06/27/06 Natural Beef

Natural Beef. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Sometimes just doing what you've always done isn't enough. And not being afraid to step outside of the box will sometimes launch your business into a whole different direction. 20 years ago, Doc and Connie Hatfield's cattle ranch was going broke. C HATFIELD: All you could hear is don't eat red meat it's bad for you and the ranchers are raping the land and all the negativity that was going on 20 years ago, plus 6 years of a down market. And I went in to Bend, Oregon which had one fitness place. Walked in and talked to the fitness man. He's a 25 year old Jack LaLane type with big muscles and I said I'd like your opinion of red meat. He said I recommend it at least 3 times a week but we're having the hardest time getting Argentina beef in here to Bend, Oregon. No hormones, no antibiotics and its short fed. It doesn't have all that excess fat and that's the product we're looking for. So he gave us some ideas for a market. I mean as I drove home I said you call yourself a rancher and you live 55 miles from where this man wants exactly what we produce. We never have marketed it. In one conversation Connie Hatfield knew what they had to do. Doc Hatfield says this idea didn't really change the way they ranched. D HATFIELD: It really didn't change the way we ranched at all. The only thing was that we maintained ownership of our animals longer and had them a short time in a gathering feedlot to get them into meat instead as just feeder cattle. It's documenting our land ethic, how we treat the land and the animals and then of course not using the hormones or the antibiotics or animal by-products. C HATFIELD: Well it was putting together at that time 14 ranch families so we could have a year-round supply of cattle every week and I mean that is a huge difference. Today more than 70 producers raise cattle in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Hawaii. C HATFIELD: We sell our product as Country Natural Beef and it has our label on it and it's in 49 whole food stores; Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Texas and Colorado because we are expanding to ranches in that area that will be going in. We're in Puget Sound Cooperative and some other independent stores in Seattle. We're in the Burgervilles, we're in McMenamins Pubs with the hamburger and so those are our major customers. We found the market. Nobody did it for us. We did it and our ranchers do all the marketing. Our ranchers do all the invoicing. With the concern over the spread of BSE in the past few years, Country Natural Beef remains unaffected. Doc Hatfield explains. D HATFIELD: Because we know absolutely where all our cattle come from and that our cow herds have not been fed animal by-products it's just additional assurance. C HATFIELD: We're affected by it because our sales go up, because the people who are buying our product know that we know where it comes from. For more information visit oregoncountrybeef.com That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.