Ranch sustainability requires land care that works for the long haul and management that makes a profit more years than not. Jim Rickert, owner of the Prather Ranch in northern California, makes the case that a ranch must take care of people and animals, too, in order to last, and these goals are synergistic, not mutually exclusive. This two-part interview with Jim chronicles his circuitous path from a masters degree doing linear programming models of farm financial alternatives under Earl Butz, economist at Purdue, later US Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Nixon and Ford, to running a fully integrated beef operation, with a closed cow herd, a ranch feedlot, and a gold-standard abattoir. Perhaps most unique, Prather Ranch has “an international reputation as a supplier of high quality bovine hides, bones, tissues, organs and other bovine xenograft materials for the medical device, pharmaceutical and biological industries.” Be sure to check back for part two of this fascinating interview.
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>> Welcome to The Art of Range, the podcast focused on ranged lands and the people who manage them. I’m your host, Tip Hudson, range and livestock specialist with Washington State University Extension. The goal of this podcast is education and conservation through conversation. Find us online at artofrange.com.
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This is the first episode in a two-part series with Jim Rickert, manager of the Prather Ranch in Northern California. You can find both episodes at artofrange.com. One of my goals for this podcast is to hear from people who have been practicing the art of ranching and have been successful. As I’ve said before, an art is really the application of a body of knowledge. We speak of someone practicing law or practicing medicine. If only ranching were rocket science, it would be simple, but it’s much more complex than that. I personally think the idea of positive and consistent financial, environmental, and social outcomes for ranching is a decent way to define success. Now, not everything that one ranching family does is replicable in other places, in other biological and social contexts, but we still learn things that enlarge our thinking. One famous writer said that we should read promiscuously because that’s good for our ability to think well and communicate well. I think we should listen to the stories of other people who have made a living producing the tangible things that humans need to live well. So with that, the long non-introduction during which I said nothing at all useful about today’s guest, I’ll welcome my guest, Jim Rickert. Jim is a rancher in Northern California with some experience with innovation and what it looks like to be a rancher. Jim, welcome to the show.
>> Thank you.
>> I was introduced to Jim through a mutual friend and we’ve not met in person, but we have visited by phone a couple times about some of what the Prather Ranch does. Jim, your last name is not Prather. Can you do a little bit of self-introduction and tell us who you are and give a brief history of the ranch?
>> Yeah. My name is Jim Rickert and the name Prather Ranch really comes from a historical family that owned it years ago. There are no Prathers in the ownership these days. The last Prather sold out somewhere around the late 1930s. But the family had owned it starting back–the ranch–starting back in the 1880s and they were there for a number of years. My involvement started out in the ranch in 1979. My wife and I had gotten out of graduate school and was working as an add consultant and appraiser, real estate appraiser, on large agricultural properties. And I had the opportunity to go for a ride one of these days with a good close friend of ours that owns the Shasta Livestock Auction Yard at Ellington Peek and on the way we were shipping cattle and doing things. I would help out with him on some cattle things as well. We stopped at the ranch here, the Prather Ranch, and in the process, I met the owner of the ranch, a man named Walter Ralphs. Walt was in the supermarket business and owned Ralph’s Supermarkets in Los Angeles. He lived in Beverly Hills, and we just happened to be at the ranch today. We were there and we had a nice visit and I visited with some of the employees and what have you, and then about six months later, he called me up and asked me if I’d be willing to come and take a look at the ranch and kind of do analysis. He’d owned it for about 16 years and always had yet to break even on the operation and had dumped a lot of money into it. So that led us to coming up. I did a little consulting assignment and looked at it and sent it to him, and then a few weeks later, he called me up and said, “You know, I’d like to come up and visit with you in person.” And we had some more talks, but he said, “I’d like to hire you.” And I said, “Huh.” And, you know, I was 31 years old. My wife is four years younger than I am and he came up and met us and I’m not quite sure what happened, but the next thing we knew we had a job, and that was the start of it all. And at the time, the ranch had about 1,000 other cows and I took over in the fall. As we got in and mouthed the cows, there was about 40% of the cows that didn’t appear to me that they’d had a calf in the last two to three years and most of them had no teeth. And so we shipped them off pretty quickly and kind of started really concentrating on trying to improve the genetics there. We were scattered out in another ranch in Southern Oregon where we were shipping cattle there and I looked around at the headquarters ranch and said, “You know, if we sell that ranch up there, we can invest about half the proceeds in this ranch, and back in the headquarters ranch, improve irrigation and grow more feed than we grew on the ranch in Oregon.” And so we did that and started adding net expanded hay production where at our peak of operation, we at one time we grew 19,000 tons of hay on about 5,000 acres of hay ground in over about 5 miles from our headquarters ranch.
