Going against the grain: Grass-fed beef a niche for Utah farmers

SALT LAKE CITY — Nick Larson stands in the Star G Bar booth in the heart of the Downtown Farmers Market, surrounded by coolers of prepackaged meat, pictures of cattle grazing in Chaco Canyon and a steady stream of customers.

"It's 100 percent grass-fed," Larson tells a woman, "from start to finish."

Her face lights up. "Do you sell by the cow?"

Armed with information from agribusiness whistle-blowers such as author Michael Pollan and the documentary "Food, Inc.," a sector of the American population is changing the way they eat.

It's an ideological revolution about food, and a growing minority is choosing to buy meat from a cow that was munching on grass in their neighborhood a few days ago, versus meat with an unknown feedlot background that's been sitting in a freezer for weeks.

Locally, a subsection of Utah ranchers are shifting their operations, reinventing the traditional way of farming to contribute to Utah's $15 billion agriculture industry.

Larson is one such rancher, selling Star G Bar Natural meat at the Downtown Farmers Market in Pioneer Park. He adjusts prices on a white board, weighing New York strip, briskets and London broil on a scale.

"The new trend for this is old news for the Gillmor family. We've been raising cattle this way since the 1870s," Larson said of the multigenerational family ranch northwest of the airport. (Larson's wife, Jenn, is a Gillmor.)

In 2001, Star G became the first to begin selling beef at the downtown market. Its ranchers proudly tout the fact that their animals are free of hormones, steroids and antibiotics, having eaten only natural grass and hay.

"They're virtually as clean and wild as it can be," Larson said.

Changing operations

Children of the baby boomer farmers arguably have been making the biggest dent in the grass-fed niche. They've paid attention to the grass-roots shift in the agriculture industry and have utilized their social-networking savvy to promote the family ranch through the Internet.

Typically, calves are born in spring, sent out to pasture for a season and then sold to feedlots by winter. It's there where they're fed grain, mostly corn. It's not their typical diet, but it fattens them up and creates marbled beef.