[thinkcontext]

Its quite rare for beef cattle to be 100% range raised.

Beef cattle generally start out in rangeland or pasture where they eat grass with supplementary grain feed for a year or so. Then they get moved to an extremely dense feedlot or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation where they are fed mostly grain based feed for the next 6 months or so.

[ticmasta]

That's what gives cows the taste most consumers recognize as "prime beef". Eating solely grass-feed is definitely a different taste;I'm not sure most consumers would like it, at least initially (outside of a hamburger).

[nemo44x]

Not sure why parent was voted down but it's true. The inputs have a lot to do with the outputs. Grass fed beef has its advantages in many ways, but grain fed does as well. Generally, you see a nice balance when a cow is grass fed most its life and then fed grain the last couple months to fatten it up.

Aaron Franklin talks about this in his book and mentions he only uses grain fed beef for BBQ. Grass fed briskets just aren't as tasty and lack the marbling of a prime Angus brisket, in his opinion. But the guy has cooked over 100 briskets each day for over a decade so I imagine it carries some weight.

In my preference for steaks, I like both. But it depends on the cut. For a Ribeye I'll take the grain fed. For a filet I'll take grass.

[MiroF]

Here's the thing, "grass fed" beef is still fed grain. You're looking for "grass finished", which is quite rare.

[scoot]

The parent commenter is speaking specifically from experience in Australia.

Since CAFO is a USDA term, I assume your comment (or the source of it) relates to the USA.

[thinkcontext]

A CAFO is a feedlot with 1k+ animal units (1 animal unit = 1 head of beef cattle), Australia has plenty of those. Here's a list of the top 25

https://www.beefcentral.com/top-25-lotfeeders-list/

I believe it is true that cattle get more nutrition from grass in AU than US but I haven't seen numbers that break it down.

[belorn]

Given a year on grass and 6 months on feedlot, that already mean that they only use 33% compared to a factory farmed one that only eat grain. A pretty large gain for the climate.