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Dairy culls can produce high-quality, tasty steaks
Originally published in the January 22, 2010, print edition.
The Land — When culling some of your dairy cows, just a couple months on a high-energy corn ration could elevate some of them into the “dairy beef” category, according to Conrad Kvamme, consultant/coordinator of the Midwest Dairy Beef Quality Assurance Center.
At the recent Midwest Dairy Expo in St. Cloud, his display booth included a large billboard reading “America’s Dairy Producers Have A STEAK In The Beef Business.” Kvamme told onlookers, “the dairy cow produces quite a good steak. It’s flavorful, it’s tender and if they are ‘fed up’ properly, dairy cows have a high-quality flavor.”
No, he’s not saying dairy beef matches up with corn-fed beef. Often the added maturity of an older dairy animal lessens flavor factors. He is saying that putting that 1,100-pound cull cow on a corn ration taking them up to 1,300 pounds does indeed make a difference.
“That’s new muscle being added and it produces some much better cuts of meat starting with the tenderloin,” Kvamme said. It also includes special cuts from the chuck such as the new “Delmonico,” or the Flat Iron steak from a choice center cut in the shoulder, even dairy hamburger.
He rates “dairy hamburger” comparable with beef hamburger if it comes from this older cow properly finished out with energy rations producing new muscle. “Get some marbling into those cuts and you’ve got good flavor.”
With milk and meat prices still depressed, is the dairy farmer willing to spend that extra cost to upgrade their cull cows?
“Yes, if you can say they are quality assured,” Kvamme said, and that means these individual animals have never had injection treatments or vaccinations in any of the choice cuts of the carcass.
“If you can market your cows as ‘quality-assured’ animals packers will pay more for those individuals. I’ve worked with quite a few dairy farmers now who have gone through the quality assurance program. They know precisely what to do with their animals to make them more attractive to packer buyers,” Kvamme said.
The Midwest Dairy Beef Quality Assurance program provides two- to three-hour teaching sessions where farmers are instructed on how not to spoil a carcass with careless vaccination and other injections. All injections should be in the neck area and not in the rump or front shoulder area.
Packers often face the problem where a cull cow looks good to the naked eye but you get the hide off and she’s been a pincushion. That means the packer often has to discard the rear quarters of such an animal. Get too many of these critters and packers are reluctant to bid up on any cull dairy animal.
McDonald’s Meats of Clear Lake processes and markets dairy beef routinely, both Holstein cull cows and Holstein steers fed out for beef purposes. “Some cows come in looking good and we pull some good steaks off them, meaning the rib eyes and the T-bones,” said Jennifer Dierkes, manager.
“If we get cows that have had extra grain for a few weeks and they’re not too old, we get some good flavored cuts from these animals,” she said, adding that older critters just don’t have the taste in their meats because they don’t have the marbling. “With these the best choice is burgers or sausage marketed at a lesser price.”
Quality meat is the trademark of McDonald’s Meats. Dierkes said they have won national awards on hot dogs and bacon. Also beef jerky awards, both state and regional, are a frequent occurrence for this firm that is now a fourth-generation business dating back 100 years to a 1909 start.
“Our meat cutters have a great eye for quality. And because we’ve been here a long time, we have complete confidence in the quality of the animals that farmers bring to us for processing into the many cuts and varieties of meat, both pork and beef,” she said. Live animals are processed every Tuesday.
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