Hollenbeck farms has amazing meat. They emailed me yesterday letting me know they are going to be selling some cuts of pork (yes smoked bacon), jerkey and beef sticks. If you head to their site you can get on their email list or call them to place orders. They swing into Lincoln every couple weeks during the non farmers market season.

Why is Hollenbeck beef so good? JR let me know.

A big misconception I feel people have, especially people at farmers markets, is that beef is beef. Especially farm raised beef vs. farm raised beef.

One reason why our beef taste different is that we don’t feed corn distillers. Corn distillers are by products from ethanol plants. Commercial feedlots used to be the only people feeding them and now farmers have them to. Cd’s have low starch and corn has high starch. Starch is what makes good marbling is beef. This is a good article you may want to read http://extension.missouri.edu/gentry/NWStockTalkSept106.pdf . What cd’s do is greatly increase performance. That is how “feedlots” make there money is to get cattle in and out quick.

Probably the biggest reason that sets our cattle apart is our genetics. We artificially inseminate (ai) our cows to the best carcass bulls in the world. A breeder can ai to about what ever trait we wants to ai for, whether is be carcass, horns, color, maternal, show, size, pretty much whatever. The cattle we set up for the table are bred to bulls like this http://abs-bs.absglobal.com/beef/Simmental.asp?Codtouro=29SM0391 . All those carcass EPD’s are highly inherited to the calves. The MARB is the marbling (tender), the REA is the rib size (steak size) and the BF is the back fat (leanness). It used to be that is order to get a steak tender you had to get it overly fat. Now you can use bulls that put both traits in calves and achieve the same goal.

There are other things we do to that cause added expense but I don’t want to bore you anymore. These two things are huge expenses to us though. The only way to make it work is to get more for your product. Our goal is to put the very best steak on your plate that we possible can.