How Old Salt Thinks About Meat

Why We're Writing This — and Why You Should Read It Skeptically

Let's start with a disclaimer: this post exists to promote Old Salt.

It's written by the founder, published on our own blog, and intended to build trust with customers, investors, and partners. There is no version of this that isn't marketing. 

I think it's important to say that plainly, because what follows is a detailed account of how we think about meat, nutrition, land stewardship, and animal welfare — and you deserve to hold all of it against the fact that I have a direct financial interest in you finding it persuasive.

That said, I've spent 15 years taking seriously the critiques of livestock agriculture — its impacts on wildlife habitat, climate, and human health — and I've read widely, argued with people smarter than me, and changed my mind more than once. I've also genuinely come to believe that well-managed livestock is not just defensible but essential to a nourishing, enduring food system. What follows are the positions we've arrived at so far. Partial and imperfect. Subject to revision. Offered in good faith.

Old Salt doesn't split hairs over product attributes, certifications, and sustainability criteria. Such hairsplitting maintains the status quo because established players can too easily fake it. Our focus is on building a better shelf.

Where Old Salt Meat Comes From

Montana. All of it. Our meat comes exclusively from livestock raised on five member ranches, all in Montana:

• Sieben Live Stock Company — Adel

• J Bar L Ranches — Centennial Valley and Melville

• Mannix Family Ranch — Helmville

• LF Ranch — Augusta

• Cordova Farms — Power

Every animal is harvested and cut at our facility in Butte. Individual cuts have the ranch of origin printed on the back label of your package, so you can trace your meat to the specific piece of land it came from. The one exception is ground beef, which requires blending fat trim from the butchering process with lean trim to achieve the appropriate lean percentage — meaning a single package of ground beef may represent more than one ranch. All pork comes from Cordova Farms.

On grass-finished versus grain-finished

"Finishing" refers to the period after an animal has matured to the point that its frame is no longer growing and it begins to fatten toward market weight. Old Salt offers two lines of beef: one finished without grain concentrate, and one that includes grain in the finishing ration. The grain-finished line is currently offered on a wholesale basis to restaurants and grocery stores and is not sold on our website.

With the exception of milk prior to weaning and the seed heads produced by grasses in the pasture, our grass-finished animals do not receive any grain concentrate as part of their finishing diet. For our grain-finished animals, at about 18 months of age they are placed on a ration that includes grass hay, alfalfa, and feed-grade barley — barley that is too high in protein to be accepted by malting companies.

On how Old Salt treats animals

Old Salt practices husbandry that relies on handling skills and techniques to work with an animal's mind rather than by force. All of our animals, whether beef, hogs, or sheep, spend the majority of their life outside on pasture. We see animal welfare not as a certification to obtain but as a daily practice — one that is inseparable from the quality of the land stewardship and the quality of the meat.

The Science We Follow — and How We Hold It

A note before we get into specifics: a typical nutrition label covers 13 compounds. The U.S. government tracks several hundred. Any sample of red meat contains something like 3,000. We can relatively easily measure the density of a particular compound in a food product, but explaining what caused the difference between two samples is a harder problem, and sorting out exactly what those differences mean for human health is harder still. We try to be specific about what's known, honest about what isn't, and resistant to the temptation to overstate conclusions in either direction.

On eating animals and human evolution

Learning to hunt, process, cook, and eat animals likely played a significant role in the evolution of our species. Bill Schindler's Eat Like a Human covers this territory in depth — exploring how the use of fermentation, processing, and heavy selection also increased the utility of plants in the human diet over time. The relationship between humans and animals as food is ancient, complex, and worth understanding on its own terms rather than through the lens of recent dietary controversy.

On saturated fat

Nina Teicholz spent 12 years researching The Big Fat Surprise, a detailed account of how the charm, ambition, and ego of one researcher in particular — Ancel Keys — played an outsized role in shaping U.S. dietary guidelines beginning in the mid-20th century, and still does to a lesser degree today. The supposed links between dietary saturated fat and heart disease have since been called heavily into question. We bring this up not to claim that saturated fat is definitively harmless, but as a useful reminder that confident scientific consensus and correct scientific consensus are not always the same thing — and as the reason we try to hold our own claims with appropriate humility.