>> You mentioned on the website that Walter Ralphs’ dream was for the ranch to be productive and environmentally progressive, but it sounds it sounds like he wasn’t able to put legs on that. What do you think he meant by that?
>> Walt was a visionary guy. He really cared about the environment and wanted to develop a really great property that we could be very sustainable and did things together. And so the good news was he was really committed to that and it just didn’t work for him the way we were originally doing it. And the previous management had issues and the pieces just didn’t come together. I mean, that’s just to give you an example of, you know, 40% of the cows hadn’t had a calf in a year or two. That was the starting point for some of this, and we had little black cows that, you know, they were maybe 1,000 pounds and we had some genetic issues as well. But he was visionary and he was willing. What he basically said to me was is part of being sustainable, though, is being profitable, and he said, Jim, I’m going to give you a chunk of money to you and Mary and you guys are in charge of making this go and I’m going to put money in your bank account and then you’re on your own. I don’t want you to come back to me for more money and subsidize this. I did that for 16 years, and so you got to make it work. So I looked at the numbers and said, you know, I can do this, and, of course, when you’re 30 years old, you know, it’s put me in coach. I can do anything, you know, kind of thing. Well, there were more than a couple of years along the way that one way that I made it sustainable is by not paying Jim and Mary for that year and waiting till we had a better year.
>> Yeah.
>> That happened along the way a time or two. But he was very willing to leave the ranch and the assets there and we had the opportunity to work with it, so we survived droughts and floods and fires and all the various things that nature seems to throw at you along the way.
>> Yeah. I think people outside of agriculture don’t fully appreciate the necessity of being financially viable.
>> Yes.
>> Finances are typically what cause ranchers, whether a mom and pop family ranch with 200 cows or a corporate ranch, to quit.
>> Yes. Yes. You know, I continued to be a real estate appraiser through these times that we were in. And, you know, by the early 1980s, everything was pretty well upside down, and I remember in the early 80s appraising for the various banks acquired properties and in Northern California and Southern Oregon we did over 400,000 acres and just ranch properties everywhere and farms and orchards and you name it and they were upside down. And there was a point when, you know, you had 18% interest rates and you had any kind of debt. There was no way. The good operators were being taken out.
>> Yeah.
>> It was just hemorrhaged and we were fortunate enough. Those were some of the years where Jim and Mary didn’t get paid, but we were fortunate to make it through.
>> You mentioned in our pre-interview conversation that you did a master’s program and part of that was some modelling.
>> Yes.
>> To model farm operations, financial operations. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Was that a master’s in ag business.
>> That was a master’s in ag economics from Purdue. I did my undergrads at work Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and then I went to Purdue and at the time I thought it was, you know, and it probably still could be, but one of the top ag econ schools, and I thought if I’m going to be an agriculturalist and interested in agriculture, I need to know something. I’m a West Coast boy. I need to know something about Midwestern agriculture because that is the driver of agriculture. And, you know, I was fortunate to arrive there when Earl Butz was still the department head. He left shortly afterwards and went be head of USDA. And another one of my accomplishments was that being an economics guy, Earl hired me and another grad student to take rental trucks. On the weekends, we hauled his furniture to the USDA to his new home in I think it was in Maryland and I actually got a personal tour of the USDA building with Earl But, the secretary of agriculture. That was very fun. He was a good guy, but he saved a lot of money by having the grad students run U-Haul trucks and bring his furniture over. And my master’s thesis was a linear programing model of a Midwestern farm and it evolved into what was a number of us contributed to this. It finally became Purdue Model B and basically it’s, you know, linear programing is solving simultaneous equations. And the model we built and this was in the days with IBM punch cards, the big mainframe computers and refrigerated buildings. It was laborious. My cellphone probably can do. It has more power than those big machines had in the day.
>> Yeah.
