If you’re going to eat beef, here are the most sustainable places to get it.

Chef Mr Richard Turner believes you can’t buy good beef in your average supermarket. “It’s all intensively reared, regardless of what it says on the packet,” he says. Mr Turner helped start the multi-award-winning Hawksmoor group of steakhouses in London, which serve only grass-fed native beef, so he knows what he’s talking about. “And intensive farming is not ethical. Cows are fed corn and grain to speed up growth and they reach kill weight far too quickly. I like cows to be at least three years old, but eight is even better,” says the man who also founded barbecue festival Meatopia and is author of Prime: The Beef Cookbook.

We ate 58bn kilograms of beef worldwide last year. Much of that came from intensively reared animals. Only a tiny portion came from farms that claim to raise their cattle in a humane way. The US, in particular, is renowned for densely packed cattle farms, where millions of cows are grain-fed on feed lots before being slaughtered in huge centralised slaughterhouses, often hundreds of miles from their home farm. This kind of beef could well be filling supermarket shelves in the UK after Brexit.

Farming beef cattle is hard work and doing so ethically is harder still. Almost nobody does it. As Mr Mark Schatzker, author of Steak: One Man’s Search For The World’s Tastiest Piece Of Beef, points out, “many of us buy the cheapest beef available, and when we do that, we incentivise farmers and feeders to produce it as cheaply as possible”. The resulting meat can be pointlessly bland, as well as inhumane.

Mr Turner has a few ideas for anyone who is looking for thoughtfully produced steak to cook at home. “Buy online after some careful research,” he says. “Avoid cross-breeds, which are used because they have heterosis, or hybrid vigour, and grow too fast. Flavour takes time, so look for pure-breed [also known as native or heritage] animals.” He also likes ex-dairy cows that have had a couple of years outside eating grass. This allows their muscles to develop properly, which closes an otherwise wasteful loop in the dairy industry.

There are many who would argue that the idea of ethical beef – or animal products of any kind – is a fallacy, and there is no escaping the carbon cost that comes with our steak habit. Nonetheless, there are a few chefs and farmers who go to extraordinary lengths to produce steak as kindly and conscientiously as possible, whether that means returning to traditional farming practices or exploring whether mass-produced meat can still be humane. Here is our recommended list for starters.

Belcampo was founded in 2012 by Ms Anya Fernald, who previously worked for Slow Food Nation (you may recognise her as a judge on Iron Chef America), as an attempt to show that you can produce meat, including beef, on a large scale but still behave sustainably. Belcampo has seven restaurants and butcher’s counters in California, and has a nose-to-tail philosophy. It serves offal and produces take-away products such as bone broth to ensure minimal waste. The company has its own slaughterhouses and butchers, meaning it controls the entire processing system, right up to the moment a plate of braised short rib or beef tartare hits the table. The cows are grazed on pasture (although they are fed some grain, too) and then killed at 24 to 30 months (older than the usual 18 months). Its slaughterhouses and butchery were designed by animal behaviour expert Dr Temple Grandin and are certified Animal Welfare Approved, which means the Animal Welfare Institute likes what Belcampo does. Unlike some other certifications in the US, farmers can’t pay for this one, and it sets high standards for both rearing and slaughter.

According to Mr Turner, Alderspring Ranch is the leading American producer of ethical beef and goes far beyond any other farm in the country. Mr Glenn and Ms Caryl Elzinga do almost all the work involved in raising cattle on their family farm themselves (incredibly, they also have seven daughters). The cows roam over a 70sq mile range of wild, savagely beautifully hills and valleys, eating nothing but grass, with no growth hormones, antibiotics, grain or genetically modified feed, and are never confined to a feed lot. The couple consider their beef to be the ultimate in clean eating. They’ve been certified organic for a decade (organic certification only came into being in the US in 2002). Much of the herding is done on horseback – this truly is cowboy country – using traditional, stress-free techniques. If you can’t visit the River Of No Return brewery bar in nearby Challis, where Alderspring beef is served, the Elzingas ship their beef anywhere in the US. As well as their total commitment to best practice when it comes to rearing and slaughtering, they also want their meat to be treated well in the kitchen. The Meathacker section of their website is full of beautifully photographed guides and recipes, for everything from how to treat beef bones and ribs, to pomegranate wine-marinated flat-iron steak recipes.

