Don Matesz has a good summary article titled "Grass-fed Animal Products: Good for Animals, People and the Planet” describing the benefits of grass grown beef.  It is online at the Conscience Choices website.

Jo Robinson has written a book titled "Why grass fed is best."  Jo’s page EAT WILD has extensive information on grass fed beef.  You can read her essay, "You are what your animals eat" on our site. Jo describes some amazing facts about industrial beef, and wonders what it will take for consumers to recognize the values of grass fed beef.

Dr Joseph Mercola is a big fan of grassfed beef.  His extensive Optimal Wellness Center website contains many pages on the nutritional benefits of pasture beef, most well-annotated with scientific studies.  We have linked you to some specific pages throughout this web site, but you may wish to explore his site on your own.  Start with his introductory article on grass fed beef.

Latest Research on Grass Fed Beef   Silicon Valley/ San Jose Business Journal. April 2002.  "CLA is the hot new thing," says Willa Keizer. "Why buy it in a bottle when you can get it through your food?" 

Wal-Mart Puts The Heat On The Competition from Beef cow-calf weekly ezine (2/28/03)
"Wal-Mart fires meat cutters and moves to case ready beef...The real price advantage comes in the form of enhanced product, as these products are typically injected with a saline-type solution to improve longevity or tenderness. Wal-Mart's label on such products states that up to 12% of the weight of the product could be added moisture. This is a huge advantage since water is obviously less expensive than beef." 

The Greening of the Herd by Marian Burros
New York Times, May 2002
"Mr. Flack is at the forefront of a nascent agricultural movement that is slowly gaining strength in small pockets of the United States and abroad, one that has turned away from the modern industrial feedlot, where animals are fed a steady diet of corn and antibiotics, in favor of the ancient methods of the herdsman, where cattle are raised on grass - more healthfully, supporters say - without hormones or routine use of antibiotics.
The flavor of grass-fed animals is capturing the attention of chefs on both coasts. In New York, Jonathan Waxman is serving grass-fed veal at Washington Park; at Anne Rosenzweig's Inside, both grass-fed beef and veal are on the menu, as they are at Dan Barber's Blue Hill and Peter Hoffman's Savoy. Cesare Casella is readying a herd of grass-fed cows upstate for his restaurant, Beppe, while serving superb pasture-raised pork. In California, Alice Waters has ordered grass-fed beef for Chez Panisse in Berkeley, and Traci Des Jardins is serving it at Acme Chophouse in San Francisco. While it's not yet widely available, grass-fed beef is in specialty markets in the Bay Area."

Grass roots revolution: Will the new beef put corn-raised cattle out to pasture?
June 2002  San Francisco Chronicle
"So far, suppliers of the new beef can barely keep up with demand. That's because chefs like Laurence Jossel of Chow and Park Chow find the taste as well as the politics of grass-fed beef appealing -- so much so that he decided to use only grass-fed beef in the approximately 100 hamburgers he sells every day at his two restaurants. 'For me, it's about the product. The flavor is cleaner,' he says. 'And after reading a bunch of stuff and understanding what goes into growing grain- fed, I think it is definitely the right thing in a lot of ways.'"

Bay Area at the forefront of the big-bucks battle between proponents of grass-fed beef and traditional cattlemen
San Francisco Chronicle, June 2002
"For much of the spring, the virtues of beef raised on Northern California pastures have been the talk of the Bay Area's top chefs. They argue that grass- fed beef is better for your health, easier on the environment and tastes better than what most Americans eat -- beef fattened on corn and soy in huge feedlots in the Midwest. 
Why care about what a handful of fancy Bay Area chefs and boutique ranchers have to say? Because when it comes to food, the trends that start here end up affecting how the rest of the country eats. The Bay Area's early embrace of locally grown organic products, for example, is a large part of the reason organic vegetables and goat cheese are sold in grocery stores across the country. 
What's more, culinary trendsetters say the local beef battle feeds into a growing national debate about the safety and health of the nation's $80 billion-a-year beef industry. It's an industry that relies on cattle bulked up on hormones, daily doses of antibiotics and feed that can contain chicken manure, feathers, rendered animal protein and cardboard fiber -- all of which is allowed by current federal regulations." 

Secret Agents: The Menace of Emerging Infections by Madeline Drexler, published by the Joseph Henry Press (2002). Read the full text online.
"The site of modern meat production is akin to a walled medieval city, where waste is tossed out the window, sewage runs down the street, and feed and drinking water are routinely contaminated by fecal material. Each day, a feedlot steer deposits 50 pounds of manure, as the animals crowd atop dark mountains composed of their own feces. 'Animals are living in medieval conditions and we're living in the twenty-first century,' says Robert Tauxe, chief of the CDC's foodborne and diarrheal diseases branch. 'Consumers have to be aware that even though they bought their food from a lovely modern deli bar or salad bar, it started out in the sixteen hundreds.'

Fenceline contact of beef calves with their dams at weaning reduces the negative effects of separation on behavior and growth rate.
Abstract describing research about low-stress weaning of calves.