Notes from the Pasture

I don't like to send a lot of emails to you, clogging your digital arteries, but one of my best friends is a force in the futures market and he sent me the attached cattle futures market chart over the weekend.

Live cattle are now selling at a new high of $227.30 on the contract, which is priced in what cattlemen call "hundred weight." If you want to know what that means for supermarket beef prices, I think you multiply the $2.27 by 4 for the lowest priced product--ground beef--and go from there. So, maybe $225 hundred weight will mean $9-11/lb ground beef, and will mean $27/lb roasts and $36/lb steaks.

If I had to guess, I'd say that $200 is the new support level and $300 might be the new resistance. At $3.00 per pound fed cattle, I think we will see beef selling at the supermarket for $12/lb ground beef, $36/lb for roasts, and $48/lb for steaks. Steaks will be the new lobster . . .

I can sell you grass fed grass finished beef now (and I pretty much mean now) at $3.50/lb on the rail, and most likely $6.00/lb in your freezers--for everything.

There's a certain amount of fogginess to running a cattle business, especially if you are doing it the way I am. I want a sustainable ranch which will be good to the cattle, good to the land, and good to me and my family. It won't do me any good to run myself ragged for three years on a Ranch if the end result is that it drives me out of the business.

I think beef ought to taste like it has walked around a specific pastureland for 3 years, and achieved maturity slowly (36 months for us versus 15 months for commercial beef).

Because I don't know anyone around here who does what I do, I don't have regular feedback. I don't have a mentor, or anything like a local model.

I did, however, get three separate responses within the last few days which made me feel good. Very very good. In fact, I'm smiling all the time. It is your collective interest and kindness which helps me continue. Seriously, thank you all.

One customer wrote: "The order I got last year was honestly the best beef I've ever had." Another: "We are out of roasts, just finishing the last 3 packages of steaks, and have maybe ten pounds of ground beef left from last year. We are so grateful to have yummy beef for our family."

2025 is shaping up to be one of my favorite years.

I may be wrong, but I suspect some of you enjoy hearing about the inner workings of our ranch, sort of like "inside baseball" only with cattle.

2025 marks the first year we have sold live cattle. Our cattle stock is a bit smaller (homestead sized) Aberdeen (Lowline) Angus cattle, raised without medications of any kind, on grass and browse, from birth to sale. The only supplements to their diet are winter feeding of valley grass hay, and year-round access to clean water, mineral blocks, and fallen apples from the orchard.

Ranch cattle are from a closed herd, and have not been medicated or pampered; they learn from an early age to stay near mom and to become self-starters in the grazing & browsing arena. Ten years into this project, I think our herd is already "pasture-hardened" by experience and natural selection. None have ever spent a night in a barn, and most have made it through ice storms and snow.

Let's assume a neighbor purchases two steers weighing 400 lbs each at $2.00/lb. The Ranch receives $1,600. If the same two steers went to auction, the sale price might be $2.90/lb--the Ranch would receive $2,140 minus fees. The Ranch takes a financial hit of $540 by selling directly. But there's a lot of uncertainty in auction transactions, so I'm willing to forego $540 in "theoretical" gain for the certainty of sale.

Technically the Buyer's return on investment is 162.5% for 10 months, or close to 220% annualized.

A customer asked me if I could find an older cow suitable for slaughter to use for her dog who has food allergy issues.

Dogs can chew on bones, and so getting all possible bones from the butcher is a good idea. There's really no absolute reason to get ground beef for raw dog food. If you get roasts cut into somewhat smaller sizes (say 1-2 pounds), the dog can quite easily do the final processing for you. And one day, you can give Fido a juicy pair of trimmed ribs--he will get exercise gnawing on the bones and extracting the marrow along with protein, fats and calcium. Win-win, as they say.

Economics: If a 146 lb carcass produces 120 pounds of packaged meat, then the Butcher fee would be $197 and the Ranch fee would be $365. That's a total of $562, or $4.70 per pound.

Eukanuba charges about $93 per 30 lb bag, or $3.10/lb. I'm pretty sure that the actual "meat" content of their kibbles is not 50%. Not even close. I suspect that if you feed your dog a quarter pound of real beef, it will equate to 2 pounds of whatever comes in a bag.

I try to keep the ranch work at the lowest stress level possible--it's part of my big plan. But if there are stress days, it's always the process leading up to corralling and sorting out the livestock in anticipation of a kill day.

However, by some miscalculation I had committed to babysit my granddaughter on Tuesday morning when I was supposed to be moving cattle into the pens. Because of my late start, the mercury was already rising by 10 am when I started to move the cattle, and they were not buying it.

Wednesday morning, a couple of hours to get the job done. At 6:30 a.m. I started with the help of a neighbor. The air was cool, the grass was dewy and by 7:15 we had 60 head in the pen and ready to be sorted. By 8:30 am we had all the graduates ready and the rest of the herd released. Farmer's Helper drove in at about 9:15. Whew, as they say in Wordle.

