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Roundtable: Can I make money selling grass fed beef (continued)….
We could call this Exhibit A in our discussion. Someone who is making money with a small grass fed beef farm. If you want to begin at the beginning, scroll down to the roundtable that featured four men with wide experience in all phases of grass fed beef marketing….local to national…operating solely or in combination with others. But, to see what a “practioner of the trade” would say about all this, we sought out Guille Yearwood of Ellett Valley Beef Company in southwest Virginia. Guille is both a pure bred Devon breeder and commercial cattleman and is a member of the board of the American Devon Cattle Association. Whether you’re…
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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…
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Are food hubs part of the answer….
….we recently hosted a roundtable on the problems smaller producers face in marketing their grass fed beef. (see below, “Roundtable: Can I make money selling grass fed beef”) We were a bit surprised that farmers markets didn’t come up. Several cattlemen we know have tried them and generally found them useful in building a customer base. Eventually, they tired of the commitment, of being tied-down every weekend, and settled for marketing from their farm. A better solution might be so-called “Food Hubs”, which are really a higher octane version of farmers markets. They have legal structure, and financial underpinning, but again require a real commitment from the participants. By coincidence the USDA…
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The “low cost” of beef….
….well, if you import it from Tasmania anyway. Our recent round-table discussion opened up a number of avenues that the “old reporter” in me couldn’t resist. One was the discovery that US Wellness, the largest marketer of grass fed beef on the Internet, was importing some of its meat from Tasmania. (Yes, I had to look on a map, too. It’s about 100 miles south of Australia.) Turns out their northern soil is practically perfect for grazing. Couple that with low wages and low land costs, throw in cheap shipping on boats returning to the States that would otherwise be empty, and you can see what American producers are up…
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Roundtable: Can I make money selling grass fed beef?
It’s a question that comes up whenever a new Devon breeder recognizes the gourmet quality of the meat in his pasture: can I sell this animal at a reasonable profit or do I have to settle for the price dictated by the auction barn? That same new Devon breeder also quickly becomes discouraged when he realizes he can’t produce enough meat for the commercial marketplace. Not many Devon breeders have the numbers necessary to supply the needs of just one store much less a major supermarket chain or a wholesaler that buys thousands of steers at a crack. The marketing problem seems insurmountable. Edward Taylor of Vermont wrote us recently…
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Addendum…..
….or should that be addenda? Addendae? Anyway, here’s more on managing heifers growing out of our Roundtable below. Both Bill Roberts and Juliet Cleave have posted comments along the way the past several days but I thought these two were worthy of special attention so I brought them up here. If you haven’t seen Juliet’s video, I hope you’ll do so now. Turn up the sound. http://youtu.be/S_kKoeRcmwM First, to re-introduce Juliet. She’s one of our partners in the Traditional Devon project in England. A native of Cornwall, living and raising Devon on land her family has farmed for well over 100 years. She has a spectacular herd and it was…
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Commenting on the comments…
Two readers of our blog (see the Roundtable below and the comments added) have prompted a response from Bill Roberts of 12 Stones Grasslands Beef. To comment on both thoughtful comments to the blog: We work with top grass fed cattle producers coast to coast. Several run grass cow/calf operations in the thousands and several finish fats in the multiple hundreds. Other than genetic potential, the three most common issues concerning limitations of grass cattle to grow and breed early or finish early are 1) Total nutrients available for the daily grazing 2) Adequate energy to meet animal requirements in the volume consumed daily 3) Mineralization 1 – is…
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Breeding heifers…and more…
The other day some of us got into a discussion, via email, about breeding heifers. But as these things go, we wandered off topic quite a bit. When I signed off, I realized that there might be some thought-starters in our ramblings for readers of this blog and so I have reproduced it here with the permission of the participants. Taking part were myself, and our two partners in Traditional Devon, Bill Walker and John Forelle, as well as two people whose counsel we frequently seek out: Bill Roberts of 12 Stones Grasslands Beef and Dr. Sue Beal, a holistic vet in Pennsylvania. The give-and-take began when I posted a video…