Steak from dairy cows could offer lifeline for farmers

A few farms, including Mindful Meat in Marin and Butter Meat Co. in Pavilion, New York, have been selling meat from culled dairy cows — and convincing skeptics.

By Florence Fabricant

Where’s the rib-eye? Someday soon it might be grazing on a dairy farm.

Meat from dairy cows, rarely valued in American kitchens and restaurants, usually becomes dog food and fast-food burgers. The farmer gets about 60 cents a pound. But selling it for steaks could get them $6 or more a pound, allowing struggling U.S. dairy farmers to profit from an approach that’s widely practiced in Europe — and used to be in the United States.

When mature dairy cows (about 6 years old) are allowed to pasture longer, their fat, which normally goes into milk, returns to the muscles and makes the meat richer and more tender. This is often done in Europe, notably in Portugal, Spain and parts of France. It’s generally not the practice in the United States, where most steaks come from grain-fed cattle that are slaughtered at about two years old.

But a few farms, including Mindful Meat in Marin and Butter Meat Co. in Pavilion, New York, just west of the Finger Lakes, have been selling meat from culled dairy cows and convincing skeptics. The restaurant Blue Hill, on the grounds of the Stone Barns farm in Tarrytown, New York, began serving the farm’s dairy-cow beef last year in its dining room and cafeteria.

At Stone Barns, dairy cattle are living out their golden years munching on Pocantico Hills grass before becoming the highlight of a tasting menu that can run more than $400 per person. Many of the beef dishes at the restaurant are made with culled dairy meat; at the Stone Barns store, frozen strip-loin steaks are $24 a pound. By fall, chef Dan Barber expects to begin selling to other restaurants.

But for this to be more than a boutique experiment, Barber said a market needs to be created for it. Small dairy farmers have to be persuaded to pasture the cattle an extra six months or so before selling them, he said, an added expense but worth it for the increased return. Most important, he added, the beef should carry a name that develops cachet like Black Angus, Niman Ranch or Snake River Farms.

Tim Joseph, who in 2009 founded Maple Hill Organic, a consortium of more than 100 grass-fed dairy farms in New York, said a few farmers have been selling their culls to premium beef companies, but most do not.

Jill Gould, who owns Har-Go Farms with her husband, Stephen Gould, a fourth-generation farmer, sells their Butter Meat beef online and in a store near the farm. At Gage & Tollner, a restaurant in Brooklyn, New York, executive chef Sydne Gooden has been buying whatever she can from Butter Meat for about a year, and using the trimmings for lunchtime burgers.

“The flavor, with aged fat, is so good,” she said. Occasionally, she offers rib-eye as a dinner special.

Last month at Blue Hill, in a blind tasting of four cuts of choice-grade steaks from grain-fed and grass-fed animals and from the dairy cows, the clear winner in terms of flavor, richness, complexity and tenderness was the beef from “the ladies,” as Barber calls the dairy cows.

The fat is often very yellow. For the Department of Agriculture, beef labeled prime or choice must have white fat — there’s an actual color chart — so despite the succulence of the dairy meat, it would never receive a top grade.

Beef from dairy herds is considered to have a lower carbon footprint than that from dedicated beef herds, because its footprint is considered to be shared with other dairy products.

Caring for the land is one factor that led Claire Herminjard, who has a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Duke University, to found Mindful Meats in 2012, an organic farm that sells dairy beef. She had stopped eating industrial meat, was not satisfied with a vegetarian diet and sought another solution.

She found that dairy farmers were happy to sell their cattle at a good price. Her company is part of Marin Sun Farms, which handles all the processing. The beef is sold to wholesalers who market it to restaurants and stores in California, Las Vegas and Chicago as Vaca Vieja (“old cow” in Spanish).

“When I take steaks to suppliers, they tell me it’s how beef should taste,” she said.

Barber said that 150 years ago most cattle in the United States were dual-purpose, providing both milk and meat. But because of selective breeding over decades, grain-fed Angus cattle came to dominate the meat market. Holsteins were bred to be milked three times a day, with enormous yields for industrial dairies that sold milk to major companies like Kraft and to school lunch programs.

In the Northeast, smaller dairy farms with no more than 200 animals are still raising pastured dairy cattle with older genetics, suitable for milking and, eventually, producing excellent meat. Barber is convinced that by aiming for porterhouses instead of pet food, Northeastern dairies could reverse their downward spiral.

Farmers would have a better source of revenue for what are usually family businesses, Barber and Joseph said, and consumers would benefit from a sustainable supply of delicious grass-fed, grass-finished meat. Dairy meat could become valued, not disdained. La Vache Qui Rit, the cheese world’s famous Laughing Cow, would have the last laugh.