Mr Andy Waugh, chef and founder of Mac & Wild’s two Scottish restaurants in central London, does serve beef, but he’d rather we all ate more of the venison he grew up eating almost every day. “My dad had a wild-meat butchery when I was a kid,” he says. “He was a tenant hunter with sporting rights on a local estate in Scotland where I grew up. People don’t see venison for what it is. They think it’s posh, fancy food or Bambi, but everyone should be eating it.” For Mr Waugh, this is because of the way the animals die as much as the taste. “I’ve seen cows going to slaughter and it’s not how I’d like to go,” he says. “I’d rather be gone without knowing about it, like deer in the wild. Deer no longer have natural predators and have deforested Scotland over the past 500 years.” Mr Waugh believes eating deer that have to be culled is a way to balance “the fine line between being super-enthusiastic about meat and very anxious about how much we consume”. The beef he cooks is as humane as he can find. “It’s almost all Scottish beef, from nine farms local to our supplier, and the cows are slaughtered at four years old,” he says. His favourite is from Highland cattle. “Farmers put them up on the hills and leave them for four to six years. Then they get six weeks of pasture before slaughter, and they usually slaughter only one cow every six weeks, if that. They’re like gold dust. The flavour is just beautiful and completely different from anything else.”

Chef Mr Charlie Brookman of The Chimney House restaurant in Brighton prides himself on working with local, sustainable farms. The most exciting in his collection of suppliers has to be Garlic Wood Farm, where meat from Knepp Castle Estate is sold. Knepp Castle’s Wildland project is an ambitious rewilding scheme and over the past 16 years has succeeded in returning 3,500 acres of intensively farmed land back to its natural state. Old English Longhorn cattle are crucial to the site’s ecology. Their gentle grazing prevents the land reverting to scrubby woodland, which isn’t particularly bio-diverse. Because they are 100 per cent grass-fed and lead long, undisturbed lives meandering around the estate, their meat is deliciously rich and deeply textured. As well as cows, the estate is also home to red deer, roe deer and fallow deer for venison and Tamworth pigs for pork, all of which you can buy direct from Garlic Wood Farm, in person or online. Or, if that’s too much like hard work, make a Sunday pilgrimage to Brighton for Mr Brookman’s pig’s head croquettes and 35-day-aged topside of beef.

Mr Matthew Evans, chef, farmer, star of Gourmet Farmer and For The Love Of Meat on Australian television and one-time Sydney Morning Herald restaurant critic, took on this former apple orchard in 2011, and has been working with his partner, Ms Sadie Chrestman, to turn it into a centre for heritage breeds such as Angus cattle and Saddleback pigs, ever since. This month, he was one of the speakers at Australia’s first Slow Meat Symposium, where chefs, farmers and producers came together to encourage Australians to eat less but better meat. In 2016, the couple started seasonal day-time feasts, where they serve farm-reared produce cooked in an open kitchen and paired with Tasmanian wine and beer. At Fat Pig Farm’s cookery school, you can learn butchery skills, how to make your own charcuterie or how to cook classic beef stews and braises, depending on the time of year.

If you can get your hands on a piece of beef that has been cut and aged by the legendary, somewhat anarchic, roaming Spanish butcher Mr Imanol Jaca, then you’re in for a treat. His company Txogitxu supplies Bar Nestor, a small bar in San Sebastián, where the only food on offer is tomato salad, grilled peppers, wobbly slices of tortilla and thick, salted steaks from Galician vaca vieja, or old cow. Ignore the unappetising translation. These are former dairy cows or oxen, hand-selected by Mr Jaca after they’ve spent long and happy lives of up to 20 years on family farms. He calls them his “old fat cows”. Mr Jaca then studiously ages the meat in temperature- and humidity-controlled maturing chambers, before he allows the chefs who buy it to get it anywhere near a grill. The end result is an explosion of flavour, bigger and beefier than any other steak, with a firm but yielding texture. After tasting it, many diners (and chefs) refuse to go back to steaks carved from immature cattle. Mr Jaca’s beef is used by dozens of high-end chefs worldwide, including three-Michelin-starred Arzak in San Sebastián. He also supplies the Sagardi group, which has sites across Spain and in Shoreditch, east London.

The farm-to-table craze has been a mainstay of the New York dining scene for some time, but few take it as far as the owners of Fish & Game in Hudson, who fled Manhattan after stints running the hugely popular Fatty Crab and Fatty ’Cue. Husband-and-wife chef team Mr Zakary Pelaccio and Ms Jori Jayne Emde take in whole animals from the network of farmers they work with and cook them in the former blacksmith’s shop they converted into a James Beard Award-winning restaurant in 2013. This means minimal waste and a menu that is constantly changing to accommodate whatever meat (or fish, game or vegetables) has arrived that day. Expect dishes such as rare seared rib-eye cap with kimchi hollandaise and butter-poached hakurei turnips. Anything left over or that can’t be used immediately is likely to be pickled or preserved, including smoked beef. Fish & Game has its own small farm where it rears chickens and produces honey, but its meat comes from suppliers such as North Plain Farm, a hyper-sustainable estate that is a sister farm to Blue Hill Farm, made famous by anti-waste chef Mr Dan Barber and his Blue Hill restaurants, or from Herondale Farm, where growth-hormone-free, heritage-breed cows eat grass until winter, when they are fed alfalfa and hay. Project 258, a book about the restaurant by Mr Pelaccio and Mr Peter Barrett, is out now.