A Little Beef

Saturday morning I went out to see some miniature Angus and Hereford cattle in a place called West Cajon Valley, on the road to Victorville. The nice people at Crossroads Ranch, run by the Coleman family, let me see, first hand, how docile and small these breeds really are. Their website--small world--was designed by Courtney Creighton, the older brother of farm dance-master and all around living historian, Logan Creighton.

I've never really done a spreadsheet on building a herd of cattle, miniature or otherwise, but I'm beginning to think a mini-herd would be worth considering. If there were a way to make sure the beef got a USDA inspection, I think our farm guests would enjoy corn-fed, Iowa style beef. (For a brief time, in another world, I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers workshop, and I still remember the way Iowa beef and pork sizzled its way, with coffee, across the Hamburg Inn.) If you've been watching the financial news (don't!), Jim Rogers says he is buying up farms. Wouldn't it be ironic if all these agritourism operations started "beefing up" their production operations again? And..if every front and back lawn in the Inland Empire were turned into a vegetable garden, I wonder if we could grow enough food to keep the southland from turning into a Mad Max movie. (Someone else do the spreadsheet on this; I'm tired of graphing commerce this morning, and I don't know how much backyard barley you have to grow to keep the squad cars in reasonably good repair.)

On the beef herd front, Scott says a friend of his is weighing the merits of staying a hobby rancher, or getting into real ranching. I think he has about 30 head of cattle--and that doesn't seem "hobby" to me, but industrial scale is the enemy of most small projects. When you're up against Con-Agra and AMD, you really have to have a pretty good "boutique beef" operation to encourage people pay a premium rate for the extra value. I think the spreadsheet might be different, however, in a restaurant operation, because that premium is more easily blurred into the extra value of the served-food price. (Incidentally, I just finished a turkey sausage sandwich. Incredible. You point-counters would do well to consider the lowly turkey sausage.)

What I really like, however, about a cattle operation is that it is deeply American--and very deeply Oak Glen. These apple farms are called "ranches" because most of the old time farmers ran cattle to make up for bad crop years. I have no problem with someone who wants to survive on carrots and tofu, but you tell me Americans don't deserve a hamburger if they want one--and you have a fight on your hands.