WINFIELD — On a warm mid-morning earlier this week, with a flock of purple martins wheeling and chirruping high overhead and a soft wind rolling through the tallgrass prairie at the southern tip of the Flint Hills, Barry Barber invited me to look closely, and with care, at a large pile of dung.
“Patties are a whole ecosystem unto themselves,” said Barber, who along with his wife Nadine owns and operates one of the most highly regarded grass-fed beef operations in the state, Turkey Foot Ranch, a mixed-grass pasture nine miles north of Winfield.
The care Barber takes in evaluating a cow’s excreta is not an incidental point of concern. It’s one of the most efficient ways of assessing the health and well-being of cattle.
“When I first started our grazing system, I wanted to check the quality of the grass. I found a place at Texas A&M that tests the manure and can tell you the quality of the forage that the animal actually digested in its rumen — the protein content, the energy content. From those results, I realized that I could learn a lot from looking at these patties.”
But it’s not just the nutrient profile of the manure itself. There’s also a defensive war being waged on the surface of these cowplops. A cow’s greatest nemesis is the fly, which transports a host of bacteria, and which Barber refers to as a winged “disease vector.” And, being flies, they delight in manure — it’s where they choose to lay their eggs — which means they’re a predictable nuisance in any pasture.
But Barber refuses to use chemicals to control the fly population. As with every challenge Barber runs up against at Turkey Foot Ranch, his fix is all-natural. And since he doesn’t use antibiotics or hormones on his cattle, the imperative to reduce the number of disease-carrying flies on his land is that much more pronounced.
Anyway, Barber and I peered at the poo a bit longer. “You see that?” he asked.
Focusing the eyes, a kingdom busy with insect life hove into view, each bug laboring away on the manure’s surface. Dung beetles. “Dung beetles,” said Barber, “are about the best thing you can have on the prairie. In a day or two, that pat will probably be gone. These guys take the dung and they bury it in the ground, so they’re fertilizing the ground for me. And you know what? They work for free. See, everything out here is participating in a larger, holistic system.”
Besides keeping conditions in the pasture ripe for dung beetles — namely, by avoiding chemical sprays — Barber also employs vast armies of tiny parasitic wasps. These he buys from an ag company in Arizona. They come in small plastic bags full of woodchip material. Each wasp, mixed among the woodchips, is about the size of a grain of rice. Barber stuffs handfuls of the material in large tufts of grass and other shaded areas across his pastures. He isn’t introducing a new species into the region; the wasps are native. It’s just that they don’t reproduce at the rate of flies. “Their job is to burrow into that cow patty. They then lay their eggs inside the larvae of a fly. The wasps then eat the fly larvae, killing them.”
BARBER knows that, to the layman, it may seem frivolous — or, worse yet, gross — to dwell at length on an animal’s waste. But it’s important to understand that this is the microscopic level of care that Barber pours into his operation on a daily basis. It’s his and Nadine’s commitment to the holistic aspects of grass-based ranching — to the minute, complicated, interconnected ecosystem from which they derive their livelihoods — that allows Turkey Foot Ranch to produce, time and again, some the state’s highest quality, gourmet beef.
AN IMPRESSIVE figure in many ways, Barber mixes in his person the knowledge and deep curiosity of a pro fessor of agriculture with the hands-on mentality of your average Kansas rancher. Still, he’s not a million miles from the kid he was growing up in Allen County, the kid who always wanted to be outdoors, whose favorite place in the world was his grandpa’s farm.
Sometimes in the evenings, Barber goes and stands in the deep grass among his cattle. Or he’ll pull up a 5-gallon bucket and just sit and watch while the animals go on munching around him. He watches them graze, he listens to them tear at the grass. “I want to know that they’re eating well and that they’re digesting well.” Clean in, clean out. “Do you know my two favorite sounds in the world?” asked Barber. “‘Chomp, chomp,’ ‘plop, plop.’”
TURKEY FOOT Ranch didn’t launch until 1998, but the notion of grass-fed beef had rested at the back of Barber’s mind since college. After graduating from Iola High School in 1974, and after clearing his basics at Allen County Community College, Barber enrolled at Kansas State University, where he earned a degree in agronomy with a focus on rangeland management — an undergraduate education almost absurdly relevant to what he would end up doing in his later life at Turkey Foot Ranch.
