Texas-based Burgundy Pasture Beef markets its products as, “100% Grass Fed. Sustainable. Wholesome.” but partner Jon Taggart says that’s a story that he can only sell one time for each customer.
“They’ll buy it once, but they won’t buy it twice if their experience with us is bad,” he says.
That story hasn’t always been the case for Taggart or for Burgundy Pasture Beef. Since they started in the mid-90’s, he says he’s “done it all in the beef industry.”
When the rising cost of inputs started seriously eating into his margins and Taggart says he realized they were “going broke spending money,” he knew a change was needed.
Their 100% grassfed operation now has beef coming off consistently throughout the year, being processed in their own USDA-inspected facility and then sold exclusively in retail stores in Grandview and neighboring metropolitan Ft. Worth and Dallas.
“There’s a market,” he says. “Obviously we’ve been successful for 25 years now.”
Recently, Taggart attended the Trust In Beef Sustainable Ranchers Tour stop in G-C Ranch to share insights from his three-decade career. Both through his lived experience and through his custom processing business, which caters to cottage producers, he has seen mistakes that can make or break cattle producers when growing, marketing, processing and selling sustainable beef.
Here are Taggart’s top tips for avoiding those pitfalls on your ranch:
Don’t Waste Your Genetics
“Once that animal leaves the ranch, your fixed costs are pretty much the same for trucking, processing, packaging and marketing,” Taggart says. “You’ve got to get as many pounds out of it as you can get.”
The money that’s spent on cattle genetics can be wasted if the cattle aren’t finished for their frame size when they leave the ranch, says Taggart.
“If you want the marbling and a decent grade, you have to give them time to take advantage of their genetics and you have to give them the resources to do it,” he adds.
Plan for the Whole Animal
According to Taggart, the pitfall that he sees most often is producers who don’t plan to sell the whole carcass.
“Somebody gets excited because a restaurant wants to buy steaks, but that’s only 15, maybe 20% of the carcass,” he says. “Then they’ll look behind them and they’ll have a pile of ground beef the size of a truck to deal with.”
First, Figure Out Your Market
Similarly, Taggart says, many producers don’t consider consumers in the equation when determining how to sell and package beef products.
“Going in, that’s the thing they need to figure out first,” he says. “It depends on the volume you want to do and your goals, and because of that, there are a lot of people selling halves, quarters, whole cows.”
It’s a very small market, considering the cost of beef these days— it’s a big investment for a consumer to fill a freezer, Taggart continues.
“Also, the consumer figures out that when they buy that whole animal, they get a lot of stuff they really don’t want,” he adds. “If they don’t have a good experience with it, they are gone forever from that market.”
Supply Starts On-the-Ground
“Since we built our processing facility in 2004, we harvest cattle 52 weeks out of the year. We only missed one week during the freeze of 2021,” he says.
What allows Burgundy Pasture Beef to consistently produce high-quality beef? Taggart says it’s his grass.
“When you look at finishing cattle on grass, I am a huge proponent of diverse grass mixtures,” he says. “I can’t stand a monoculture.
“In order to have that constant supply, you’ve got to have a level of nutrition in your pastures that will allow you to do that,” he adds.
Taggart recommends a mix of cool season and warm season legumes, annuals and perennials.
“In a monoculture, it’s going to reach its peak of nutrition one time a year all at the same time,” he says. “You can’t maintain that gain on cattle all through the year to have the supply constant.”
Learn more about Burgundy Pasture Beef and make your plans today to attend the 2024 Trust In Beef Sustainable Ranchers Tour for more insights into how to build a more sustainable beef supply chain.
