There’s a spot along Kansas Highway 99 where the California-Oregon trail once ran. Throughout the frontier days of the mid-1800s, this was where the beginning of the final westward trek began, a busy intersection where traffic stalled into a sprawling pioneer campground. Now only a wind-beaten covered wagon and picnic table mark the spot; but when I drive past I always pull over, drawn to the ghosts of thirsty cattle resting for the long, dry haul ahead of them.
It was Nancy Vogelsberg-Busch who first brought me to this place. Well, actually, her cows did. For three summers running I have driven 150 miles into north-central Kansas from my home in Bonner Springs to pick up Bossie’s Best beef from Nancy’s VB Farms.
It might seem a fool’s errand, given the amount of beef in Kansas. Drive from point A to point B anywhere in the state, and you will see cattle pressed up against barbed wire fences, grazing at the side of the road. They ride the back roads, stacked two high in vented aluminum trailers. We even have do-it-yourself car washes for those big trucks that taxi cattle wherever it is they need to go. According to the Kansas Beef Council, the industry generates nearly $5 billion of annual revenue and ranks second in the United States for total number of beef cows processed every year, more than 7 million head, nearly three times the state’s human population.
The bulk of this activity happens down in the southwestern part of the state, around Dodge City and Garden City. Except for the soggy earth pounded by cattle in feedlots, the land there is flat and dry, and the silhouettes of processing plants look like hissing dinosaurs on the horizon.
But I have come to different terrain, to the shaded hills surrounding VB Farms, because Vogelsberg-Busch’s cattle are different. Her cows are pasture-raised and grain-finished, the way they were back in the days commemorated by that lonely wagon. From her small ranch in Home, she feeds 40 families who come, as I do, to buy beef from her door, and she markets smoked franks and grass-fed ground beef in select stores throughout the state—all under the Bossie’s Best “USDA Organic” label. Of the handful of farmers raising organic livestock in Kansas, Nancy is the most visible. One day soon, she hopes to develop some kind of selling network among her colleagues.
Before you go calling FedEx, however, you should know that this cult of the cow is destined to remain local. “I’m never going to be any bigger,” says Nancy. “My hope is to stay on the farm and have people continue to come out here.” For a fourth-generation farmer and single mom like Nancy, this connection between the land and the consumer represents both a link with the past and a hope for the future, especially in an age of mad cow disease and high-volume production.
In fact, it was a massive beef recall back in 2002 that made me decide to get out of the conventional cattle loop. My husband and I belong to a grocery co-op in Lawrence, and we ran across Nancy’s ad in the monthly newsletter. These days I wouldn’t think of getting beef any other way.
Here’s how it works. Nancy calls to say that the cow has been slaughtered at Welch Brothers meat locker in Frankfort—a town about 15 miles south of VB Farms—and is hanging to age. Next we call Ron Hards, who owns the locker. He bought the place five years ago (around the same time Nancy started Bossie’s Best) after working for more than 17 years in a nearby sausage factory. Ron’s facility has been certified organic as part of USDA compliance standards that Nancy must adhere to, though like most rural butchers, he processes livestock from other farmers in the local community as well as his own. “Not too many people choose to do this kind of work,” says Ron. “It’s hard. It’s not the cleanest. And you’re tired at the end of the day.”
Ron walks you through your options. Me, I like everything bone-in, whole muscle, not stew meat. I’ll take all the bones my carcass mates don’t want. I ask for the oxtails, the flat end of the brisket, some short ribs, and the skirt steak, but in the end Ron divvies up the meat so everyone gets cuts from all four parts of the animal. On the day of the pickup, right in the heat of summer, I load up my car with coolers and blankets and hit the trail. All told, including gas, my haul of beef costs about $4 a pound.
In case you were wondering, there really was a Bossie. The cow’s bloodline curls among the branches of the Vogelsberg family tree, entwined in a complex relationship of mutual sustenance that traces its beginnings to Nancy’s great-grandfather, Nicholas. In 1878 he staked a claim near Home and began raising cattle. Eventually Nancy’s grandfather left the homestead to her father, John, on the condition that he would never use chemicals on its land or its livestock. By the time Nancy was born, in 1956, John had helped found the first organic farmers association in Kansas. Today, her brother Joe works the home place—still true to the promise.
Nancy, who had originally planned to be a sociologist, was completing an internship with the Navajo in Arizona when she realized the risks facing her own heritage. “Here I was working with women who were losing their culture because, basically, no one was paying attention to their elders,” Nancy recalls. And yet neither was she. So Nancy returned to Kansas, became one of the first students at The Land Institute, in Salina, and farmed with her father, learning how to raise cattle in a sustainable, single-ranch system.