Barber recalled a feed science class he took while at K-State. It concerned setting up a feeding system at a feedlot. The lesson was designed to show students how to transition cattle to a grain-based diet. When you take cattle off of grass, explained Barber, their rumen isn’t designed to digest starch, which is found in corn and other grains. “If you give them too much starch, it will kill them.” So an intricate feeding system is put in place, one that introduces starch little by little into the cow’s diet until the animal is on full-feed. “Then you give them antibiotics and ionophores [a weight-gain supplement]; basically, you’re just adding a lot of junk to them.
“Anyway, because I was from Iola, where I spent a lot of time in that grass country over there, hunting prairie chickens and quail, I remember thinking: you know, Kansas has some of the best grass in the world, why do we plow this stuff out and then send the cattle to the feedlot and grow grain and use all that fossil fuel and all those chemicals and then ship those cattle to the feedlot and lock them up there? It didn’t make sense.”
After college, Barber signed on as a rangeland management specialist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (then the Soil Conservation Service), where he worked his way up to a position of district conservationist, managing offices in Butler and Cowley counties, before retiring from the NRCS last September.
But, in 1994, Barber’s life took a turn. Doctors found a pituitary tumor at the base his brain. The result was that his body was being flooded with an excess of growth hormone, causing joint pain and debilitating arthritis. After a long battery of tests, during which period he ended up requiring a hip replacement, the tumor was finally removed.
But it was directly following this health scare that ideas of grass-fed beef returned. “That was the moment I made the connection and decided, ‘OK, I’m going to do something about this.’”
And while Barber certainly doesn’t identify corn-fed beef as the causal reason for his specific ailment, he did begin to take seriously the fuel he fed his body.
PRIOR TO THE Second World War, most Americans had never eaten corn-fed beef. Today, few meat-eaters in the U.S. have eaten anything else. It’s the dominant beef by a mile. As corn production skyrocketed in the post-War years, and as consumer demand for beef grew, farmers turned away from grass-finished production and began fattening their cattle on corn. Cheaper and more efficient — in that it allowed farmers to keep and feed the animals in confined pens — corn-fed cattle could be moved to market considerably faster than their perambulating, grass-finished peers
Barber is respectful toward his counterparts on the corn-fed side of the aisle. And while he doesn’t agree with every aspect of their business model — especially on the “big ag” end — he doesn’t view his operation or his way of life as a rebuke to his colleagues who’ve invested in feedlots.
But it’s true the introduction of the feedlot system, said Barber, created a raft of ill-begotten consequences affecting both the quality of the landscape and the quality of the food. “Grass-fed beef is a whole different fatty acid profile. Good fats are good for you, bad fats are bad for you. And grass-fed beef is high in the good fats” — omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid, primarily, as well as a host of beneficial fat-soluble vitamins. “So it’s not only good for the land, it’s good for the animals, and it’s good for the people.”
THE KEY TO unlocking the potential of grass-fed cattle is knowing how best to feed them.
Rather than one giant pasture, Barber uses a system called “intensive rotational grazing,” which means he moves his cattle to fresh paddocks every two or three days.
Besides providing the cattle with new grass — primarily Eastern gamagrass, in Barber’s case — the rotation promotes nutrient cycling in the land. Stock cattle raised in a single open pasture tend to herd together in one or two spots, very often around a pond. (Turkey Foot Ranch avoids use of a pond, which typically contains a high bacteria content. Instead, Barber supplies his animals with fresh, cold water pumped from a nearby well into self-filling tanks positioned in each paddock). Unlike a set stock, Barber’s cattle spread their manure and urine uniformly over the small paddocks — paddocks are typically 2-4 acres in size — which generates new growth in the soil.
According to Barber, this system mimics the former grazing habits of the buffalo. “If you read historical accounts of buffalo herds as they moved through the prairie, after they left it was a dung and urine heap and the grass was gone. But then they moved and it regrew.” When you put all that natural fertilizer on the ground and then tromp in that grass and that cellulose, explained Barber, it triggers the microbes in the ground and stimulates the entire biology of the soil.
But Barber’s system is more thorough still. Instead of grazing the grass down to its roots, Barber moves the cattle to a new paddock before they’ve had the chance to remove even half of that plot’s forage. According to Barber, the best, most nutritious portion of the grass is in the top half. “There’s more energy in the upper end of it, and I’m after energy. A lot of guys talk about protein. Protein will make a young animal grow fast, but energy is what puts the marbling on them, what finishes them.” Engaging a level of knowledge more sophisticated still, Barber chooses to move his herd in the evening, when, based on cycles of respiration and photosynthesis, the grass achieves its highest saturation of sugar, and is therefore at its most nutritious.
