Field Notes: Summer 2008

Natural Livestock Workshop attendees. See photo Gallery for more photos...

Livestock...Naturally!

?The markets for natural and grass-fed meats are growing fast, both in Oklahoma and nationwide. Between 1997 and 2002, meat goat production doubled in Oklahoma, putting the state fifth in the U.S.

At a March 29 workshop at Connors State College in Warner, an experienced group of ranchers, veterinarians, and extension specialists laid out guidelines to help livestock producers get in on these profitable opportunities.

The presentations illustrated both the fundamentals common to many successful natural livestock enterprises, like rotational grazing and low-stress handling, as well as some of the individual strategies such businesses can use to adapt to their local circumstances.

Two Takes on Pastured Beef

“Agriculture is so tradition-bound,” says Jon Taggart, of Burgundy Pastured Beef in central Texas. “Everybody does it the way granddad did it.”
Taggart got the day rolling.

“I’ve been in ranching for 25 years, marketing beef for 10 years. I’ve been in cow-calf, stockers. I did the whole plant wheat, fertilize, spray-for-weeds thing – lots of inputs.”

But, Taggart said, that approach was making less and less money. “We were either going to figure out a way to make a living in the cattle business or get out of it.”

“There were no books, no classes,” he says. “I was told in no uncertain terms that this wouldn’t work.”
“But,” he continues, “I’m kind of hardheaded….”

These days, Taggart says, “We’ve been killing cattle once a week for 4 years. For 6 years our business has doubled every year, or more. We now have 8 full-time employees.”

In Arkansas, a group of eleven farmers combined a total of 50 head of cattle, of several different types and ages, on pasture, with the idea of marketing the meat cooperatively.

In 2002, nine of those farmers formed an LLC named Ozark Pastured Beef to pursue that plan.
The partnership now has seven members, four of whom are actively raising cattle. Two of them, holistic veterinarian Ann Wells and NRCS Arkansas grazing specialist Ron Morrow, also spoke at the workshop.

Feed and Forage
Both Ozark and Burgundy use management-intensive rotational grazing, and try to feed hay for as short a time as possible each year.

“We use a high-intensity, short-duration grazing system,” says Taggart. “We’ve done that forever and ever.”

At Ozark Pastured Beef, said Wells, the goal is to feed hay no more than 60 days out of the year.

Taggart is more blunt. “I hate it. If you gave me a baler today, I’d sell it tomorrow.”

“The only hay I feed is alfalfa,” he continues. “This year, we started at Christmas and went through February 15, which is when the winter annuals kick in.” He also sometimes feeds hay in the summer if the weather is dry.

With hay playing such a small role, live forages have to make up the difference. To do that, Taggart relies on cool-season annual crops, like wheat, oats, rye, and ryegrass. “I try to rotate pastures so that the ryegrass will go to seed,” he says. “I went four or five years without planting any before this year.”

“Ryegrass will make anyone look like a good farmer,” he jokes.

Taggart plants these forages with a no-till drill - “the only good piece of farm equipment I ever bought.”

He also uses the no-till drill to plant legumes, including alfalfa and various clovers, for fertility.”I don’t fertilize anything,” he said.

Ozark uses northwest Arkansas’ abundant supply of chicken litter as fertilizer. The plan is to raise soil fertility to a certain level with the litter, and then maintain it through management alone.

Quality Control
Raising livestock on grass alone is an accomplishment in itself, but it’s only the first step toward a successful overall enterprise. In Taggart’s experience as well as Morrow’s and Wells’, meat has to be both tender and well marbled to sell, no matter how it was produced.

“The biggest problem I see in the grassfed industry is quality,” Taggart opines. “People will only buy the story one time. They’ll buy the quality, the flavor, and the tenderness over and over again.”

“There’s a market for lean beef. There’s also a market for good beef.”

Wells concurs. Customers may say they want lean beef, she says, but they don’t really.

“On grass, I can fatten calves and then hold them for 2 years, if need be,” Taggart says. “I don’t subscribe to the idea that grass-finished cattle have to be managed on an ‘increasing plane of nutrition’ right through slaughter.”

Based on that thinking, Taggart gives his finishing herd what he calls “TLC.” Next year’s cattle, though, “have to work a little harder” on less palatable forage.

