Is Your Grass-Fed Beef Imported?

All Things Considered:

Nobody collects information on exactly how much of the grass-fed beef that Americans eat comes from abroad. Theo Weening, the global meat coordinator for Whole Foods, says his company buys very little. "We probably import maybe 3 percent. The rest is regional, local; that's what we really push for," he says.
But you'll see plenty of Australian-origin beef in other supermarkets. Organic Valley, meanwhile, gets all of its grass-fed beef from Australia. There's also a lot of grass-fed beef coming in from and Brazil.
So why does the U.S., the world's biggest beef producer, have to go abroad to find enough of the grass-fed variety?
, an agricultural economist at the University of Georgia, says some of the reasons are pretty simple. Weather, for instance. In most of the U.S., it freezes. In Australia, it doesn't. So in Australia, as long as there's water, there's grass year-round.
And then there's the issue of land. "If you're going to finish animals on grass, it takes more land," Lacy says. Grassland in Australia is relatively cheap and plentiful, and there's not much else you can do with a lot of it, apart from grazing animals.
As a result, Australian grass-fed cattle operations are really big. In fact, they're the mainstream. Seventy percent of Australia's beef production comes from cattle that spent their lives grazing. And when beef operations are large-scale, everything becomes cheaper, from slaughtering to shipping.
On Monday, the U.S. company Cargill with Australia's second-biggest beef producer — a company called Tey's. Cargill will now sell more Australian beef in the U.S., both grass-fed and grain-fed.

I would figure that most of our potential area for grass-fed beef is instead used for cow-calf operations which send the calves to feedlots at weaning.  So they can raise a lot more calves to sell by keeping more cows on grass and shipping out the calves.  Plus, in much of that region they still have to contend with winter.  Then there is also the extra time it takes to fatten calves up on grass. Overall, it would be hard to produce the beef in the U.S. at a price that is competitive to Australia, Brazil , Argentina or Uruguay.