>> All these technicians. It was amazing. Gowned up in white uniforms and everything. So what we were doing is trying to basically mathematically model a Midwestern farm and then you would go through and test different types of equipment and there was a lot of data available on planting dates and yields, so what you were trying to do is identify opportunities to make the farms more efficient and what an extra hour of planting time in the right day and the right months would do to the bottom line. And we’d find that when we would run these models and we would go out and beta test them with farmers. They’d go and we’d run it on their farm and do their thing with the extension service and we’d take their exact data and run it and I’d point out to the farmer and say, “You know, if you planted an extra hour of planting on say April or whatever the date was, this has a shadow price, which shows what one addition unit is worth, of like $500 an hour.” And these people would blink their eyes and say, “Well, hell. I think I’m going to get my brother in law to come over and take his vacation in April and we’ll gobble up a bunch of those $500 an hour deals rather than and we’ll put the extra time planting at that time.” And then we would look 8 row equipment versus 12 row equipment versus 16 row equipment and kind of model that and see what does that do with all the different things, so we were all the way from the start to the finish and trying to model all these different things. And so we’d end up with these big trays of these IBM punch cards and the number of factors in it were, I mean, there were thousands of different entries we were making for this data, so it was very interesting things. But it was just at the front end of all this when all these computer models were starting to happen. And, you know, we would also do least cost feed rations. We were pioneering with that. And in a plant in Minnesota, we were looking at a meat processing plant and we were trying to come up with what’s the least cost combination of materials to make a hot dog because the prices changed every day and maybe the plates would bring one price and you had to get the yields, you know. There was all these different things to optimize and it was an interesting time and I was right on the front end of all this and I kind of basically left school thinking that we’re never going to use this kind of stuff because it’s so cumbersome to get at it and then, you know, it wasn’t that many years later I owned a little Macintosh and we started, you know, to multiplan and started doing some of these things and it kind of would grow and it would do a few little simple things. Now, like I say, my telephone probably has more power than that machine that we were using in Indiana.
>> Yeah. It’s interesting that you moved from running these computer models on row crop farming and eventually ended up ranching.
>> Well, it was kind of in my blood, you know. My family, depending on which side, had been in California and ranched in the West Coast, you know, from the 1850s through the 1900s depending on which group came along, and even I don’t know. Maybe even farming is a little bit in my blood. I’ve always loved agriculture and my relative in North American was a Hessian soldier that reportedly got captured in Trenton when Washington crossed the Delaware and he was offered to either be ransom back to the Duke of Hesse or he could switch sides, and if the colonials won, then they were going to give him some land somewhere and he opted for that.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Let’s shift gears to talk about the beef operation that you’re running now. But as a context to get there, there is a TEDx talk. I assume that was you giving the TEDx talk nearly a decade ago.
>> Actually, it was my son.
>> OK.
>> Yeah.
>> He talked about an invisible contract between food producers and food consumers and this seems like that’s a useful thing to keep in mind as we continue talking about vertical integration and land stewardship because it seems like this invisible contract is driving some of that thinking and action. What did he mean by this invisible contract between producers and consumers?
>> Well, you know, the producers have this obligation to produce clean, healthy, wholesome food in a sustainable manner that doesn’t degrade the environment and we as a family truly believe in that. On the other hand, the consumers have a right to ask us to produce food in that manner and there are some food practices and production practices that you don’t feed too good about sometimes. The USDA will allow you to do it. But, you know, for example, in our processing room where we’re breaking meat and we’re cutting it. You know, actually I’m better off having people who don’t have much experience and we train them than I am experienced meat cutters because one of the first things I say is that while USDA might allow us to do things and this is acceptable to go through the Food Inspection Service and we could sell this product, if you wouldn’t feed it to your family, to your children, grandchildren–in my case, grandchildren and children–then we shouldn’t do it period. And so it’s a little different take on it, but that is our–and people get that. And in fact, all the employees that are full-time within our organization, they all get what part of their compensation is beef, and so they eat it. They feed it to their families and we take a lot of pride