Burgundy Pasture Beef now kills animals between 24 and 30 months, usually at 1,250 to 1,350 lbs. Ozark’s kill weight is slightly less, around 1,100 to 1,200 lbs., which Wells said is the minimum necessary to cover costs.

The Fat of the Land
However, weight is not the primary concern of either operation. “I don’t care what they weigh,” says Taggart. “They don’t have to weigh a certain amount, but they have to be fat.”

Many ranches measure live animals’ fat content with ultrasound sensors, but neither Burgundy nor Ozark does. Ozark relies instead on body condition scoring (BCS), which does the same job by sight and touch, to judge whether animals are ready for slaughter.

“I think I can do as good a job by hand as by ultrasound,” Wells said. BCS scores range from 1 to 9. By Wells’ standard, animals scoring 6 and higher will have the fat cover and marbling necessary for quality cuts of meat.

“We’re looking for a body type rather than a breed,” Wells says – an attitude reflected in Ozark producers’ different breeds and types of cattle.

Taggart, on the other hand, uses all Angus cattle. “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” he says. “I’m a big believer in genetics.”

In fact, Taggart now buys cattle from only 2 ranches, whose genetics he’s found to be best for his purposes. In a departure from the cow-calf system used by Ozark (and many other) operations, he keeps no mother cows on the ranch at all.

Two years ago, he switched to buying only heifers. “Heifers marble better and earlier than steers,” he explains.

Part of the Process
Quality control begins in the pasture, but continues right through slaughter and beyond.

“The biggest headache was processing,” Taggart said, reflecting on Burgundy’s learning curve for direct marketing grass-fed beef. “A north Dallas customer paying twenty-eight dollars a pound for tenderloin doesn’t want blood all over the package.”

Eventually, the Taggarts solved that problem by building their own processing facility. A plant 32 miles away still kills their animals, but they do the rest of the processing – aging, cutting, packaging, and shipping – right on the ranch.

Ozark Pasture Beef, like most other ranches marketing meat direct to the customer, relies on a custom processor. For Ozark, it’s a two-hour trip across the state line, and they never haul less than 4 animals at a time.

The processor charges Ozark 60 cents per pound hanging weight, plus a $15 per animal kill fee. When Taggart custom processes other ranchers’ animals, his fee is a flat 70 cents per pound, including vacuum wrapping.

Both operations emphasize the importance of low-stress animal handling before and during processing. “You can do everything right and then screw it up in 20 minutes,” Taggart says.

“Never haul one by itself. In the early days, I’d take two even if we were only processing one,” he says, to avoid the stress of isolation in an unfamiliar environment. For the same reason, he avoids leaving the animals at the processor overnight.

Wells and Morrow, along with the other Ozark producers, visited their processor while the facility was still in the planning stages, to make sure that each understood the other’s expectations. Taggart confesses that he’s not above slipping a case of beer into the trailer to inspire a little extra care from the workers who’ll be handling his animals.

Ozark has their processor dry-age the carcass for about two weeks; Taggart prefers a full three. There’s a tradeoff: meat that hangs longer will be more tender, but also drier. A thick outer layer of fat is essential to keep the meat from drying out too much.

To Market…
Though their production methods are quite similar, the two businesses diverge in their proprietors’ off-farm obligations as well as in their location, and those differences shape their marketing strategies.

All four of Ozark’s currently active producers have what Wells calls “day jobs” – she as a veterinary consultant, Morrow with NRCS, and so on.

“This is a secondary or tertiary enterprise,” she says. “Marketing is way down the list.”
The business relies mainly on its website, as well as word of mouth, to attract customers in its northwestern Arkansas delivery area.

“Marketing is a lot of work, and the four of us are not marketers,” Wells says. “That is our biggest weakness.”

“Also, there’s no major metropolitan area nearby. Therefore, we don’t sell as much.”
Burgundy Pasture Beef, on the other hand, sits an hour’s drive from six million potential customers in the Dallas/Fort-Worth area.

Selling the Whole Cow
“Most of our marketing is home delivery,” Taggart says. “We were losing money when we started out, but we had to suffer through that.”

One breakthrough came when, like Ozark, they switched to a minimum order. (Burgundy’s is 10 pounds; Ozark’s is one hundred dollars.)

Another came through increasing volume. “Very few people will buy quarters and halves. You could do a small amount, kill once a year, sell to ten or twenty families – but we were looking at something bigger.”
In addition to their prime location, neither Jon nor Wendy Taggart works off the farm – a fact that has enabled them to expand their direct marketing well beyond their home-delivery base.

