Cheap and easy grassfed test on back burner

August 12, 2020

Article in Graze: by graziers for graziers, June-July 2020
by Martha Hoffman. 

    With strong consumer demand for grossfcd products, dairy graziers and grassfed dairy marketers would like to have better ways of verifying that milk being sold with grassfed claims have actually been produced from forages. Current procedures for verification, such as the reliable gas chromatogrophy test that analyzes the fatty acid content of the milk, are expensive, lime-consuming and focus on the nutritional components of grassfed milk rather than providing evidence to combat "fake" pasture claims. 

     Current procedures for verification, such as the reliable gas chromatogrophy test that analyzes the fatty acid content of the milk, are expensive, time-consuming and focus on the nutritional components of grassfed milk rather than providing evidence to combat "fake" pasture claims.

... Mark Rasmussen, Director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, and others discuss challenges with technologies to test milk quality and content, including fluorescence spectroscopy.