How to Tell If Your Beef Is Actually Good (You Know It When You See It)

If you spend any amount of time trying to figure out how to tell if beef is good quality, you'll learn pretty fast that the labels won't save you.

Grass-fed, grass-finished, pasture-raised, regenerative, family farm: all of those terms get co-opted, watered down, and rented out to companies that have no business using them. So how do you actually tell? In a lot of cases, you have to take the Supreme Court approach: you know it when you see it.

Why "good" farming is fighting an uphill battle

The fundamental business model of American agriculture is stacked against what I'll call "good" farming (basically not poisoning stuff).

The system is set up so the bigger you are, the better it works.

If you want to do things a better way, often that means going it alone and direct to consumer. You have to cut out the middle man to make the extra expenses and smaller scale work.

But building a direct to consumer business isn't exactly straightforward….

And Jesse and I spend a lot of time wondering whether it even makes sense for more farms to do what we do?

Should every small farm go direct?

For instance, we've worked very hard for years to learn how to market our product, develop an amazing relationship with our butcher, find an accountant who gets ecommerce AND farms, figure out packing & shipping, make videos, write emails, and on and on. On top of getting better and better at raising 100% Grass-Fed Beef.

Does it really make sense for every farm in America to do that?

Would we not be better off with some kind of cooperation?

Don't a lot of farmers just like producing food?

And can some kind of middle man be a GOOD thing?

Where the line is (and why "you know it when you see it")

This is a thorny area, because in agriculture there's a thin line between sketchy/greedy middle man and collective greatness.

After all, 4 or 5 farms working together seems easy enough to achieve.

10 or 12? Seems totally doable.

But at some point don't you just become another JBS/Cargill/etc. (the big evil meatpackers who process 85% of American beef).

Look at ButcherBox. "Supporting American small farms" quickly became "buying shipping containers worth of beef from Australia every single week."

So where's the line?

I don't know for sure. I imagine there's some black and white definitions that smart people can come up with, but it also feels like a situation where, as the Supreme Court said about pornography, "you know it when you see it."

How to tell if beef is good quality (a working checklist)

So if the labels are unreliable and the line between "real small farm" and "another giant in a small-farm Halloween costume" is fuzzy, here's the working version of how to tell if beef is good quality:

If a brand can't answer those without spinning, it's a JBS-in-disguise situation. If you want a deeper read on the visual side, our post on why grocery store beef is watery is the best example of "you know it when you see it" in action. And if you want to see what real transparency looks like on our end, here's how we actually raise our cattle and what our cows actually eat.

And one test the table leaves out: taste it with nothing but salt. If it's the real thing, you'll stop drowning it in BBQ sauce on your own.

Anyway: what we're chewing on

This is just something we're pondering as we think about how to grow our business and feed more folks in the coming years. What's the best way to make the business of farming work for the most farmers.

(The north star in all of it hasn't changed: it's the meat quality, stupid.)

Another thing always on our minds is how to make our products more accessible.

If you'd rather skip the detective work entirely, the simplest move is just to reserve a Half Beef Share with a free chest freezer from a farm where you can answer every question on that checklist by name.

Your Farmer,
Josh

PS: There's a reason "you know it when you see it" became famous as a legal standard. Sometimes the only honest answer is to use your eyes, ask hard questions, and trust the result. Beef is one of those.