On what's actually in muscle tissue

The muscle fibers of red meat and the myoglobin they contain are particularly rich in complete protein — including all nine essential amino acids — as well as zinc, heme iron, selenium, phosphorus, and at least three B vitamins: riboflavin, niacin, and cobalamin (B12). Heme iron is a highly digestible form of iron for humans, unlike the non-heme iron found in plants such as spinach. These are not minor nutritional considerations, and they are part of why we believe well-raised red meat belongs in a nourishing human diet.

On animal fat

The human body's metabolism of saturated fat for energy does not spike insulin the way carbohydrates do — which is the primary mechanism behind the effectiveness of low-carbohydrate diets. Beyond energy, animal fat carries fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K, as well as antioxidant phytochemical classes including phenols, carotenoids, and flavonoids. The nutritional role of animal fat is more substantial than the dietary guidelines of the past 50 years have acknowledged.

On omega-6 fats and seed oils

Omega-6 fat — specifically linoleic acid — is a type of polyunsaturated fat found in particularly high concentrations in plant seeds. The percentage of American caloric intake from polyunsaturated fats is much higher today, over 20%, up from 1–3% historically, largely because seed oils entered the food supply beginning when Crisco was introduced in 1911. Whether this shift contributes to inflammation and chronic disease is an active area of research. Linoleic acid is an essential fatty acid — humans need it and cannot manufacture it — but its greatly increased proportion of caloric intake today is worth paying attention to.

What's notable about ruminants specifically: bacteria in the guts of cattle, bison, and sheep extensively hydrogenate omega-6 fats into saturated fatty acids. This is why all red meat — whether finished exclusively on grass or whether the finishing ration includes grain concentrate — is quite low in omega-6. This is not true of monogastric animals like chickens and pigs, which lack rumens and therefore produce meat that is higher in omega-6 because they directly uptake into their tissues the fatty acids found in their primary feed sources.

On omega-3: an honest take

Much is made by niche meat marketers of the fact that grass-finished beef tends to contain about three times more omega-3 than its grain-finished counterpart. That's true and worth knowing. But neither type of beef is a particularly significant source of omega-3 overall. The daily recommended intake of omega-3 is about 1 gram for an average woman. A quarter pound of grass-finished beef tends to contain about 0.08 grams of omega-3, compared to about 0.025 grams in a quarter pound of grain-finished beef. If omega-3 intake is your nutritional goal, a comparatively small amount of fatty fish or walnuts will get you there far more efficiently than beef will. We'd rather tell you that than use a technically-true statistic as a marketing hook.

What We Put Into Our Animals — and What We Don't

On growth hormones and beta agonists

Old Salt does not use growth hormones — often used in conventional beef cattle production — or beta agonists, which are used in conventional production of beef cattle, swine, and turkeys to increase lean muscle mass and feed efficiency. We've made this choice not primarily because we believe there is strong evidence that residues of these compounds are present in the meat, or that such residues if present would be definitively harmful to consumers, but for the more basic reason that their use is likely detrimental to the health and well-being of the animals themselves.

On synchronizing hormones and artificial insemination

Some Old Salt ranches do use synchronizing hormones — specifically prostaglandin — in female breeding stock to group the ovulation cycles of individuals so that artificial insemination is more efficient and to narrow the window in which calving season occurs. Artificial insemination can be a good tool to hone herd genetics more quickly to fit a ranch's landscape and business model. These are naturally occurring hormones within livestock, and we do not believe their use has any ill effects on the animals or the meat that comes from them.

On antibiotics

Because feedlots typically bring in cattle from many different herds raised in disparate environments, many administer antibiotics to livestock as a preventative measure, whether animals are sick or not. Old Salt does not do that — we don't want to unnecessarily compromise the microbiome of healthy animals and we don't want to contribute to antibiotic resistance.