in trying to do it in a really–in a lot of ways, we’re pretty old fashioned. In our kill plant, we don’t have a hide puller. We skin them all by hand. Yesterday, we–we’re not high output. We’ve never slaughtered an animal that we didn’t raise in a herd and we opened the plant in May of 1995. I personally work on the kill floor with the crew because it’s kind of a control point where I can see everything, and I look at a carcass and I can tell you real quickly if somebody given a chop in the wrong place, if we have an abscess. You know, we’re looking at the livers. You name it. We’re right there and it’s like a roadmap for me and I actually like to bring the cattle up to the knock box myself personally. I like to do that just because I want to really minimize the stress. The animals are fed in pens. We do feed them a mixture of rolled barley and rice bran and ranch-raised hay and we fatten them for 100 to 150 days probably is the general range. Our cattle are 1,300. I try to shoot for 1,350, 1,400 pounders. 750 pound to 800 pound carcasses. Of course, there’s variations within all of that and, you know, heifers are oftentimes a little smaller and what you. In a typical kill day, you know, we do about 22 beef, of which two or three are call animals and the balance of them are what we call fats and we hand select them. We walk them from the pens where they’ve been fed and with the peer group they’ve been with their whole life. They’re born together in the different herds that are separated around here and they keep those same peer groups together and then bring over, lay them individually, and then, like I say, that’s done on Monday and yesterday was our kill day. Yesterday, we killed 20 beef. We’ve had a lot of trouble with COVID and we’re still kind of digging our way out of that issue a little bit, so we had to slow down production a little bit. And then the animals, I’ll bring them up. We have a guy that knocks them and I typically bone out the cow heads and do some of the skinning and those are a couple of the worst jobs, and I’m kind of a big fan of if I’ll do the worst job, then it’s easier for me to ask somebody to do the second worst job and people respond pretty well to that. So when we’re dealing with the different problems in there, I’m just right there with everybody, so pretty darn hands-on that way.
>> Yeah. I think the term old fashioned is sometimes perceived in modern agriculture as a euphemism for inefficiency and failing to keep up with the times and kind of a negative connotation, but old fashioned in your case sounds like obeying the second commandment, which is to love your neighbor as yourself, and in a real way that has market value if you don’t have all these middlemen between the consumer and the producer.
>> Yeah. We’ve created a brand of beef product. For example, we dry age the beef for two weeks, so the cattle that we killed yesterday, we won’t start them. Well, actually they’ll start on the 13th just because we cut beef every day of the week. We’ll start them on the 13th day and then, you know, that’ll take pretty well that next whole week to cut all this beef up.
>> Yeah. Describe dry aging for those that may not be familiar with this.
>> Basically, we hang those carcasses for about two weeks and we hang them. We have a separate cooler. We have a drip cooler and then a staging cooler and then we have this aging cooler in the back and we keep the lights off. We keep it right at 35-36 degrees. Just basically, you end up with a lot of evaporation. It’s actually controlled decomposition is really what we’re doing and it concentrates the flavor. We lose about 3% of the body weight, of the carcass weight in this process and it really enhances the flavors. It also causes the muscle fibers to relax quite a bit, so you end up with tenderer product and you get a more concentrated beef flavor. Big plants just can’t do that and I want to do niche things that people can’t. And so it makes a completely different product. And if you start out with a good English crossbred and a majority of our cattle are black baldies and we’ve been heavily involved in trying to do selection. I mean, we have a closed herd. We haven’t purchased a female since the mid-1970s and we’ve discontinued buying live bulls in 1990, so we have a separate breeding program where we AI a group of cattle, of cows, that we think are best in cattle and we have a heifer line and an Angus line for our bulls that we produce from those cows and we will AI once and use clean up bulls in our process. We end up with a calf crop typically from the, you know, somewhere between 92 and 95% calf crop winged from bred cows and then, you know, probably 5 to 7% that are opened, you know, in the fall. We’ll keep a cow basically as long as she keeps having a calf. We have a little grandma that we keep around, and actually I’ve in the opinion that longevity is pretty darn important in this business. And so we’re even select quite a few heifers, even though they’re a little smaller sometimes, from these grandmas that have been around. You know, I had a cow. We slaughter it. She was what? 21 years old and she gave us 19 calves and she came and brought one in every time and she was kind of a nondescript, you know, kind of a medium frame, but she calved within two weeks every time and we like heifers out of cows like that.
>> Going back to the aging question. What is the standard practice, you know, in a large industrial plant?
