….my recent post on the price disadvantage American producers face when competing against foreign grass fed beef (see below “Roundtable:\u00a0 Can I make money selling grass fed beef)\u00a0needs some fine tuning.\u00a0 My point was that I pay almost four times as much for butchering as my competitor in Tasmania.\u00a0 And so foreign beef can absorb the shipping costs and still undersell American beef.<\/p>\n
But my good friend Bill Roberts of 12 Stones Grasslands Beef files a mild disagreement (that’s what friends are for, to tell you when you’re wrong.\u00a0 Mildly.)<\/p>\n
Bill says we’re not up against price competition alone.<\/p>\n
As I understand it, price is not the main issue in American wholesalers buying New Zealand, Australian and Uruguayan grass fed beef.\u00a0 It is consistent acceptable quality in volume.\u00a0\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
That’s what all the wholesalers told us when Mel Coleman Jr. and I did a canvas of potential clients several years ago.\u00a0 We had visions of sugar plums and profit dancing in our heads, but what the wholesalers said threw cold water on our dream.\u00a0 <\/b><\/p>\n
Because most\u00a0grass finishers in the United States are small farms scattered through diverse “worn out soil regions”, the domestic quality varies dramatically.\u00a0 They simply couldn’t depend on repeat business with the ups and downs of American grass fed beef.<\/b><\/p>\n
That’s why our focus has turned more to soil fertility and forage quality now that we\u00a0understand the genetics needed to produce a gourmet product if<\/span><\/em> the soils and forage are right.<\/b><\/p>\n The point is, I think, that if we’re going to produce grass fed beef in a competitive marketplace, we’ve got to do everything right.\u00a0 Devon may be the perfect cow, as I would argue, but flavor is a function of the grass they eat and not their genetics.\u00a0 We better be building our farms from the ground up!<\/p>\n Those Tasmanian farmers not only get a break on butchering, they’re raising their cattle on essentially virgin soil.\u00a0 Most of us are farming land so depleted that it will take years to restore it’s fertility.<\/p>\n Here at Thistle Hill, natural fertilizers, particularly fish oil and mineralization, has been our second biggest expense for the past decade.\u00a0\u00a0 We’ve also spent a good deal of money on our cafeteria mineral program to make sure our cattle are getting everything they need.\u00a0 And of course those minerals don’t disappear, they eventually wind up back in the soil.\u00a0 We think we can see and taste the difference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ….my recent post on the price disadvantage American producers face when competing against foreign grass fed beef (see below “Roundtable:\u00a0 Can I make money selling grass fed beef)\u00a0needs some fine tuning.\u00a0 My point was that I pay almost four times as much for butchering as my competitor in Tasmania.\u00a0 And so foreign beef can absorb the shipping costs and still undersell American beef. But my good friend Bill Roberts of 12 Stones Grasslands Beef files a mild disagreement (that’s what friends are for, to tell you when you’re wrong.\u00a0 Mildly.) Bill says we’re not up against price competition alone. As I understand it, price is not the main issue in American wholesalers buying New Zealand, Australian and Uruguayan grass fed beef.\u00a0 It is consistent acceptable quality in volume.\u00a0\u00a0 That’s what all the wholesalers told us when Mel Coleman Jr. and I did a canvas of potential clients several years ago.\u00a0 We had visions of sugar plums and profit dancing in our heads, but what the wholesalers said threw cold water on our dream.\u00a0 Because most\u00a0grass finishers in the United States are small farms scattered through diverse “worn out soil regions”, the domestic quality varies dramatically.\u00a0 They simply couldn’t depend on repeat business with the ups and downs of American grass fed beef. That’s why our focus has turned more to soil fertility and forage quality now that we\u00a0understand the genetics needed to produce a gourmet product if the soils and forage are right. The point is, I think, that if we’re going to produce grass fed beef in a competitive marketplace, we’ve got to do everything right.\u00a0 Devon may be the perfect cow, as I would argue, but flavor is a function of the grass they eat and not their genetics.\u00a0 We better be building our farms from the ground up! Those Tasmanian farmers not only get a break on butchering, they’re raising their cattle on essentially virgin soil.\u00a0 Most of us are farming land so depleted that it will take years to restore it’s fertility. Here at Thistle Hill, natural fertilizers, particularly fish oil and mineralization, has been our second biggest expense for the past decade.\u00a0\u00a0 We’ve also spent a good deal of money on our cafeteria mineral program to make sure our cattle are getting everything they need.\u00a0 And of course those minerals don’t disappear, they eventually wind up back in the soil.\u00a0 We think we can see and taste the difference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,35,21,10,26,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marketing","category-meat","category-on-the-soap-box","category-pasture","category-roberts","category-roundtable"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1739"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1741,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1739\/revisions\/1741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}