Soul Shine Farms Grass Fed Beef 2.53

I'm Leslie & I am the farmer behind Soul Shine Farms! No I am not the stereotypical farmer! How did I get into this you ask? I graduated from the University of Virginia with a biology degree & decided to stay in Albemarle & train horses and manage farms for a living. I then worked for the UVA Health System in the Dept. of Internal Medicine laboratory researching all things gastrointestinal primarily Crohn's disease and other inflammatory conditions. I moved to the beautiful Shenandoah Valley which boasts some of the richest farmland in the world and over the course of many years while training horses for a living I honed my skills raising beef cattle including making all my own hay. At that point was selling them to the commercial feed lot market. My science background and strong interest in sustainability, environment, nutrition, and farm preservation prompted years worth of research to find better practices & novel ways to get back to what made family farming work in the first place. The commercial beef industry has all but wiped out the heart of what helped build America - the family farm. That machine has taken the quality & safety of American beef to the lowest it has ever been! Through all the highs & lows of farming & the 365 days a year of work through all weather conditions & no vacations that has kept me more motivated than ever to provide a far superior product that is raised & grown the way nature intended - the way our human bodies were designed to process it & be nourished by it - the way my forefathers did it, when people ate to live active physically demanding lives, largely free of the majority of the diseases we are afflicted with today.

Why grass fed? Well the answer is simple. Cattle were meant to graze on grass. Their bodies are engineered by nature to freely roam, consuming vast amounts of forage, growing slowly & steadily over time. This method builds muscle while creating the energy stores that are needed without large deposits of fat. Grass fed cattle lead low stress lives which make them healthier & there is no need to treat them with antibiotics or other drugs. The incidence of disease in free roaming cattle is largely non existent.

Commercial feed lot cattle (i.e. the meat you see at the supermarket) are the antithesis of this natural method. They are crowded together in large dirt feed lots & given diets of industrial by products to boost productivity at lowest cost and administered bovine growth hormones in order to produce a fat laden animal in as short a time span as possible. This process requires the animal to be fed antibiotics with their feed to prevent the inevitable spread of disease caused by such tight living conditions. These antibiotics and bovine growth hormones are in their systems at slaughter and are thus in the meat you consume. Science points to this mass use of these antibiotics in meat as a major contributor to the current state of antibiotic resistance in humans & the explosion of resistant strains such as MRSA, VRE, C.diff, Strep. A among others. Science has also connected the continuing trend of younger & younger girls going through puberty to the use of large quantities of BGH in commercial beef.

Compared with feedlot meat grass fed beef has less total fat. It can have 1/3 as much fat as the same cut from a grain fed steer & can have the same fat content as skinless chicken breast. Grass fed beef also has less saturated fat, less cholesterol, & less calories than its grain fed counterparts. Grass fed beef contains more vitamin E, beta carotene, vitamin C, and anti-inflammatory heart healthy omega-3s and conjugated linoleic acid.

My grass fed angus beef is allowed to mature on lush pastures, are not given antibiotics or hormones of any kind, and are better than organic in that they are never confined. They eat native grass hay during winter that is made by me here on the farm all herbicide & pesticide free no till farming. It is much more expensive & work intensive to raise beef this way but it is what we need to get back to. I believe that the growing demand for clean eating and the more natural paleo diet will help sustain farmers who are catching on to these better farming practices.

I have also taken the extra steps to have my beef dry aged! The beef hangs at a specific controlled temperature and humidity for a specfic amount of time usually 10-21 days. You typically do not find this luxury outside of 5 star restaurants mainly because it is time consuming, space consuming, & expensive! All supermarket meat is wet aged in plastic which speeds up the process but cuts down on meat quality & flavor.