Grass-Fed vs. Grass Finished… What’s the difference?

I had no idea about this until I started picking the brains of my meat people at the farmer’s market. One rancher told me that a cow could be grass fed for a month of its life, and fed literally trash for the remaining years of its life and this would still be considered grass-fed. And while I found that to be maybe slightly dramatic (no hate, we loved the drama), I wanted to dig into this a little bit.

What I learned was that grass-fed means that the animal was raised on a diet of grass or forage for some time. However, the term “grass-fed” alone does not specify if the animal was fed grass for its entire life. In many cases, animals labeled as “grass-fed” might have been switched to a grain-based diet to fatten them up.

Grass-fed & Finished: This label requires that the animal was fed grass (or forage like hay) for its entire life, from start to finish without any grain supplementation. This term guarantees that the animal never ate grains, providing a diet closer to what it would naturally eat.

Remember that we eat what the animals that we eat, eat. Tongue twister. I like beef also because of all the stomachs cows have to process out stuff we don’t want to eat but that’s a post for a different day.