A Healthy Local Alternative

Grass Roots Beef is naturally raised and pasture fed on Hillview Farm in Grey County, less than 2 hours from downtown Toronto. The cattle here at Hillview Farm are kept out of crowded, unhealthy feedlots and returned to their natural habitat - open pasture. The result - beef that is even more than organic. Feeding large amounts of grain, even organic grain, to cattle that have evolved on rangeland eating grass, fills their meat with bad fat and calories, and diminishes nutritional value.

Grassfed Basics

What are "grassfed" animal products? Most ruminants, including cattle, sheep, goat, bison, are raised on pasture for the first months of their lives. The vast majority of them are then transported to distant feedlots where they are "finished" on a grain-based diet. Typically, the animals are fed a variety of drugs and feed additives to speed their production and to minimize the health problems that come from eating an artificial diet and living in stressful, crowded conditions. This is the type of meat that you find in most grocery stores and restaurants. Even most organic meat is finished on grain and often in feedlots.

Grassfed animals, by contrast, are raised from birth to market on family farms. Their diet consists of freshly grazed pasture during the growing season and stored grasses (hay or grass silage) during winter months or drought conditions. Read more >>

Did you know that...

Omega 3 Essential fatty acid is only manufactured in green plants. Studies have shown that people with diets rich in Omega 3's are:
- less likely to have high blood presure
- less vulnerable to cancer
- less likely to die of heart attack

Current studies suggest that Conjugated Linolic Acid (CLA) is:
- anti carcinogenic
- reduces body fat
- anti diabetic
- anti antherosclerosis (heart disease)

Researchers studying human nutrition have been slow to see a connection between animal diets and human diets. To most dieticians, beef is beef, eggs are eggs, and milk is milk. Few are paying attention to what the animals were fed or how they were raised. Thus, when the guidelines say "eat less red meat", the edict applies to all red meat, whether it's a fatty steak from a grain fed cow, or a lean steak from a grass fed cow with its invisible bounty of omega-3's, vitamin E, and CLA.