Eventually she settled VB Farms on a 160-acre plot a few miles up the road from the home place. Her dad, thankful she finally decided to live nearby, marry, and farm, made her a gift of Bossie, the family milk cow. Today, all of her cattle are Bossie’s progeny, the only remaining descendants of her great-grandfather’s herd.
Nancy has raised three children from the seat of her tractor. Only the youngest, Isaac, still lives with her. She has grown soybeans for tofu, seeded hay for feed, and bred Bossie to build her herd. When she became a single mom, Nancy did whatever was necessary to keep the farm and send her kids to college, even if that meant taking a job in a nearby envelope factory. There, on the graveyard shift, she began doodling her plans for Bossie’s Best on the back of envelopes. She laughs, “Let’s see—how can I make a million hot dogs?”
None of the math on Nancy’s farm seems that simple to me. The entire herd winters at VB Farms. Her oldest son, Noah, and her daughter, Ali, return at Christmas to help sort the animals into groups: twenty-five pregnant heifers, some young steers, a handful of two-year- olds feeding for slaughter, weaning nine-month old calves, and a massive bull named Flash. They forage a bit on pasture stubble, and Nancy piles up hay here and there from the stash she has cut during the summer.
As the weather warms, calving season begins, and the size of her herd might swell to 100 head. Nancy delivers all the calves herself, despite having suffered a stroke three years ago. She’s strong, scrappy, and fearless. Come summer, Nancy coaxes her half-ton heifers and the 2,000-pound bull into a truck for a short ride to—literally—greener pastures. July is breeding time, and she’s selected an isolated spot one county over for Flash to do his job. This field is certified organic grassland she rents from another farmer. She has a similar pasture over at her brother Joe’s on the home place. Meanwhile, her youngest cows are grazing at VB Farms, and one by one the fed cattle—those that have been eating an organic grain ration for the past several weeks—are taking their last rides over to Ron Hards’s place.
Nancy’s rich, loamy Kansas soil is so productive, she can pull three or four cuttings of alfalfa each summer, enough to keep her animals in hay all winter. Her pastures are divided into seven separate plots to run a somewhat complicated seven-year rotation of oats, alfalfa, and red clover. She buys whole-ear organic corn from a nearby farmer and a few salt licks. Everything else she produces herself.
As we walk the farm, Nancy’s thoughts turn toward the discussion of the real value of our food and a living wage for farmers. She dreams, she says, of selling more hot dogs, of quitting her job in the factory to devote herself to full-time farming, and of leaving a viable legacy for her children.
A large chunk of her land is still virgin prairie grass. Never-tilled land is a rare treasure in these parts, and watching her cows amble through the field as she talks about the future brings tears to her eyes. “The prairie is a symphony,” she pauses. “If you’re quiet you’ll hear it.”
For more information about VB Farms and Bossie’s Best, visit Nancy’s Web site at www.bossiesbest.com.
A Beef Buyer’s Guide
Our story on Nancy Vogelsberg-Busch and her organic beef cattle may have convinced you that eating locally raised, certified organic meat is the way to go. But she’s in Kansas, and maybe you’re in Florida. How do you find a producer in your area? If you’re buying beef from a grocer or butcher, what do you look for? The meat may be labeled “natural” or “grass-fed,” but does that mean it’s healthier? Are the animals treated humanely? And how does it taste? If it doesn’t have great flavor, what’s the point? We had the same questions. So we did some research, taste-tested steaks, and devised a concise guide to navigating the jungle of buying beef.
You Are What They Eat
About 97 percent of American beef cattle are finished on grain (made from feed corn, primarily; most animal by-products can no longer be included), and for conventionally finished cattle, that grain most likely contains added antibiotics, as treatment for sick animals and as a preventative for healthy ones. The ripple effect of treating cattle with antibiotics is currently being studied; the scientific and medical communities are particularly concerned about its possible impact on human resistance to antibiotics. Growth hormones are also routinely administered to these cattle. So if you buy “conventional” beef (that is, the majority of beef available at your grocer), there’s a good chance that the animal it came from was exposed to both. To understand what’s in the beef, read the label and ask questions.
The Name Game
Natural: In order to label beef “natural,” the USDA requires that the product contain no artificial flavors, coloring, ingredients, or chemical preservatives, and that it be no more than minimally processed. Does that mean that it doesn’t contain antibiotics or hormones? Or that it’s 100 percent grass-fed? That depends on the producer. Some ranchers who produce natural beef do treat their animals with antibiotics and/or hormones, while others use neither.
