence this pioneering woman has had on our industry.

Why "low stress" cattle handling actually produces better beef

The whole "low stress" handling thing is really thinking like a cow, and working with that psychology to achieve what you want in a way that makes sense to them.

Yet another one of the many, many, many ways that working WITH nature as a farmer produces better results.

Hooting and hollering and prodding is the cattle handling equivalent of spraying your fields with chemicals.

It works.... in the moment.

You might get the outcome that you want right then. Maybe there's even a time and a place for it. But it creates a worse product, and in the long run it's counterproductive and damaging to everyone involved.

(For more on the "working with nature vs. industrial brute force" thesis, here's how regenerative grazing builds better soil and better beef. And for the related story on why we won't use chemicals like glyphosate on our pastures, here's is there glyphosate in your beef.)

What this means for the beef in your freezer

Anyway.

The beef you get from us comes from animals that lived calm and were handled calm, start to finish (to the best of our abilities... we're not perfect). You can see and taste the difference.

If you want beef that was raised like that, with attention to every last detail of the animal's welfare, you can reserve a Beef Share with a free chest freezer here.

Your Farmer,

Josh

P.S. Seriously one of the coolest things we've ever done. Jackson was fan-boying hard, because she is "the most famous person [he's] ever met" after all.