>> The standard practice is to kill them as soon as you get them chilled out. You put them in a big plant. You put them in a cryovac and you ship them off and they have a much different thing that happens in a cryovac because you’re in anaerobic condition and you have all this blood and water that kind of oozes out of them. You open up a primal that comes out of an I’ll call it wet aging, you open that thing up and sometimes it has some really foul odors, one part of it, and it just is much different and there’s lots of fluids inside it in the bags when you get a ribeye or a loin or something like that where dry aging you have a much different–it’s aerobic, and so you have a much different smell. I think it changes the taste. In fact, I even feel there’s a nuance to the barley feeding that we do. It’s creates in my opinion a little more buttery taste to the beef than say corn or something that has a lot of silage feed into it. You know, the dry hay and this combination with the rice bran and the rolled barley. It’s kind of nuanced kind of like you think about how you do wine and people go to great descriptions of the different flavors in wine and I frankly can’t quite taste them.
>> Yeah.
>> But, you know, you hear these wine connoisseurs, they go through some quite elaborate discussion, but I do think there is a difference in beef that way. And the dry aging is very old technique and big plants just can’t do it. Can you image if you had a–let’s say you had a seven weight carcass and you were going to lose 3%. So you lose 3%, so that’s 20-some pounds and then it just evaporates and then you take that and you sell it for, you know, 2 1/2, $3 a pound. You got $50 a head pretty easy.
>> Yeah.
>> In just moisture that evaporated and went, and then if you did 4,000 head in a day, now that’s a real number. That’s a real number. Now, we hope that we can make up for that by charging a little premium price and appreciate the effort and the nuanced work we do. And we’re really big on, you know, most of our properties that we operate on have conservation easements on them and we’re in it for the long pull. And an awful lot of them are located, you know, we’re over a 200 mile radius with the ranching operations and we take advantage of the fact that California has an alpine climate in the mountainous areas in the north part of the state and a Mediterranean climate in the foothills starting from Redding, California, and going down. There’s a Mediterranean climate down there. So we end up with–when it rains and we are suffering a massive drought, but when it rains and it will rain again someday, when it rains, I have times where, you know, I have 1,400 mother cows and feed to the mother cows feed 200 or 300 tons of hay and it’s just to supplement a few groups before we can get them on a truck and ship them south. When it does that, it’s pretty slick. When it doesn’t rain, there’s a whole different story.
>> Yeah. I’d like to talk about what that forage supply cycle looks like for you, but I wanted to go back first to the idea of flavor. You finish your own cattle. There’s a fair bit of–there’s a lot of emotion out there regarding grain finishing versus grass finishing. How do you finish cattle? And how do you think that effects flavor?
>> We grain finish our cattle with this mixture rolled barley. Now, we don’t max them out, you know, to where we’re feeding a really hot ration, but we get up to 75-80%, you know, grain, concentrate the grains in our ration by the time we get to the feeding period. But we don’t end up with a lot of abscessed livers or anything like that you do when you’re really feeding a hot mix. So we lose a little bit of efficiency. We don’t feed any, you know, anything else to that. I mean, it’s an all-natural mix that way. People worry about GMO feed and, you know, they talk about that. Well, I’m not aware of any GMO barley, so we don’t have that issue. We raise the hay ourselves. And there’s no GMO rice, so there’s no GMO rice bran out of that as well. Years ago when my grandfather and my father and his brothers–each of them had a slaughter plant and a couple different plants over the years and in my grandfather’s day prior to WWII grains were relatively expensive and they didn’t feed very much grain at all and it was grass-fed cattle. And in fact, our slaughter plant in Sutter County down towards Sacramento, we had a slaughter plant before we had electricity and refrigeration. Now, that was a challenge. We would slaughter one day, you know, one or two animals, bring it into town, chill them out. In the summertime, there wasn’t much chill out and people would come buy the meat and they would buy what was exposed. If you got there at the wrong time of the day, you got the neck, and if you got a little later in the day, you might get, you know, a New York or a ribeye. And if you were really late in the day, you got rounds or corned beef or salted beef and they would store it that way. But in visiting with my grandfather and father there in the Mediterranean climate, we had some really nice–and I can get them now–some really nice grass-fed beef in May and June. Basically what’s happened is those grasses, those annual forages, which were mostly annuals in that Mediterranean climate, they were maturing and basically they have these seed heads and those animals will select the seed heads and they’ll select for those, whether ryegrass or oats or something or wild oats or something like that. They’ll select for those seed heads you end up–we’ve had some beautiful, I mean, literally choice animals that I’ve brought off. You know, I’ve kept some around and what works really well is I have a heifer that lost a calf and we’ll leave those heifers out there, and when that feed turns, they can just get goby fat and we’ll bring them in and I won’t even feed them. You know, I mean it’s amazing. White fat and just beautiful animals. But there’s a little window and then you’ve got to have some age on the animal, so you can’t get that on, you know, a 15 or 18-month-old animal. You got to have a little maturity in it to get them to start fattening.
