“Making It Work” is a series about small business owners striving to survive tough times.
While many people may 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. It turns out that most of them don’t stay in Montana.
Even here, in a state with almost twice as many cows According to population estimates, only about 1 percent of the beef purchased by Montana households is raised and processed locally. Highland economy, a consultancy firm. Like the rest of the country, many Montanans eat beef instead all the way to Brazil.
Here’s the general fate of a cow that starts out on Montana grass: It will be purchased by one of the four dominant meatpackers – JBS, Tyson Foods, Cargill and Marfrig – that own the 85 percent of the country’s beef; transported by a company like Sysco or US Foods, distributors with a combined value of more than $50 billion; and sold at a Walmart or Costco, which together about half of US food dollarsAny livestock farmers who want to break out of this system – and sell their beef locally, for example, rather than as an anonymous commodity that crosses the country – are Davids in a swarm of Goliaths.
“The meat packers have a lot of control,” said Neva Hassaneina professor at the University of Montana who studies sustainable food systems. “They tend to have a huge impact on the entire supply chain.” For the nation’s farmers, whose profits have shrunk over time, she said, “It’s kind of a trap.”
Cole Mannix tries to escape that trap.
Mr. Mannix, 40, has a tendency to wax philosophical. (He once considered becoming a priest.) Like his relatives since 1882, he grew up as a rancher: baling hay, helping to birth calves, leading cattle to the highlands on horseback. He wants to ensure that the next generation, the sixth, has the same opportunity.
So in 2021, Mr. Mannix was a co-founder Old Salt Cooperativea company that aims to change the way people buy meat.
While many Montana ranchers sell their calves into the billion-dollar industrial machine when they are less than a year old, never to be seen or profited from again, Old Salt’s cattle never leave the company’s hands. The cattle are raised by Old Salt’s four member ranches, slaughtered and processed at the meat processing facility and sold through the ranch-to-table restaurants, community events and website. The farmers, who own the company, benefit at every stage.
The technical term for this approach – where a company controls various elements of its supply chain – is vertical integrationIt’s not something that many small meat businesses attempt because it requires a huge amount of start-up capital.
“It’s a scary time,” Mr. Mannix said, referring to the company’s significant debt. “We’re really trying to invent something new.”
But he added: “As risky as it is to start a company like Old Salt, the status quo is riskier.”
It would have been much easier for Old Salt to just open a meat processing plant, as some farmers have doneand no problem with restaurants and events. (In fact, that’s where much of the national attention has been focused: the White House recently pledged to do so 1 billion dollars to independent meat processors, citing the lack of competition from the major meat packers as the reason.)
But Mr. Mannix said that wouldn’t have solved the other problem ranchers face: the difficulty of reaching 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 part of the food system.”
Old Salt is his attempt to rebuild the whole damn thing.
And people are recording it. “Old Salt is a beacon,” said Robin Kelson, executive director of Abundant Montanaa non-profit organization that promotes local food. “They show the rest of us that by stacking businesses, by working together in creative ways, it is possible to make the system work.”
On a recent Saturday, downtown Helena’s newest restaurant, the Union, was a hive of activity. A wood-fired grill sizzled as diners devoured steaks and short ribs; out front, a butcher case gleamed with bacon and breakfast sausages. All of it came from Old Salt’s affiliated ranches.
This restaurant-slash-butcher shop is Old Salt’s latest venture. It joins the Outpost, a burger stand in a 117-year-old bar, and the Old Salt Festivala food and music-filled celebration of sustainable agriculture at the Mannix ranch in late June, now in its second year. It complements the company’s meat processing facility and meat subscription program.
Andrew Mace, co-founder and culinary director of Old Salt, probably wouldn’t recommend starting five businesses in three years. But he said it was all part of the company’s “very ambitious plan to reshape the local meat economy.”
While Mr. Mace wants all of Old Salt’s outfits to make a profit, their larger goal is to serve as a marketing tool for the meat subscription service: So diners can fall in love with the Union’s rib-eye and then sign up to have the company’s “steak and chop bundle” delivered every month.
Old Salt’s goal is to sell meat to 10,000 households nationwide each year over the next five years, up from about 800 now. It won’t be easy: Americans are used to buying ground chuck in the grocery store, not from a website.
“It just takes a lot of digging into people’s spending habits,” Mr. Mace said, “and getting them to understand that you’re not just buying meat, you’re investing in local landscapes.”
That is important to Mr. Mannix. He hand-picked the members of Old Salt more than 9,000 ranches across the state because they share his commitment to regenerative ranching, a set of principles aimed at restoring soils and to reduce the environmental impact of livestock.
His overarching goal is to put more money into the hands of these farmers so they can spend more time and money managing their land. (In total, Old Salt ranches manage more than 200,000 acres, an parcel larger than Shenandoah National Park.)
That’s why Old Salt’s farmers own most of the company and share in the profits. “We didn’t want to be a beef company that buys cattle from ranchers and ultimately, as it grows, has an incentive to pay as little as possible for those cattle,” Mr. Mannix said. “That leaves less money to pay for the time it takes to really care for ecosystems.”
By uniting four ranches under one brand, members could pool their products and marketing resources, rather than compete with each other.
“It takes some courage to do what they do, but we need people like that to lead the way,” said Dr. Hassanein, a professor at the University of Montana. Although it may seem ironic since beef production is almost responsible for its production 9 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, she said she supports these ranches precisely because she cares about nature and the environment.
“These are well-known ranches; many of them are award-winning conservationists,” said Dr. Hassanein. “If they can’t survive economically, then we really have to wonder what will take their place.”
That’s a question many farmers in Old Salt, who are facing both economic and environmental pressures, have asked themselves. If Cooper Hibbarda fifth-generation rancher and chairman of the board of Old Salt, put it this way: “It is clear from all sides that we cannot continue to do what we have always done, otherwise we will not have a ranch to pass on to the next generation.”
“We’re trying to chart a new model,” he said. “We really go to the extreme.”
