While many people can conjure up romantic visions of a Montana ranch — vast valleys, cold streams, snow-capped mountains — few understand what happens when the cattle leave those pastures.
Most of them, it turns out, don’t stay in Montana.
Even here, in a state with nearly twice as many cows as people, only around 1 percent of the beef purchased by Montana households is raised and processed locally, according to estimates from Highland Economics, a consulting firm.
As is true in the rest of the country, many Montanans instead eat beef from as far away as Brazil.
Here’s a common fate of a cow that starts out on Montana grass: It will be bought by one of the four dominant meatpackers — JBS, Tyson Foods, Cargill and Marfrig — which process 85 percent of the country’s beef; transported by a company like Sysco or US Foods, distributors with a combined value of over $50 billion; and sold at a Walmart or Costco.
Any ranchers who want to break out from this system — and, say, sell their beef locally, instead of as anonymous commodities crisscrossing the country — are Davids in a swarm of Goliaths.
“The beef packers have a lot of control,” said Neva Hassanein, a University of Montana professor who studies sustainable food systems. “They tend to influence a tremendous amount throughout the supply chain.”
For the nation’s ranchers, whose profits have shrunk over time, she said, “It’s kind of a trap.”
Cole Mannix is trying to escape that trap. Like members of his family have since 1882, he grew up ranching: baling hay, helping to birth calves, guiding cattle into the high country on horseback.
He wants to make sure the next generation, the sixth, has the same opportunity.
So, in 2021, Mannix co-founded Old Salt Co-op, a company that aims to upend the way people buy meat.
While many Montana ranchers sell their calves into the multibillion-dollar industrial machine when they’re less than a year old, never to see or profit from them again, Old Salt’s livestock never leave the company’s hands.
The cattle are raised by Old Salt’s four member ranches, slaughtered and processed at its meatpacking facility, and sold through its ranch-to-table restaurants, community events and website.
The ranchers, who have ownership in the company, profit at every stage.
It would have been much simpler for Old Salt to open just a meat processing facility, as some ranchers have, and not bother with restaurants and events.
But Mannix said that would not have addressed the other issue that ranchers face: difficulty accessing distributors and customers.
“It doesn’t matter if you have a nice processing facility if you can’t sell the product,” he said. “You can’t rebuild the food system by just throwing a bunch of money at one component of that food system.
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