There's a market. People want grass-fed beef that tastes great and is better for you. By requiring a federally inspected processing plant however, regulators and the big corporate interests have made direct marketing beef to your neighbor difficult or even illegal. This is an issue that the community interested in sustainable agriculture has to address. I have always been taught by my family, you ought to do something you love.
Love is an enormously powerful economic principle that is largely ignored in the money economy.
To me, sustainability means reconnecting communities of people to the produce of the farms and ranches. To do that, we need to decentralize the food system, and make direct connections between farmers and people, so people know how their food is produced. Then corporate farms that are largely faceless wouldn't have the edge over people with faces in the community. Western SARE is an effort of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.