Green Grass and Murray Greys:
Beaver Creek Farms’ Direct

—Wylie Harris

Tom Gunn and one of his Murray grey cows.

It’s a gray March day on Beaver Creek Farms outside Lawton – blustery, cold, threatening rain – and the cattle, a breed called Murray Grey, are colored to blend in. But ranch owner-operators Carole Brown and Tom Gunn see, in the green grass everywhere underfoot, the color of the stuff they’ll use to measure another successful season of direct-marketing their grassfed Oklahoma beef.

“The market doesn’t really affect the price we’re getting for our beef,” says Gunn. “Cattle prices are high now. Our premium is still higher, but not as much. But a year from now, the direct marketing price will still be high – the other prices, maybe not.”

Although – or perhaps because – their eyes never stray far from the bottom line, Brown and Gunn use an approach that considers the health of all parts of the system: soil, water, plants, animals – and customers.

“A lot of the people who buy our beef buy it for the health reasons of grassfed,” says Gunn. “We get a lot of interest through grassfed, and a lot through antibiotic- and hormone-free.”

Not long after they entered the cattle business in 1994-5, Gunn says, “We realized we’d get a better premium by going a different route. We compared the price we were getting for cattle and then the price of steak in the grocery store. There was no relationship.”

Gunn and Brown eased into the direct marketing game a few animals at a time. According to Brown, it took three to four years to build up a stable customer base.

Early on, she says, “We gave away a lot of free one-pound packs of hamburger, because that’s the easiest thing for people to tell the difference between ours and what they get in the store.”

The marketing efforts paid off. “We’ve never had a complaint about the beef,” says Brown. Today, if you want to buy Beaver Creek’s grassfed beef, there’s a place on the waiting list for you.

Even so, says Brown, “We try not to take anything to the butcher unless it’s already sold.”

Beaver Creek takes a small deposit in July and August – “just a commitment,” as Brown puts it – for an animal that will be slaughtered the following January. “We’d sell a lot more than we do,” she allows, “but people don’t realize that they have to plan ahead.”

Over the years, Beaver Creek’s customers have adjusted to that planning process. Brown and Gunn have shifted to meet their clients’ needs, too – for example, by moving their sale date closer to the time of year when people are getting tax refunds.

Brown and Gunn have tried several different processors over the years, finally settling on a small USDA inspected plant 60 miles away.

“We’ve found that it’s worth the drive,” says Gunn, citing the importance for direct marketers of locating a capable, trustworthy processor.

Beaver Creek’s customers are usually local, from Oklahoma City and Norman, with some from Tulsa. When their orders are ready, they pick them up at the processor themselves.

Selling by the quarter or the half, Beaver Creek needs no permits beyond the inspection sticker from the processing plant. Says Gunn, “If you can sell it local, why bother to ship?”

Like its marketing strategy, Beaver Creek’s signature breed is the result of a gradual conversion sparked by an early realization.

Brown and Gunn began with Limousin bulls in a mixed herd of cattle. Their interest in Murray Greys, an Australian breed currently celebrating its hundredth year of existence, grew out of an article the two saw in the Stockman-Grassfarmer magazine.

The article described Murray Greys as gentle, beefy, suited to all climates, with small, lively calves – and polled. “We really hated any kind of dehorning,” Gunn says.

He and Brown visited a herd of Murray Greys in Kansas, and, “We found it all to be true.”

“There are studies on different breeds and how they do finishing out on grass,” says Gunn. “Murray Greys do extremely well.”

So well, in fact, that the organizers of GrazeFest Alabama invited Beaver Creek to bring its animals for a display of different breeds at an event in Alabama last fall. The interest they drew helps explain why sales of breeding bulls make up a fast-growing share of Beaver Creek’s income.

“The number one criterion for bulls is tenderness—” Gunn says— “not how many pounds a day they’re going to gain.”

They have tail hair or semen tested for genetic markers of tenderness, with many of their bulls registering perfect scores.

That’s not to say that gain isn’t important, or that Beaver Creek hasn’t worked out its grass feeding routine to address it. Their calves gain 2.5 to 3 pounds a day on cool season grasses, Gunn says, while they shoot for 1 to 1.5 pounds a day during the summer.

How do they sustain that rate of gain on forage? “We’re not intensive grazing,” says Gunn. “We don’t move ‘em every day. That’s why we don’t overstock, and there’s always forage for them to go to. It takes more land to do it like we’re doing. But we can’t feed them corn – that’s just not the way we do things.”

Beaver Creek’s forage isn’t the only aspect of production that’s pampered. “Cattle have feelings. They really do,” Gunn explains. “We don’t use hotshots, or run ‘em with dogs or four-wheelers. We try to keep their stress as low as possible.”

Nor do Brown and Gunn overlook the “feelings” of soil and water. In 1998, Beaver Creek received an Oklahoma Producer Grant from the Kerr Center, which they used to plant buffer strips around, and fence livestock out of, a perpetually muddy pond draining several hundred acres of continuously cultivated land. As a result, over the years, the water in the pond has cleared up.

Even with such a successful record, Brown and Gunn are slow to claim credit. “We only have ten years’ experience,” says Gunn. “What we don’t know is amazing.” Still, it’s plain that they’ve found a niche in more than just the marketing sense when he says, “We will never give up the beef business.”

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