“I take care of the cows when they’re alive,” he quips, “and she takes care of them when they’re dead,” referring to the processing plant, “boucherie,” and restaurant that the couple have added over the years at the ranch.

“The restaurant is a way to move the surplus ground beef in a very high-value form – hamburgers,” he says. “It’s also made some former home-delivery customers into pickup customers; they’ll eat a hamburger once a month when they come to pick up their order.”

In addition, Burgundy has a nationwide shipping operation – born overnight, Taggart says, after a Time magazine article featured the ranch. The Taggarts also sell to selected area restaurants at retail prices.

Direct marketing has caused both Burgundy and Ozark to devise ways to move all the different kinds of cuts. Taggart pointed out that ground beef makes up half the weight of the cuts from a beef, but less than 40% of the value. The steaks are worth almost as much, but are only 15% of the weight.

“We have trouble moving the high-end steaks,” Morrow said. “The challenge,” Taggart agreed, “is to sell the whole cow.”

Reading the Label
Burgundy Pasture Beef’s label bears no special claims, such as “grassfed,” “organic,” or “hormone/ antibiotic free.” Such a “no-claim” label can be approved “in-house” by an on-site inspector; otherwise, Taggart says, it has to go all the way to Washington, D.C., and there’s much more red tape.

“If I was selling through Whole Foods, where the only customer contact was via that label, I would do the special claims,” he explains.

Ozark operates on a similar philosophy. “Both our land and cattle could be certified organic, but aren’t because we don’t need to,” Wells says. Customer relationships, she explains, serve the same purpose as the organic label.

To control flies, Taggart releases parasitic wasps every 2 weeks, wherever the cows are grazing. He buys them by mail, but suspects that he’s built up a resident population of wasps over time.

When the wasps aren’t enough to control all the flies, he uses orange oil. Wells uses essential oil preparations; some are available commercially, but she mixes her own.

Getting Parasites’ Goat
After the morning devoted to the specifics of two grassfed beef operations, Morrow and Wells continued into the afternoon, splitting the audience to focus on the general principles of natural raising of cattle and goats, respectively.

For goats, those principles necessarily involve a heavy emphasis on parasite management.

Drawing on her experience as a holistic veterinary practitioner, Wells reviewed several methods of parasite control as alternatives to chemical dewormers. Such alternatives are increasingly important, she said, since parasites are rapidly evolving resistance to the existing array of chemical controls.

However, Wells cautioned that alternative methods alone will never provide the same level of parasite control as chemical dewormers once did. As such, she emphasized a holistic approach combining alternative treatments with preventive management.

Management strategies that she said help to minimize parasite problems include selecting healthy animals with as much natural resistance as possible, quarantining new additions to the herd for a minimum of two weeks, regular monitoring of parasite levels, rotational grazing, and multi-species grazing.

The More, the Merrier
The day closed with a panel discussion of multi-species grazing. According to OSU Extension veterinarian David Sparks, grazing goats and cattle together can control parasites in both species, as well as undesirable plant species in pastures.

Cattle and goats, Sparks explained, are immune to each other’s parasites. “When a cow comes along and eats grass that has goat parasite larvae on it,” he said, ‘the only thing that the parasite gets to do is get digested. Cattle and goats just clean the pastures for each other.”

Sparks presented preliminary results from a study designed to test this idea.
Even without rotational grazing, goats had less severe worm problems when they shared native range with cattle (see figure below).

According to Sparks, this finding is even more encouraging than it might seem, since last summer’s cool and rainy conditions were ideal for the parasites. (This research is continuing with help from a Kerr Center Producer Grant; see Field Notes, Spring 2008.)

The same principle could apply to combining sheep with cattle as well, but Sparks favors goats because their diet is more different from that of cattle. “If you stock correctly, you probably don’t need to decrease the cattle stocking rate,” he said.

He mentioned one ranch that pays cropdusters every year to spray of one-third of its acreage for briars and brush. “If you had something that would eat those species, this could be an income stream instead of an expense,” he said.

“The days when we could afford to operate inefficiently and take the profit from cattle and put it into spray are probably at an end,” Sparks said. “I think that what we’re seeing here is probably the future of the livestock industry.”