>> Got it.
>> You can push them with grain and get them to fatten, but you can’t do it with a young animal just off of grass, and then we have a window in the fall alpine climate where we can do it again. And I always ask the grass-fed people, I say, “What do you do in January, February, and March?” And, “What do you do?” And most of the time they just say, “Well, we don’t produce any at that time of the year.” How do we make a competitive business out with a slaughter plant if you have to lay the plant off and the employees off for three months a year or six months? You know, I don’t know how you make a sustainable model. And another important thing is to have products that aren’t so expensive that– Walter Ralphs always believed in this–that we need to selling products at prices that ordinary people can afford. In fact, we sell one beef a week out of our plant here and it’s to the local folks. I mean, you have to come pick it up at the plant and we try to gear it to our community here, and we have a really, you know, almost poverty. There’s probably, you know, our unemployment rate in this little community we’re in runs 20 to 25% typically, so it’s a really impoverished area and actually jobs here at the ranch are pretty coveted for the community. And anyway, we sell that and this is all in cryovac individual cuts, boneless. You get a quarter of a beef and we charge 4.99 a pound. That means for the price of good quality hamburger, you get the fillets and New Yorks and roasts and everything else and it’s all boneless. And we have about a three to six month waiting list on it and people usually, I mean, it’s the same customers and I’ve had them for in some cases 20 years and they order one and they say, “Put me on the list for six months from now.” Now, we charge a lot. We charge quite a bit more for individual steaks and stuff that’s sold in the Farmers’ Markets in the Bay Area. That’s a much different clientele there and, you know, hamburger is $10 a pound and fillets are 30 down there. But it’s much more expensive to deliver to those people and to go through the process of getting there. And, you know, selling an individual steak to someone in one of the communities, Danville or one of those communities down in the Bay Area or San Rafael, it’s amazing how much it costs to do business in the San Francisco Bay Area.
>> Yeah. You alluded to it just now that we haven’t talked about it directly. How do you conduct direct meat sales for the rest of the product that comes through plant, if you don’t mind saying?
>> Well, we have three small meat shops/grocery stores that we sell carcases to and they break them from there. We have a wholesale distributer down in the Oakland area that we sell to and they further take meat out to restaurants and that sort of thing, and then we have a Farmers’ Market presence, which we’ve had for close to 30 years, in the Bay Area. And we have a young couple that they homeschool their kids and they go to all the markets and this family does the marketing there, and they’re just wonderful folks and they’ve got it so they work all weekends and then they take a couple days off in the middle of the week and it’s fun to watch. I mean, some of these–I mean, the oldest now is 12 years old, but he’ll wait on customers and count change back to them. I mean, it’s fun to go down and participate in that.
>> For ranchers that don’t want to own a slaughter plant on their own, what do you think about people pursuing direct meat sales on their own, you know, going through a customer cutter and/or trying to get into a USDA plant that’ll release a carcass? What do you think about people that don’t own a plant trying out direct meat sales? What are some of the pros and cons of that?
>> Well, lots of folks have tried that and, you know, I remember I think it’s Dan Makin, one of US Davis farm advisors up in I think Placer County. He says, “You know, I have a stack of business plans for direct marketing that’s about two feet tall that comes from all these different producers.” And he says, “Then I have another stack that has the ones that are still in business five years from now and have been in business for five years. And then I’ve got one lonely one out there on the end that’s been there for over 20 years.” He says, “That’s you, Jim.”
>> Right.