Long story short, we had very nice looking beeves, ranging in hanging weight from 480 lbs to 588 lbs.

We had our first annual ranch tour in a few years yesterday. It was remarkable for 3 things:

The Ranch goes international. We had attendees from China, Tibet, Mongolia and Japan (and Korea, of course) and sold beef to all of them. If this sounds like a surprise for a business model that is relentlessly local, all of these international clients live in Eugene.

Doug the Cook. I did my simple preparation of three somewhat pedestrian steaks (sirloin and flank) with a simple rub, a pre-cooking olive oil massage, and an air fry finish (6-6-6) and I think the results were pretty good, proving that cooking lean grass fed beef can be done simply with simple equipment.

Ranch or Park? We had a neighbor suddenly appear who was not interested in the ranch, or in the beef, but simply interrupted the entire proceeding to ask to cross the ranch with his dogs anytime he pleased. I said no, definitely not. In fact, ranches and farms are industrial sites, sharing more in common with a lumber mill or a steel recycling yard than a public park. We have large, diesel powered equipment which is often hard to see around and impossible to hear over. Our livestock and their guardian animals are not trained to interact with the public, only with predators.

I am always looking into simple, economic and sustainable health hacks for myself and have found quite a few over the decades.

At 6 a.m. every morning I have a large cup of hot tea and put off breakfast until later. I was fortunate enough, courtesy of the Peace Corps in 1976, to begin to eat probiotic kimchi (the dietary fountain of youth and health) and will, God willing and the creek don't rise, hit 50 years of this practice in 2026.

My latest: I have replaced coffee, entirely, with beef broth. In the morning, I spoon out about 4 oz. of beef broth concentrate, add pepper and salt and 12 oz of water. It has a soothing taste and energizes me for the morning.

Kettle & Fire out of Austin, Texas charges $9 for a 16 oz carton. If you drink one a day for 4 months you'll run up a ~$1,100 bone broth tab. $3,300 for a year. For chicken carcass soup.

On the other hand, if you just order our beef and get the soup bones, you can, with just one big soup bone, boil up 4 gallons of grass-fed, grass-finished beef bone broth. An entire beef can provide at least 60 gallons of beef broth. At trendy supermarket prices ($50 per gallon) that's about $3,000 worth of beef broth per whole beef. Cost to you? Maybe $12 worth of bones, and your time in the kitchen.

The US cattle herd is now the smallest it's been since 1951. 1951 was a time when the US population was a mere 150 million people. Today our population is 342 million, and we have only the domestic beef supply of 75 years ago? As the younger generation liberally sprays their communications: WTF? (I think that acronym stands for "What's That For!")

The second data point is that the price of beef is at an all time high and, for anyone used to looking at commodity charts in an inflationary environment, ready to go higher. Beef is just catching up to "inflation quick starters" like housing and transportation, but its rise will be turbo-charged by the shrinking herd.

Just as most people have been shocked to see a house which sold for $250K in 2012 now selling for $750K, get ready for the real supermarket shock in beef. The concept of a steak entree in the $25 range will be as quaint as a 4-bedroom house in South Eugene offered at $250K.

So, invest in a chest freezer, join with friends and family to make buying groups, and buy a steer so you can laugh at the $35/lb ribeye costs coming to your grocery and butcher shop.

Some things you just can't un-see, and we all have our lists. How about a Tomahawk Steak?

A "tomahawk" steak is a comic monstrosity, where the butcher carves a beef rib with a 1.5 to 2 inch steak but leaves the entire 12 to 14 inch long bone in place. Here is an ad for a Tomahawk Steak from Snake River Farms, weighing in at 2.5 lbs, $158 per steak. 158 dollars for a ribeye steak and a silly handle.

That 2.5 lb hunk of caveman glory is at least 1/2 bone by weight, so the "meat" part weighs only 1.25 lbs. And since wagyu steak is bathing in fat--about 40% fat and 60% beef--there's only 3/4 lb of actual beef protein in that Tomahawk Steak. $210.67 per pound of Tomahawk beef.

Through the magic of mathematics, they are selling you that Tomahawk thing at 30X--thirty times--what you'd pay for a ribeye steak from the Ranch. That one Tomahawk purchase runs about 40% of your total cost of a rear quarter of one of our steers, cut, wrapped and frozen, ready for your freezer.

Well, that's probably more than you thought you'd read about tomahawk steaks, but it's possible you found something interesting in there somewhere. Merry Christmas and Happy 2024 to all.

It's sometimes hard to make sense of a crazy & complicated world. But my heuristic, my rule of thumb, says: whatever prices were in 2015, they are double that now. The Consumer Price Index might not say that, but anyone who shops at Costco knows it's true.

Things haven't really gone up in price or value, our currency has been cut in half.

Despite inflation, pricing remains delightfully 2016-ish. $3.50/lb on the rail for quarters and halves, and only $3.25/lb for a whole beef.

