The predictable re-emergence
of mad cow disease on American shores brings to mind the Mandarin
Chinese word for crisis — a combination of the ideograms for
danger as well as opportunity.
The danger is obvious and
growing, as mathematical probability tells us there must be more
than two mad cows among the 112 million or so in our national herd.
More will be found, and the crisis will grow. And so will the
opportunity for anyone producing and marketing healthy beef.
Natural, organic and grass-fed meat are all sure to
attract the attention of careful meat-eaters. Because of all the
better beef technologies, grass-fed is the safest from
Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE). In fact,
it would be virtually impossible for a calf born on a grass-only
ranch or farm, fed only on its mother’s milk, weaned and
raised on local grass or hay, to contract BSE. Grass-feeding offers
beef eaters the only 100 percent guaranteed source of prion-free
meat.
But how do we find it?
The main problem,
for grass-fed producers and consumers alike, has been market
infrastructure. It just isn’t there. The combination of low
volume, high capital requirements, overcautious investors and a
complete lack of interest on the part of mainstream packers, has
forced grass-only ranchers to become their own marketers, either
directly from the farm, through small local brokers or through one
of the small grass-fed cooperatives that have sprung up around the
country.
What appears to be working for some ranchers is
to simply set aside a few steers every year, raise them on grass,
and sell directly to restaurants and local buyers willing to buy a
quarter of butchered meat.
Mark Harris, whose ranch in
central Montana runs about 1,000 cows, set aside 45 steers last
year for the grass-fed market, up from 15 the year before.
He’s expecting demand from the nearby communities of
Billings, Livingston and Bozeman to grow as consumers become more
aware of the health advantages of grass-fed meat.
But for
larger, all-grass operations, the problem remains demand. It still
isn’t there. So Harris would be taking an unacceptable risk
converting his whole ranch. The grass-fed message, which has
sounded more like sentimental pure-food evangelism than traditional
meat marketing, has not persuaded enough consumers that the product
is safer and thus worth the extra cost or effort.
That
will surely change as the horrors of new variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob
Disease (nvCJD) become better known and more mad cows appear from
crowded feedlots, finished on things they were never supposed to
eat.
An opportunity is opening for an enterprising packer
to make the switch fromvfeedlot-fed to grass-fed beef. It
wouldn’t have to be one of the gigantic four which dominate
conventional meat production. But whoever makes the move should be
national in scope, well-capitalized, and experienced at selling and
delivering fresh meat to a fast-growing market.
This
would be good news for the Tallgrass Prairie Producers Cooperative,
composed of 10 ranches and an office in central Kansas. It went out
of business in 2000 after five tough years of learning painful
lessons about self-marketing beef. Now, they’re thinking of
kick-starting the venture back into play. But as Annie Wilson, a
member of the co-op, says, “A successful business needs access to
volume markets to reach breakeven.”
That’s
something an isolated rural cooperative can rarely find, and
it’s also missing in the West’s urban settings.
Grass-fed ranchers Mike and Sally Gale in Chileno Valley, Calif.,
say their phone has been ringing off the hook since the first Mad
Cow story broke.
“We’ve had over 50 new customers,
including restaurants and food retailers, call during the first
month after the story broke, some from out of state. If there was a
packer-distributor who knew how to slaughter and process grass-fed
beef and distribute it nationwide, there would be thousands of new
outlets, retail and wholesale,” says Mike Gale. “I could refer
customers directly to them. And if there was special stockyard
sales of grass-fed animals, and ranchers didn’t have to rely
on local cattle brokers, they’d go grass-fed in a heartbeat.
With the constant threat of BSE in the food chain, it would seem
like a great way to go.”
The Gales and hundreds of other
small ranchers committed to raising healthy beef on grass are
hoping that just one national packer will make the switch.
It would be a tipping point for their product. “And one
day,” says Mike Gale with a grin, “we might even seem normal.”
Mark Dowie is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org).
He lives in cattle country about 50 miles north of San Francisco
and teaches at the University of California Graduate School of
Journalism in Berkeley.
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