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Jeff Schmidt and his family run JR Ranch near Othello,
Washington (in the Columbia Basin), raising purebred Angus and
Shorthorn cattle and marketing some of their animals through his
parent’s grocery store as natural beef. His parents, Roger and
Ellie Schmidt, own and operate Sunny Farms Country Store, a
retail produce store in Sequim (on the Olympic Peninsula in
western Washington), a very unique store that has a growing
customer demand for natural beef.
Roger Schmidt got his own start in the produce business working
for his father 40 years ago, raising and marketing produce in
the Seattle area. Then for 10 years he leased and operated the
Yakima Fruit Market in Bothell, Washington. In 1976, when Jeff
was 10 years old, Roger and Ellie moved their family to Sequim,
bought an old dairy farm, raised a few cattle and started a
you-pick produce business. They milked a few cows and ate the
vegetables they grew. In 1977 they constructed a small plywood
building to house the products they were marketing, and the
business kept growing—and they kept adding onto what eventually
became their country store.
About the same time they started the you-pick produce business,
they began raising registered Shorthorn cattle on a small scale,
starting with one purebred cow purchased from a neighbor. They
gradually replaced their small herd of commercial beef cows with
purebreds. Roger says, “We started selling some of our beef to
local people, selling halves and quarters that we custom cut and
wrapped at our Sunny Farms Country Store. We’d occasionally have
an extra quarter of beef so we started selling it in our retail
cases.” Customers liked the locally raised beef, and eventually
the Schmidts were marketing more and more of their beef through
the store.
Their natural beef product is labeled “Roger’s Beef” but this
wasn’t an intentional designation. “When we started selling the
quarters and halves, our meat cutter put up a sign in the store
that said Roger’s Beef,” explains Roger, and the name stuck. As
more customers requested special cuts, he started selling more
and more of the beef across the counter, and the family had to
supply more animals for this growing market.
Jeff became interested in the cattle while he was in high
school, and after attending Washington State University for 3
years he came home to help his parents with their family
operation. He wanted to expand the cattle, however, since he was
not that interested in the produce end of it. Land around Sequim
was becoming very valuable as farm land, and too expensive to
purchase for raising cattle, so in 1991 the Schmidts found some
land in eastern Washington. Jeff and his wife Pam moved there,
where they and their 4 children now manage 1000 acres of owned
and leased land where they raise cattle--and additional produce
for the Sunny Farms Country Store. They grow pumpkins, squash,
fruit and vegetables that they send across the state to Roger
and Ellie’s store, and they also sell some of their produce
through their own family-run fruit stand near their ranch, in
Othello.
In 1998 Jeff added Angus cattle to the herd, and today runs
about 400 cows in a purebred operation that markets bulls in
their JR Ranch annual production sale each February. They sell
about 80 Angus and 30 Shorthorn bulls (yearlings and 2 year
olds) at that sale, and also have a November sale of steers for
club calves.
They feed and market about 80 steers through the Sunny Farms
store during the year, packaged and sold as Roger’s Beef. “We
produce all the feed for these animals, and even though we grow
them slowly and it takes longer to finish them than traditional
feedlot cattle, we don’t have to buy a lot of high priced feed,”
says Jeff.
Roger says part of the secret to the growing popularity of this
custom grown meat is in the aging and cutting, and he gives a
lot of credit to the butcher who does the cutting. It’s hard to
find a good meat cutter, because nobody cuts carcass beef
anymore. “It’s a vanishing trade. It’s hard to find people at
the retail level who can handle a full carcass,” he says. Harry
McCool, his main butcher, has been in the meat business for more
than 40 years and Roger appreciates his expertise.
“One of the things that has made our particular marketing scheme
successful is not just the way we feed the animals (and no
antibiotics, no growth hormones), is the aging process,” he
says. “We use a rail system with a very dry cold aging cooler
and the beef is aged for a minimum of 21 days.” This has a great
influence on palatability and tenderness.
“All our beef is federally inspected, and slaughtered in
inspected plants,” says Roger. The cattle are processed locally,
not far from the ranch at Othello. “Because we are in the
produce business, we have refrigerated trucks, and thus we can
easily manage the transport of our beef from farm to market,” he
says. The carcasses are quartered at the plant and transported
on Sunny Farm trucks over the mountains to the store at
Sequim—about a 6 hour drive. The ranch sends about 3 carcasses
each week, to supply the store’s demands.
“We are a purebred operation and have never used implants or
growth hormones, and with the steers we raise for our Roger’s
Beef we use no antibiotics or dewormers after they’re weaned,”
explains Roger.