>> It’s a tough gig. The slaughter plants are a long ways away. They’re really busy now. And so you end up, you know, it’s a tough thing to haul six beef to a slaughter plant 200 miles away, get them killed, get them cut up and then come back and pick up the meat. I know there was one guy who was doing this and he lived up, he was about 100 miles away from the kill plant. He would haul down this five or six, then he would pick it up and drive it to Los Angeles and sell it, and man, oh man! Unless you value your time at about 10 cents an hour, I don’t know how that works because you don’t have any volume of business. And another issue for custom plants is the stress on the animals prior to slaughter. It’s always been a big deal to me. In fact, that’s why I even move the animals up personally. I want to handle those animals really, really quietly and really, really gently. I want them to not be stressed out. I don’t want all of the stress hormones that come and what’s just inherent in bringing animals and they get into strange locations and the strange water and smells and everything else. Our cattle are locked over to the kill floor and they’re drinking out of water that’s the same water they’ve been drinking for the last three or four months. They’re with the cattle they were with. There’s no strange cattle. They’re with their peer group of cattle, their herd mates. And so if I do it right, they’re not stressed out at all. And then you bring them in, you lead them up. We even have a quote from our old acquaintance from way back, Temple Grandin, above the knock box about, you know, giving them a little moment of silence and we’re still taking their lives, but we try real hard to make this an unpleasant process. I mean, we’re still taking an animals life, but make it as cordially as possible with the least amount of stress on the animal. I see no reason to abuse an animal and then take its life. It seems to me like we owe that animal the respect of trying to do this in the very best way possible, and people are really receptive of that. We’ve been through the certified humane process. We were the first large herd in their system and they’ve audited us every year and, you know, we try to be real responsive to all that. I mean, we want to give these animals the absolute best life possible and one bad day.
>> Yeah. I like that. I suspect that a lot of vegetarians are vegetarians not because they believe beef in moderation is really bad for people, but because of some real and perceived abuses of animals.
>> Absolutely. And we actually see that a lot in our customers. We have a lot of people. We’ve had a couple of books written. There was a gal who was from Berkeley who she was a vegetarian and she was having a lot of health issues. And so she went to her doctor. Her doctor said, “You need to eat meat.” And she was a writer, so she contacted us and said, “You know, I’ve been doing research on meat and I need to eat meat, but I need to get it. I just don’t feel right about how these are raised. Could I come up and would you show me everything you do?” And we did, and I took a bit of a risk on this. In fact, we’re pretty transparent. If you want to come watch slaughter. I mean, I’m not going to probably bring the PETA people, but, you know, anybody who takes a reasonable interest in it, I’m pretty transparent about it. Come up and watch us and we’re working hard to do this right. And she came up. We went through the whole process all the way from tagging newborn calves and we have an ISO 9000 compliant cattle herd, so we have a whole routine. We have SOPs and everything else and that has to do with another part of our business in the biomedical part. But we brought her through the whole thing. She was out and rode around with us and helped tag calves and went through. We were shipping cattle about the time she was here to some other pastures and she went to different places and then she came up here and watched the whole process, and then when we get done with the kill day, we actually, the whole kill crew along with me, one day a week we have a meal prepared for us and we all eat a meal together and just break bread and thanks for all their participation. It gives me a good chance to visit with everybody directly and find out if there’s any issues. People are pretty relaxed and we just finish our day’s work and, you know, we start early and work hard and then everybody can take the afternoon off that’s in the kill crew. So anyway, she went through the whole process and with that particular day we were having hamburgers, barbecued hamburgers, and she looked around and she had a hamburger with us.
>> Wow.
>> That was the first meat she’d eaten. She saw what was happening and what we did and how we cared for the animals and we truly, really do believe it. I mean, it’s good business, but it’s also good morals. If we’re entrusted with these animals, it’s to take care of them and do it properly. I mean, it seems to me that’s just apparent.
>> Right.
>> But sometimes these systems are really difficult to accomplish that even with the best intentions. I don’t know how people can slaughter 4,000 head in the day and all these people and the 80% turnover I read about in the big plants. I mean, we have people that have been with us for 20 years.
>> Yeah.
>> My hat is off to them. We should have food safety issues. They really do a wonderful job with a difficult situation.
>> This conclusions the first part of my two-part interview with James Rickert. If you have not already, please subscribe to the show in your podcast app of choice to make sure you don’t miss the conclusion of my interview with Jim in the next episode. Thank you for listening to The Art of Range podcast. You can subscribe to and review the show through iTunes or your favorite podcasting app so you never miss an episode. Just search for Art of Range. If you have questions or comments for us to address in a future episode, send an email to show@artofrange.com. For article and links to other resources mentioned in the podcast, please see the show notes at artofrange.com. Listener feedback is important to the success of our mission: empowering rangeland managers. Please take a moment to fill out a brief survey at artofrange.com. This podcast is produced by Connors Communications in the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences Washington State University. The project is supported by the University of Arizona and funded by the Western Center for Risk Management Education through the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
>> The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed guests of this podcast are their own and does not imply Washington State University’s endorsement.
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