Pasture-Fed Beef Vs Grass-Fed Beef: What's The Difference?

It's no secret that food labels can be confounding. One example you've likely encountered is the myriad of dates on your food packaging (best by, use by, sell by) that don't have anything to do with the food going bad. As it turns out, our meat packages are also sprinkled with more terms that might not mean what you think, including grass-fed and pasture-fed. You might be surprised to learn that these bucolic-sounding terms describing where and what the cattle ate while being raised are more complicated than meets the eye.

At face value, a pasture is a place where a cow might spend its time, and grass is a type of food the cow might eat. That pasture-fed label on beef might make you think the cow spent its life outside on the land, and seeing grass-fed on the sticker might imply the cow ate mostly grass. However, both of those assumptions could potentially be incorrect because there is no legal definition for either term. The actual difference between pasture and grass-fed beef is very hard to decipher without knowing how the seller defines these terms.

All beef cattle spend more than half their lives eating grass. That grass could be growing in a pasture, or during periods of bad weather, the grass could be cut and dried hay that was grown for feed and saved for later. You wouldn't be wrong to say all beef is grass-fed, at least partly. The big difference comes in the last few months of life, which is when many beef cattle are sent to feedlots where they eat grain rather than grasses. This speeds up their weight gain so they're ready for market quicker than cattle that stay out on the pasture.

The confusion here comes from the lack of regulation on how to define grass-fed. The USDA withdrew its standard in 2016 because it lacked the authority to create the standard and couldn't verify compliance. As such, it's the meat's producer that will define the claim of grass-fed on your package, with a handful of voluntary certifications possible to back them up.

Pasture-fed is similarly loosely defined. After cattle are weaned from their mother's milk, they spend their time out in a field eating. There's no USDA definition of what that field must look like, or that the food the cattle are eating actually grows in that same pasture. Some producers provide a mix of dried forage and hay to the animals as they graze, which could include some grain, or even other foods like molasses to provide additional calories.

Some beef producers grow special mixtures of grasses in managed pastures for cattle to graze on, and some of these producers then raise the animals for their entire lives there. That beef could be called both pasture-fed and grass-fed — and so could beef that was the product of less time on the pasture and a lower percentage of grass in their diet. It pays to be an informed consumer and do a bit of research when you see a pasture-fed or grass-fed claim on your beef so you get the benefits you are paying for from the claims.