I bring you tidings of great joy. I previously reported how we conquered Grass Fed & Grass Finished lean steaks with the Sign of the Beast method (6-6-6). Method: using a common tablefork pierce the steak as many times as you like, then massage soy sauce and pepper into it, and finally massage it with olive oil.

Now for the latest epiphany: Chuck Roast done Korean-style. Slice the 3 pound roast into 3 pieces, create a version of Korean beef marinade with soy sauce, crushed fresh garlic and ginger, sugar, pepper, a tablespoon of sesame oil, and plaster it with bacon fat. Air fry for 886--8 minutes, turn, 8 minutes, rest for 6 minutes, slice and serve. As tender as the filet, very moist and tasty.

I don't believe I will ever eat roast beef any other way.

In the Book of Revelations we learn of the magical (in a bad sense) number: 666. However, we have had an entirely different revelation for you concerning beef and "666".

How do you cook the lean steaks so they are as tender as steaks layered with grain fed fat? We tried just about every method: cold drying, fruit juice marinades, Crockpot, Instant-pot, low temperature pan frying. All ended up with mixed results, never with homerun results. Until last week, when we finally tried out an Air Fryer. What a revelation, what an epiphany!

Set it for 375 F, and cook it for 6 minutes, turn it and cook it for 6 minutes, extract it and let it rest (this is important) for 6 minutes. Our kitchen smelled like delicious steak, and after the 6-minute rest mark our bone-in ribeyes were the best we've ever done. So, technically, it's 375/6/6/6.

As for the grocery store's "Organic Smart Whole Chicken Hatched"--we stopped administering IQ tests to our chickens years ago; the chickens simply got too depressed with the results, moped around and stopped eating.

When our son visited for the first time in 3 years we ate a lot of Ranch beef, lamb and chicken. At the end of his stay we had a 2.5 day period where we air-fried tenderloin strips, sirloin, T-bone, filets and pork chops for dinner, lunch, dinner, lunch, dinner, respectively. A carnivore carnival of sorts.

We are winding up our 7th full year on Spencer Shadow Ranch, probably not a bad time to go over a few of the things I've learned along the way.

Change is the constant. "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."--Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard. The rancher must be vigilant to see not only what isn't working, but what new opportunities may arise. Pre-ranch, I thought I'd work on it for five years or so and then just coast. Well, that's not the way it happens.

Learned Helplessness and Learned Resilience. If in the course of life you acquire "helplessness" as a response to the daily chaos of the world, you will live in misery. If, on the other hand, you acquire "resilience," you will thrive, no matter what. One thing the Ranch brings is a daily dose of chaos, more than I recall from the urbs or suburbs. Out here you will drown in helplessness, and thrive in resilience. It's just that stark.

Getting things done. It's not what you know that counts, or even who you know that counts. It's who the people you know (and trust) know, the carefully cultivated network of people that your trusted friends connect you to.

Finally, I would like to exercise some gratitude and thank you all for your interest in our place and your patronage in the products.

Lots of things are going on at your ranch: winter feeding our 100 head of Aberdeen Angus cross cattle with valley hay, winter feeding our 200 head of sheep with pasture forage and Christmas Valley alfalfa for protein supplement.

From where I sit and what I see there's an excellent chance of not only rising prices across the board in agriculture, but shortages and scarcity. Maybe it won't hit us here in Oregon, but I heard recently that Oregonians import 75-85% of their food from outside the state, so maybe it will impact us.

Lumber is now incredibly expensive--close to twice as much as 2019. Real estate you know about. Fuel prices are skyrocketing in January & February--not the season of rising gasoline prices normally. But we almost can't use the word "normally" anymore.

Now might not be a bad time to invest in another 7.5 cubic foot freezer, and maybe a fruit & vegetable drier, and begin to think about food security. The old model of just expecting full and inexpensive food in the grocery store may get a few giant bumps in 2021.

In "The Dallas Buyers Club" Matthew McConaughey travels to Mexico to buy AZT for AIDS treatments for a group of people he helps back in Dallas, in order to circumvent the foot-dragging of the FDA.

When people get interested in our beef, the first question they have is how much? Not how much does it cost but how much beef is actually in a quarter or half a beef? How much space am I going to need?

Just "allocate" $7.50/lb to the deluxe cuts and $3.25/lb to the economy cuts. Since a side of beef will basically cut out to a 60/40 division by weight, it will average out to the $5.75/lb we know is the total price. $3.25/lb for the best ground beef, osso buco, soup bones with lots of meat on them, $7.50/lb for ribeye or T-bone steaks.

How to weigh them? Simple: just go shopping for what you want and weigh your bag on a bathroom scale. You can choose a child to be the "tare" weight: "Hey, Johnny, step on the scale. 112 lbs. Now, hold this bag of steaks. 128 lbs (16 lbs of steaks)."