Moving the cattle, Barber uses extremely low-stress techniques. “I never hoorah these cattle,” said Barber. “I don’t ever want them upset, excited, stressed.” And it’s not simply because Barber is a gentle soul, though he is that; there are practical ramifications for the meat. If cattle become agitated or overexcited before slaughter, their bodies release high levels of cortisol and adrenaline, which negatively affects the pH level of the meat — ruining both its color and its flavor. This is referred to as “dark cutter” beef. “So it’s critical to have these animals calm and happy all the time,” said Barber. “The way I see it is that these animals are living a good life up until the second the hammer drops. From my perspective, that’s all I could ever ask for. If you can live a good life until the lights go out, you can’t do better than that.”
Barber runs about 50 cattle through Turkey Foot Ranch each year. Technically, they’re all steers. He purchases them from a vetted breeder — who limits the calves’ diets to milk and grass — and welcomes them to Turkey Foot Ranch when they’re anywhere between 24 to 30 months old. Barber prefers Red and Black Angus, although he has a few Chianina and Wagyu crosses. The goal with all of his cattle is to promote healthy weight gain. The average finishing point per head is north of a thousand pounds. Barber monitors the size and shape of their rumps and tail heads. When their backs fill out to a certain flatness, they’re ready for slaughter. Typically each cow spends 12 to 18 months at the ranch before visiting the locker.
MOST OF Barber’s beef goes to Wichita. He supplies a number of health-conscious grocery stores and restaurants, and he’s been a fixture at the city’s largest farmers’ market for nearly 20 years. “I tell people: I was selling grass-fed beef before grass-fed beef was cool,” laughed Barber. “Now, though, more people want to have a connection with their food, they want to know how it’s grown and where it’s grown, so they know whether it meets their standards for the quality of food they want to eat.”
But the increased popularity of grass-fed beef has also meant that the big box stores are moving in. Walmart, Whole Foods, Dillons. But you have to be aware of labels at those places, said Barber; they’re deceptive. “A lot of those animals are coming from overseas, from Uruguay or Paraguay. These stores often find firesales on beef and buy it that way. It’s labeled ‘grass-fed’ but the question to ask is: ‘Was it finished on grass?’ In those cases, you don’t really know it’s source. Was it finished on grain? Has it been fed antibiotics, hormones? When you buy a pound of hamburger off me, it came from one animal and, since they’re tagged, I’ll know just what animal it is.”
The key phrase for the Barbers is this: “local and direct.” They don’t sell their beef online and ship it vast distances. They prefer a locally produced, locally marketed, “community-based” exchange. “I think ‘local and direct’ trumps ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ or ‘humanely raised’ when describing our product, even though all those other labels apply. When you meet the person, you know whether he is true to what he says. That’s why I love meeting our customers.”
“TURKEY FOOT” is the nickname given to big bluestem grass, the flagship grass of the Flint Hills, and the plant resource that blankets miles and miles of land around the Barbers’ ranch. On Monday, after finishing with his cattle for the day, Barber climbed a high ridge overlooking his pastures. The view took in the whole of the area: Barber’s ranch, the treeline marking the cursive journey of Timber Creek, the wide blue sky, the miles of ancient prairie. For Barber, this project is as much about the land.
“This expanse of prairie known as the Flint Hills is the last, largest, contiguous expanse of tallgrass prairie in North America. And there’s only about 3 percent left. What was originally tallgrass prairie in the northern continent — now, only 3 percent remains. So we have the very last stand of the tallgrass prairie, right here.”
Barber waded through the deep grass, a blend shot through with wild alfalfa and yellow broomweed, hairy grama and prairie clover, sunflowers and purple ironweed — what Barber calls a “prairie buffet.”
“That’s why when we talk about feedlots and plowing out grass to grow corn and grain, that’s what we’re talking about. You see? We’ve plowed up the prairie.”
Barber knelt in the high grass and took a gentle hold on the stalk of a long, slender pitcher sage plant, its petals a deep cornflower blue. “You like to see all these plants out here, because they all work together. It’s a symbiosis. And just look at this one’s color. It’s an herb, you know. And it’s a pollinator. See? Do you see that beetle working away, hard at it? Amazing. Just all of it.”
