GreenFed™ is a more technically correct term. In fact, Beyond Organic cattle eat only what comes out of the ground, including grasses, legumes, forbs and herbs, which are known collectively as forage.
Beyond Organic cattle do not eat grains. Additionally, Beyond Organic cattle are fed sustainably, which is good for them, for you and for the environment.
Green fed animals consume their natural diet—the diet they were created for. As compared to grain fed, conventional feedlot beef or conventional dairy, Green fed products have been shown to be higher in beta carotene (Vitamin A) and other antioxidant vitamins, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) and omega-3 fatty acids. Green fed products also tend to be lower in fat, cholesterol and calories.
Additionally, you are supporting a way of life for the animals that is more natural and humane, and as we like to say—better for them, better for you, and better for the planet.
Meat from green fed cattle is lower in total fat and can have one third the fat as a similar cut from a grain-fed animal. (Note: Fats from grain-fed animals can also contain the residues of the chemicals they have ingested.) Green fed beef can have the same amount of fat—good, healthy fat—as skinless chicken breast.
I absolutely love cultured diary. I have been happily consuming it for as long as I can remember and it has played a pivotal role in my health journey. The more I studied cultured dairy, the more amazed I became at its widespread use across so many different civilizations—both throughout history and today. The following is a fairly lengthy excerpt from my new book, Live Beyond Organic, where we discuss one of the key historical discoveries I made about cultured dairy. Enjoy!
I’m a little young to have a “bucket list,” but if I did, one of the places I’d love to visit would be the Caucasus Mountains in Bulgaria, a country situated in southeastern Europe and bordering Romania and Serbia. Bulgarian peasants, who live in remote mountain hamlets, reputedly have unusually long life spans. I think it would be interesting to meet these people and learn what they eat to remain so healthy.
My idea came from reading about a Russian microbiologist named Élie Metchnikoff, who studied the remarkable Bulgarians for their longevity a century ago. Born in 1845 in the Ukraine, Metchnikoff earned a glowing reputation for work on immunity from infectious diseases. He, together with Paul Ehrlich, captured the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1908.
Metchnikoff was in his early sixties when he was catapulted to fame. Like anyone getting up there in years, he was contemplating his mortality. For the life of him, so to speak, he couldn’t understand why normal life expectancy in humans wasn’t 120 years. He was confident that scientific theories and techniques would someday prevent premature old age and senility.
Metchnikoff speculated that senility might be due to illnesses caused by an abnormal ration of intestinal bacteria, which, in turn, were caused by toxins present in the diet. The Russian researcher laid all the blame on the large intestine, which was “the reservoir of the waste of the digestive processes, and the waste stagnating long enough to putrefy,” he said. “The products of putrefaction are harmful.”
As Metchnikoff continued his investigative inquiry into aging, someone told him to check into the Bulgarian peasants living in the Caucasus Mountains, who tended to live to a ripe old age. They certainly did live a long time—an average of eighty-seven years. This was double the average life expectancy of Europeans in the early 1900s, which stood in the mid-forties at the time. In the Bulgarian steppes, however, living to be 100 years old was more the rule than the exception.
Why did the Bulgarian peasants live so long, especially in an underdeveloped country lacking basic medical care? What Metchnikoff learned was that the Bulgarian peasants consumed large amounts of a cultured dairy beverage known simply as “sour milk.”
Back in those days, the Bulgarian peasants didn’t have any refrigerators, so they would lug a tin pail of fresh cow’s milk to the family cellar. The peasants drank some of the milk, but they left what they didn’t immediately consume—which was sometimes quite a bit—in the cellar, where it would culture and thicken over the next several days. The result was a tangy beverage they called “sour milk,” whose modern-day equivalents would be the yogurt and kefir found in health food stores and high-end grocery stores today.
The Bulgarians really had a thing for this “sour milk,” which became known in Europe as Crème Bulgare. According to Metchnikoff’s empirical observations, consuming Crème Bulgare caused the Bulgarian bowels to become acidic and form an inhospitable environment for the unfriendly bacteria, yeasts, viruses, and parasites that would otherwise produce toxins.
For his groundbreaking work, Metchnikoff is known today as the “Father of Probiotics” and is quite the health legend.
One of the most important aspects of our mission at Beyond Organic relates to sustainable agriculture and responsible stewardship of the land and the environment. Modern, commercial agriculture and food production—while very “productive” in some ways—comes at a cost to the environment, and is the epitome of the word “unsustainable.”
Both the Bible and historical wisdom provide guidelines and principles of land management and stewardship—so that we benefit from healthy productivity season after season. Unfortunately, profit and greed have led to shortcuts and overuse of chemical inputs that strip the land and soil of its life-giving fertility.
At Beyond Organic, our goal is to develop a dynamic, holistic, and “natural” agricultural system that is replicable and sustainable—both environmentally and financially. It is our desire that one day, thousands of family farms will embrace the techniques and standards that we seek to re-establish, based on the wisdom and guidance of so many that have come before us.
We operate one of the largest, individually-owned certified organic farming and ranching networks in the United States with nearly 9,000 acres of organic pasture across six different properties situated in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains in Southern Missouri and the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Georgia.
We understand that a successful ranch is dependent upon the sun, the soil, the pasture, the rain, and effective management of the animals. And if properly cared for, we also realize that a successful farm or ranch does not need to rely upon chemical fertilizers or pesticides, GMOs, grain, antibiotics or hormones for its animals.
At Beyond Organic, we love our land and we love the animals that occupy it. And as we nourish and improve the land, we know that our animals and the foods and beverages they allow us to produce, will benefit from this “old school” commitment to caring for our most important natural resource.
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