By Jim Munsch, Coon Valley, Wisconsin — Take a stroll through the meat market, do some math, and your first inclination is to say that direct marketing of beef will pay a producer.

We farmers have been basically saying that for years. Ever since I can remember, I’ve heard uncles, cousins and neighbors complain about store prices for food, and the fact that the “middleman” is making all the money. Behind this emotional observation is an acknowledgement of a real economic truth: Middlemen tend to be a small number of for-profit organizations with considerable economic power compared to individual producers of much smaller scale and with feeble economic power. In some cases their performance can be inconsistent, resulting in equally inconsistent demand and prices for your products. Continue reading “Methods for calculating marketing costs”

By Tom and Susan Wrchota, Omro, Wisconsin — If you want to sell a few head of grain-fed beef in sides and quarters, you shouldn’t have much trouble finding a processor who can do the job for you. But if you want to target a high-end niche market for grass-finished beef in an effort to produce the margins required to make a living from a small-scale enterprise, you need a processor who is up to the task.

In the nearly 15 years that we’ve been marketing grass-finished meat, our business has evolved to meet both customers’ needs, and ours. Staying small and simple wasn’t going to cut it if we wanted to make a full-time living selling grass-finished beef and other farm products, so we had to grow and become more complex. Continue reading “To really market, you need the right processor”

By Jim Munsch, Coon Valley, Wisconsin — At a grazing meeting last month, I heard that fresh, grass-fed beef from Uruguay and other countries had shown up in Upper Midwest specialty food stores catering to the health conscious. The question that was being bantered about: “Why can’t that beef be produced in the U.S.?”

Certainly grass-fed beef can, and is, produced in the U.S. But the question today centers more on the markets in which U.S. graziers can successfully compete. If grass-fed beef is coming from South America and Australia, and if it is being sold fresh at prices lower than what we can offer while still making a profit, do U.S. grass-fed beef producers have a future? Continue reading “Grass-fed: with imports coming, it’s time to go local”

By Tom Wrchota, Omro, Wisconsin — Most of conventional agriculture treats productivity as the be-all, end-all for financially successful farming. Productivity is nothing more than measuring inputs and outputs, such as how many pounds of grain it takes to produce a pound of beef, pork, lamb, or chicken. So productivity is the study of how items relate to each other.

Much more important than productivity is profit, which is margin multiplied by volume, minus expense. Continue reading “Grass-fed beef: What’s possible, what isn’t”

By Tom Wrchota, Omro, Wisconsin — Ever since living and working in Costa Rica back in the early 1970s, I have greatly enjoyed the taste, smell, and texture of “properly” raised and prepared grass-fed beef. Once back in Wisconsin, it was one of my crusades to develop a beef herd and a grass management system that could service my acquired beef appetite … along with making a living selling it to other prospective affectionatos.

After 11 years of being part of this emerging sector, I’ve come to a few conclusions about what represents grass-fed beef quality, and how a northern grazier might be able to produce a relatively consistent product. They’re based on laboratory tests, blind taste panels, and my own, on-ranch observations. Continue reading “Different ‘grass-fed’ beef categories require differing strategies”

Cliff Schuette employs annuals and fescue in 12-month beef grazing program

Breese, Illinois — “If you’re paying for the ground year-round, you might as well try to graze it year-round.” While Cliff Schuette’s rationale may be sound, this grass-farming grail is simply not attainable for northern graziers.

Then again, Cliff and a few others like him are showing that perhaps year-round grazing — or at least something very close to it — is not quite the mirage many graziers made it out to be. In recent years Corn Belt graziers have been employing annual crops and stockpiling tall fescue in successful efforts to graze at least some stock 12 months a year, thus cutting feeding costs to levels far below conventional norms for their areas. Continue reading “Year-round, Corn Belt grazing”