If you are trying to buy better meat, grass-fed seems like a pretty good place to start.

It conjures up exactly the image you would expect, cattle happily outside in fields, heads down grazing and eating grass. Sometimes that is exactly what it means. But not always.

In the UK, the term "grass-fed" is surprisingly woolly. An animal doesn't necessarily have to have spent its entire life outside eating grass to be sold as grass-fed. In fact, grass can account for as little as 51% of its diet, with cereals and other concentrated feeds making up some of the rest.

The difference between grass-fed and 100% grass-fed isn't really about grass at all. It's about what sort of farming system the animal belongs to.

Cattle are ruminants, which means they can digest something we can't: grass. Put a bullock on permanent pasture and they can turn plants growing on land that may be completely unsuitable for producing human food into meat. And while they’re at it, they can play a role in improving the landscape around us.

Managed well, grazing animals can be part of a wonderfully vibrant farming system. Their manure returns rich nutrients to the soil. Grazing stimulates regrowth, encouraging root systems to bury deeper in the soil and hold water more securely. Hedgerows and field margins provide habitat for insects, birds and small mammals to thrive. The cow isn't separate from that system, it’s a central figure.

This is one of the reasons I think the conversation around beef has become so muddled is because we have a tendency to talk about "beef" as though every kilo of it represents roughly the same thing, yet there is an enormous difference between a cow living predominantly from the resources of the farm around it and an industrial system designed around producing beef as quickly and efficiently as possible.

This is where things get confusing.

Most British beef cattle will eat grass at some point in their lives.

Some will graze outside exclusively for their entire lives. Some will graze outside during the warmer months and be housed during the colder wetter months where they will be fed conserved grass(hay or silage) when they're housed over winter. Some may spend some of the year outdoors, but much of it housed, where they are fed cereals or concentrated feeds alongside grass. A small number will never set foot outdoors.

With all these variables beef can still be described as grass-fed. So when you see those words on a packet, they don't necessarily mean what you might imagine: an animal raised outside entirely on pasture and pasture alone. That's why the 100% matters.

A genuinely 100% pasture-fed animal receives its nutrition from pasture and forage throughout its life rather than being finished on grain or concentrates.

Fresh grass in the spring and summer, may become hay or silage in winter, but the basic principle remains the same, they only ever eat pasture fresh, dried or fermented. That’s it.

I don't think it is particularly helpful to turn this into an argument where grass is "good" and grain is "bad". Farming is far more complicated than that. Nor does feeding an animal some grain automatically make someone a bad farmer. The more useful question is why we are feeding grain to a ruminant in the first place.

Cereals are energy dense. Feed them to cattle and you can accelerate growth and finish an animal more quickly. From a production point of view, that makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, if you extract that idea far enough and something fundamental changes. Instead of the animal fitting into the farming system, we begin redesigning the farming system around maximising the output of the animal.

Grassland becomes less important, feed can be brought in from elsewhere and animals can spend more time housed, maximising sticking density on the farm. The connection between the amount of food a farm can naturally produce and the number of animals it carries begins to loosen. That is the point at which farming starts to look much more like manufacturing.

In an industrial model, success tends to be measured by output and efficiency: faster growth, predictable finishing, consistent carcasses and more kilos of beef produced in less time. Nature becomes something to control.

In a genuinely pasture-based system, the starting point is different.

How much grass can this land grow?

When should the cattle move?

How long does that field need to recover?

What plants should be growing here?

What does the soil need?

Where can we make space for wildlife?

The farmer is still producing food and absolutely still needs to make money. This isn't a nature reserve with a few decorative cows wandering around it, but the aim is to produce food within the ecological limits of the farm, rather than continually finding ways to push beyond them.

There is another bit of nuance that I think is often missing from this conversation. Putting cattle on grass does not automatically make a farming system regenerative. You can have a field that is technically pasture but is essentially a monoculture: heavily fertilised, regularly reseeded and with very little botanical diversity.

Equally, you can walk through another pasture and find grasses, clovers, chicory, plantain, yarrow and dozens of other species. Look closer and there are beetles, worms and fungi. Above ground there are pollinators and birds. Beneath it is an enormous living ecosystem. Both fields are growing grass yet they are not doing the same job. This is why I am much more interested in how a farm functions than any single claim printed on a packet.

The best pasture-based farmers I know are constantly looking at what is happening beneath their feet. They are thinking about soil structure, water retention, root depth, plant diversity and how long a pasture needs to recover after grazing. The cattle become a tool for managing that ecology as well as a source of food. That, to me, is farming in tune with nature.

What an animal eats can also change the meat it produces. Research comparing beef from different production systems has found differences in its fatty-acid profile, with 100% pasture-fed beef containing more long-chain omega-3 fatty acids than conventionally produced supermarket beef.

However, I actually think we do this argument a disservice when we make nutrition the entire selling point. I don't buy 100% pasture-fed beef because I think a steak is going to act like a vitamin tablet, I buy it because I care about the system behind it.

I want cattle to be doing the thing cattle are extraordinarily good at doing: eating plants that humans cannot eat and turning them into nutrient-dense food while contributing to a living landscape. That principle informs the farmers we choose to work with at Pipers & Co.

We want to source from farms where the animal isn't simply the end product. Soil, wildlife, landscape, animal and farmer are all part of the same equation, because if we are going to eat animals, I think we should care enormously about the life, and the farming system that came before the meat.

This is the difficult bit for consumers because packaging is full of lovely words.

Grass-fed. Farm-reared. Natural. British. Outdoor…

They can all sound reassuring without necessarily telling you very much.

If 100% grass-fed with no nuance matters to you, look for exactly that.

Certification such as Pasture for Life gives an additional level of assurance because the farming system has been independently checked rather than relying solely on a claim from the producer.

For those more inquisitive, who want to properly understand the system they are voting for, buy from a source who can simply tell you how the cattle were raised.

Ask what they eat.

Ask whether they're grain-finished.

Ask how much of the year they spend grazing.

Ask what happens in winter.

Good farmers tend to be remarkably happy to talk about farming.

That’s ultimately what we need more of. Not another clever label, but a little more connection between the person eating the food and the person who produced it, because "grass-fed" is two words, yet behind those words can sit two very different versions of farming.

If we're serious about using the money we spend on food to support better farming, it's worth knowing which system we're buying into.