Because they don’t use these methods for aiding beef production,
and also because their cattle are not fed as much concentrate,
the animals grow more slowly than most feedlot cattle. “Our
cattle are fed slower and longer and are not pushed for maximum
gain and quick finish,” says Roger. “We use a high forage based
feed with silage, earlage, chopped hay or straw, with minimal
additional corn,” he explains.
Their natural beef takes longer to grow, and there’s more cost
of gain than with traditional feeding methods, but it also
commands a higher price. Their natural lean (extra lean) ground
beef is currently selling for $3.79 per pound, their New York
Steak $11.99 per pound and Rib Steak $11.99. These are examples
of their case prices as of December 3, 2007. Their customers
have options for 10 different cuts that include top round and
various types of roasts to cube steaks and breakfast steaks.
The store also sells some regular beef, since they have more
demand for beef than what they can provide from their own farm.
In order to keep the prices distinguished, the Roger’s Beef is
prepackaged, while the other beef is offered in a standard type
of full-service counter, according to Roger. For holidays they
take orders for special cuts such as prime rib roasts, but steak
is still the most popular item.
At present all the home-grown beef marketed through the store is
fed a little corn. “For the future, however, we’ve talked about
raising some grass fed beef,” says Roger, since some of their
customers might be interested in that option. “We are presently
using triticale as a cover crop and as a grazing crop, or for
silage. The triticale might offer some winter or fall pasture if
we decide to finish some of these animals on forage,” he
explains. Some people have asked if they might someday sell
organic beef but they feel the feed costs for doing that would
be prohibitive and for now they’ll just stick with selling
natural beef.
Jeff says he doesn’t do any of the marketing; he just raises the
cattle. Part of the herd calves in spring and some cows calve in
the fall. This gives a little more flexibility to have calves of
harvestable age year round for the store, and to sell bulls as
yearlings or 2 year olds. The weather is not very cold for the
fall calving, and the cattle just need a little straw for
bedding and do fine. “They calve 100 percent on their own; if
they don’t, they don’t stay here. We sell bulls, and the
commercial producer needs animals that can do it without high
input/high labor costs,” says Jeff.
The animals marketed as natural beef are fed less quantity of
corn than most people feed. “We feed them for about 250 days and
grow them more slowly. Our cattle are anywhere from 14 to 20
months of age when they are harvested. We don’t feed anything
but hay, corn silage, rolled corn and rolled barley. We don’t
feed any antibiotics or hormones, and not even any fancy
minerals—just ordinary feeds,” he says. Feeding the cattle this
long is not as economical as finishing them quickly, but he
feels they are creating a better product by doing it slowly—and
as natural beef the steers often end up being worth more than
the bulls they raise.
They run the cattle much like many commercial ranchers do. “The
cows are turned out on grass in April. We don’t have enough land
to stockpile much forage, but the cows are often grazing until
early winter. Even if there’s a few inches of snow, they do
fine. We usually don’t start feeding hay until there’s at least
8 inches of snow. There’s not a cow worth her salt that can’t
get through 6 inches of snow if there’s good feed there. We run
on corn stalks, and right now (early December) we have them on a
140 acre circle of timothy that’s 6 to 8 inches tall and it’s
good feed even if it’s a little frosted down. The cows gain
weight on it. A lot of ranchers are already taking out $150 hay
and dumping it out there for their cows,” he says. It’s a lot
more cost effective if the cow can harvest the feed herself.
He feels strongly that the cattle industry has picked up many
bad habits in the past few decades, such as feeding a lot of
harvested feeds. “Cattle are meant to graze. They can do fine
under most conditions. There are a lot of places in the world
where people don’t even water cattle; the cows eat snow,” he
says. If a cow can’t be profitable in somewhat marginal
conditions, she’s not doing her job.
“You need cattle that are fitted to your own environment, to
utilize what you can grow. This is so important. Let the
environment sort the cattle for you, rather than you trying to
outguess mother nature. It works: every fall there are certain
individuals that just look better, every time, and have better
calves. If you can quit worrying about numbers and EPDs and just
look at the flesh on the cattle (and the calf they bring home)
and remember their mothers and their grandmothers and
great-grandmothers, and the numbers of the cows that do it
right, pretty soon you have about 4 or 5 cow families that
outshine the rest of the herd. Any rancher who keeps good
records on his cattle knows there are certain families that just
historically do a little better than the average,” he says.
As a seedstock producer, he is trying to produce the type of
animal that will work for his bull customers, and also trying to
produce animals that provide a great eating experience for the
people who keep coming back for more “Roger’s Beef”. Being part
of a unique retail business that supplies beef from farm to fork
gives this family a great opportunity to keep their finger on
the pulse of the end product—and the whole reason for our beef
industry. |
