“Making It Work” is a series about small business owners trying to weather the 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. Most of them, it turns out, don’t live in Montana.
Even here, in a state with nearly twice as many cows as people, only about 1 percent of the beef purchased by Montana households is raised and processed locally, according to estimates by consulting firm Highland Economics. As with the rest of the country, many Montanans instead eat beef as far away as Brazil.
Here’s a common fate for a cow that starts out on Montana grass: It will be bought by one of the four dominant meat packers — JBS, Tyson Foods, Cargill and Marfrig — that process 85 percent of the nation’s beef. carried by a company like Sysco or US Foods, distributors with a combined value of more than $50 billion; and sold to Walmart or Costco, which together take about half of America’s food dollars. All the cattlemen who want to escape this system – and, say, sell their beef locally, rather than as anonymous commodities crossing the country – are Davids in a herd of Goliaths.
“Beef packers have a lot of control,” said Neva Hassanein, a University of Montana professor who studies sustainable food systems. “They tend to affect a huge amount across the supply chain.” Of the nation’s ranchers, whose profits have shrunk over time, he said, “It’s kind of a trap.”
Cole Mannix tries to escape this trap.
Mr. Mannix, 40, tends to philosophize. (He once considered becoming a Jesuit priest.) Like members of his family since 1882, he grew up ranching: baling hay, helping to give birth to 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, Mr Mannix co-founded the Old Salt Co-op, a company that aims to revolutionize the way people buy meat.
While many Montana ranchers sell their calves to the multibillion-dollar industrial machine when they are less than a year old, never to be seen or profited from again, Old Salt’s animals never leave the company’s hands. Cattle are raised by Old Salt’s four member ranches, slaughtered and processed at its meatpacking facilities and sold through its farm-to-table restaurants, community events and its website. Farmers, who have ownership in the company, win at every stage.
The technical term for this approach — in which a company controls various elements of its supply chain — is vertical integration. It’s not something many small meat businesses try, as it requires a huge amount of start-up capital.
“It’s a scary time,” Mr. Mannix said, referring to the company’s heavy debt. “We’re really trying to invent something new.”
But, he added, “No matter how risky it is to start a business like Old Salt, the status quo is more dangerous.”
It would be much simpler for Old Salt to just open a meat processing plant, as some ranchers do, and not get into restaurants and events. (In fact, that’s where much of the national attention has been focused: The White House recently committed $1 billion to independent meat processing companies, citing a lack of competition from big meatpackers.)
But Mr. Mannix said it would not have addressed the other issue farmers 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 element of that food system.”
Old Salt is his attempt to remake the whole damn thing.
And people are noticing. “Old Salt is a beacon,” said Robin Kelson, executive director of Abundant Montana, a nonprofit that promotes local food. “They’re showing the rest of us that by stacking businesses, by working together in creative ways, it’s possible to make the system work.”
On a recent Saturday, Helena’s newest downtown restaurant, Union, was buzzing. A wood-fired grill sizzled as patrons munched on steaks and short ribs. in front, a butcher’s case glistened with bacon and breakfast sausages. All sourced from Old Salt member ranches.
This restaurant-butcher shop is Old Salt’s latest venture. It joins the Outpost, a burger stand inside a 117-year-old bar, and the Old Salt Festival, a food and music-filled celebration of sustainable agriculture at the Mannix Ranch in late June, now in its second year. This is in addition to the company’s meat processing facilities 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 redefine the local meat economy.”
While Mr. Mace wants all of Old Salt’s outfits to turn a profit, their larger purpose is to serve as marketing vehicles for the meat subscription service: get customers to fall in love with Union rib-eye, then sign up to get the details the company’s. “Steak and steak” package delivered every month.
In the next five years, Old Salt’s goal is to sell meat to 10,000 families across the country each year, up from about 800 now. It won’t be easy: Americans are used to buying ground chuck at the grocery store, not a website.
“It just takes a lot to dig into people’s spending habits,” Mr Mays said, “and make them understand that you’re not just buying meat, you’re investing in local landscapes.”
This matters to Mr. Mannix. He selected Old Salt’s members from more than 9,000 ranches across the state because they share his commitment to regenerative ranching, a set of principles that seeks to replenish the soil and reduce the environmental impact of cattle.
Its primary goal is to put more money in the hands of these ranchers so they can spend more time and money managing their land. (In total, Old Salt’s ranches manage more than 200,000 acres, a tract larger than Shenandoah National Park.)
That’s why Old Salt ranchers own the majority of the company and share in the profits. “We didn’t want to be a meat company that buys animals from ranchers and ultimately, as it grows, has an incentive to pay as little as possible for those animals,” Mr. Mannix said. “That leaves less money to pay for the time it takes to actually take care of ecosystems.”
Uniting four farms under one brand also allowed members to pool their products and marketing resources, rather than competing against each other.
“It takes some guts to do what they’re doing, but we need people like that up front to lead the way,” said Dr Hassanein, a University of Montana professor. While it may seem ironic given that beef production is responsible for nearly 9 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, he said he supported these ranches precisely because he cares about wildlife and the environment.
“These are well-known ranches. many of them are award-winning ecologists,” Dr Hassanein said. “If they can’t survive financially, then we really have to ask what’s going to come in their place.”
That’s a question many of Old Salt’s ranchers, who face both financial and environmental pressures, have asked. As Cooper Hibbard, a fifth-generation rancher and chairman of Old Salt’s board of directors, said, “It’s clear from all angles that we can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing or we won’t have a ranch to give to the next generation.”
“We’re trying to carve out a new model,” he said. “We’re really swinging for the fences.”