However, if and when animals do get sick, we administer a veterinarian-approved antibiotic and ensure that the withdrawal period for the drug has passed before harvest. The withdrawal period is that duration of time — ranging from a few days to a few weeks depending on the drug — that ensures levels of the drug in an animal's system have sunk below the Maximum Residue Limits set by the EPA and enforced by FDA and USDA before any animal products enter the human food supply. Selective, compassionate use of antibiotics when animals are genuinely ill is, in our view, the humane choice.

On agrochemicals and PFAS

One thing is certainly true about Old Salt's mountain ranches that is not necessarily true of livestock — even certified organic livestock — raised in many other parts of the country: not only are Old Salt cattle not raised on lands treated with the most concerning chemicals associated with commodity row crop agriculture, such as paraquat or glyphosate, but they are not even raised near such lands.

The value of an organic certification is considerably different on a ranch in the middle of Montana's mountain valleys than it is on a ranch surrounded by heavily treated crop fields. Neither do Old Salt livestock come into contact with the class of "forever chemicals" called PFAS that are of increasing concern, and which are sometimes found in animal products raised on or near land irrigated or otherwise contaminated with water from wastewater treatment facilities.

Wildlife, Land, and the Methane Question

On wildlife

Old Salt sees wildlife as neighbors, not nuisances — even the challenging ones like coyotes, grizzlies, and wolves. Diverse wildlife is actually a strong indicator of healthy land, and our ranches develop management plans to minimize conflicts while actively supporting habitat. We collaborate with Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, Audubon Conservation Ranching, World Wildlife Fund, Trout Unlimited, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Natural Resource Conservation Service, and many others. The connection between well-managed working ranches and healthy wildlife habitat is not incidental — it is one of the things that makes the Old Salt model worth replicating.

On methane and ruminants

It is true that ruminants like cattle and sheep emit methane, a greenhouse gas that is over 28 to 30 times more potent than CO2 over a 100-year timeframe. Today there are 80-plus million head of cows and calves in the United States, and this is a real consideration that we don't dismiss. But it is also true that prior to European settlement, other ruminants were emitting methane at significant scale as well — an estimated 30 to 60 million bison, 10 million elk, and 30 million deer.

Ruminants are not a new source of greenhouse gases on North American grasslands. It is also important to note that grasslands evolved with grazing ruminant herds, and therefore removing them from grassland ecosystems could cause desertification that would more than offset any emissions reductions — while also destroying the habitat those ecosystems provide and eliminating a significant source of nourishing food. We believe managed grazing on healthy rangeland is part of the climate solution, not simply a cause of the problem. We hold that position while acknowledging the science is still developing and the full picture is complex.

How to Keep Learning

When people join Old Salt, we share a reading list that has shaped our thinking on these topics over the years. These books don't all agree with each other, and we don't agree with every position in all of them. But they are the works that have most honestly and rigorously engaged with the questions we care about, and we think they're worth your time.

• The Unsettling of America — Wendell Berry

• Sacred Cow — Diana Rodgers and Robb Wolf

• The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet — Nina Teicholz

• Nourishment: What Animals Can Teach Us About Recovering Our Nutritional Wisdom — Fred Provenza

• Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered — E.F. Schumacher

• Doughnut Economics — Kate Raworth

• Braiding Sweetgrass — Robin Wall Kimmerer

• Eat Like a Human: Nourishing Foods and Ancient Ways of Cooking — Bill Schindler

• A Sand County Almanac — Aldo Leopold

If this post raised more questions than it answered, that's probably appropriate. The relationship between land health, animal welfare, nutrition science, and ecological outcomes is genuinely complex, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either oversimplifying or selling something. We're selling something too — we said so at the top. But we'd rather earn your trust by showing our work than by making it sound simpler than it is.

For the fuller picture of how Old Salt thinks about the food system and why we've built what we've built, read our companion piece: Building a Food System Worth Its Salt. And for Cole's ongoing thinking on these topics, subscribe to The Salt on LinkedIn.

— Cole Mannix