Organic: The USDA organic certification program requires that these cattle never be exposed to antibiotics, growth hormones, pesticides, genetically modified ingredients, or irradiation. If an animal becomes ill and an antibiotic is administered, it automatically becomes ineligible for the organic market. The “organic” label, however, does not mean that the cattle were 100 percent pasture-finished. Like Vogelsberg-Busch’s cattle, they may be raised on a mix of organic grass and organic feed (usually corn, soy, or other organic grains).
Grass-Fed/Free-Range: The USDA is currently working on legal definitions for the terms grass-fed and free-range. In their absence, some producers continue to use the terms loosely. The term grass-fed may lead consumers to think the cattle feed only on organic grass, but that’s not necessarily the case. The pastureland may have been sprayed with pesticides or herbicides. It’s most likely that these cattle have also fed on hay. And unless the label says “100 percent grass-fed” or “pasture-finished,” they have spent some time in a feedlot. So when you find a producer advertising grass-fed beef, look a little closer at the details (many nationally distributed producers have Web sites that provide more information). The good nutrition news, according to a research report from the University of California and California State University, is that grass-fed beef has 60 percent more omega-3 fatty acids (which help prevent heart disease) than beef from grain-fed animals, and more than twice the amount of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a group of polyunsaturated fatty acids that is thought to reduce the risk in animals of cancer and heart disease.
In the Kitchen
For a casual blind tasting of steaks with the aforementioned labels, we ordered boneless rib eyes from the nine nationally distributed producers listed below. (Their meat is available at many supermarkets, butcher shops, and natural foods stores, and by mail order.) With the exception of Waterfall Hollow Farm’s, which were frozen, they were packed with ice bricks in a cooler. We seasoned the steaks with kosher salt on both sides and cooked each kind in exactly the same way. Our first impression? The variation in the cooked steaks was immense. (That variation results in large part from the differences in breed of cattle and within individual steers, the type of pasture on which they are fed, and how they are handled both before and after slaughter.) Second, there was an almost equally wide variation among our tasters: No two people’s idea of the perfect steak is the same. Some food editors preferred a steak with a nice chew over one that was more tender but just as flavorful; to others, “clean-tasting” was not a compliment—it meant too lean and gamy.
Natural: Niman Ranch (grass-fed and grain-finished, no antibiotics or hormones), based in California, offers both fresh and aged steaks. The aged steaks had a rich, beefy-but-clean flavor, and a tender, juicy, fine-grained texture. The fresh steaks were milder in flavor and well marbled. (866-808-0340; nimanranch.com) Coleman Natural Meats (grass-fed and grain-finished, no antibiotics or hormones), from Colorado, had fresh steaks; they were juicy but bland and a little mushy. (800-442-8666; colemannatural.com) Meyer Natural Angus (grass-fed and corn-finished, no antibiotics or hormones), in Nebraska, sent us fresh steaks that were very lean. They had an almost gamy flavor and tender (some said mushy) texture. (800-856-6765; www.meyernaturalangus.com) Fresh steaks from B3R Country Meats (grass-fed and grain-finished, no antibiotics or hormones), from Texas, had good flavor and chew. (800-245-7230; www.b3r.com)
Certified Organic: Virginia’s Sunnyside Farms (grass-fed and grain-finished) raises beef cattle that are three-quarters Wagyu (commonly called Kobe). The fresh steaks were very beefy and tender, with good flavor and a coarse, almost pot roast–like texture. (540-675-3636; www.sunnysidefarms.com) Organic Valley (grass-fed and grain-finished), based in Wisconsin, sent us wet-aged steaks; some thought they were on the bland side, but others liked the tender “baby beef” quality. (888-444-6455; organicvalley.coop)
Grass-Finished: Conservation Beef (free-range, no antibiotics or hormones) provoked intense discussion; some found the dry-aged steaks dry and too funky, while others found them juicy and flavorful. Go figure. (406-495-8653; conservationbeef.org) We wanted to like the dry-aged steaks from Waterfall Hollow Farm, in Arkansas, but were disappointed: Our samples were tough and not very flavorful. (870-423-3457; www.waterfallhollow.com) Napa Free-Range Beef (no antibiotics or hormones) steaks, from California, were tough and fishy-tasting. (707-968-9111; napafreerangebeef.com)
Find Your Own
Here are a few Web sites that will help you locate a producer in your area and may provide details on producer practices. Eatwellguide.org: Select preferences such as “No Antibiotic Use” or “Certified Humane” to find restaurants, markets, and producers. Localharvest.org: Search by zip code and product for producers, farmers markets, and community supported agriculture groups. Eatwild.com: Information and sources for organic and pasture-raised meat and poultry.—Nanette Maxim and Jane Daniels Lear