Still more on marketing grass fed beef….

….my recent post on the price disadvantage American producers face when competing against foreign grass fed beef (see below “Roundtable:  Can I make money selling grass fed beef) needs some fine tuning.  My point was that I pay almost four times as much for butchering as my competitor in Tasmania.  And so foreign beef can absorb the shipping costs and still undersell American beef.

But my good friend Bill Roberts of 12 Stones Grasslands Beef files a mild disagreement (that’s what friends are for, to tell you when you’re wrong.  Mildly.)

Bill says we’re not up against price competition alone.

As I understand it, price is not the main issue in American wholesalers buying New Zealand, Australian and Uruguayan grass fed beef.  It is consistent acceptable quality in volume.  

That’s what all the wholesalers told us when Mel Coleman Jr. and I did a canvas of potential clients several years ago.  We had visions of sugar plums and profit dancing in our heads, but what the wholesalers said threw cold water on our dream. 

Because most grass finishers in the United States are small farms scattered through diverse “worn out soil regions”, the domestic quality varies dramatically.  They simply couldn’t depend on repeat business with the ups and downs of American grass fed beef.

That’s why our focus has turned more to soil fertility and forage quality now that we understand the genetics needed to produce a gourmet product if the soils and forage are right.

The point is, I think, that if we’re going to produce grass fed beef in a competitive marketplace, we’ve got to do everything right.  Devon may be the perfect cow, as I would argue, but flavor is a function of the grass they eat and not their genetics.  We better be building our farms from the ground up!

Those Tasmanian farmers not only get a break on butchering, they’re raising their cattle on essentially virgin soil.  Most of us are farming land so depleted that it will take years to restore it’s fertility.

Here at Thistle Hill, natural fertilizers, particularly fish oil and mineralization, has been our second biggest expense for the past decade.   We’ve also spent a good deal of money on our cafeteria mineral program to make sure our cattle are getting everything they need.  And of course those minerals don’t disappear, they eventually wind up back in the soil.  We think we can see and taste the difference.