Belcampo did it all. The nine-year old company raised livestock on pasture on its 27,000 acre farm in northern California, slaughtered animals in its own processing facility, and sold the meat in its own high-end butcher shops and restaurants in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and for a time, New York City. Belcampo also shipped meat around the country to customers willing to pay the hefty per-pound price (a 2.5 pound package of ribeyes sold online for $119.99 or almost $48 a pound, before shipping)—all in the name of good land and animal stewardship.
Then, last summer, the company was accused by former and current employees of selling meat brought in from elsewhere and sold as their own. Employees alleged that beef from Tasmania and Mary’s chicken were unloaded into the case and labeled as Belcampo meat; other former employees reported similar scenarios in different shops. After a short internal investigation, the company admitted that a small amount of meat had in fact been sold this way at their stores. Belcampo’s vertical integration from farm to fork, marketed as the key to total transparency, was in fact opaque.
Then, in mid-October, the company abruptly announced the closure of their e-commerce, restaurants, and retail shops. It’s not clear how the meat-labeling scandal impacted the company’s bottom line or whether the business was already in trouble. But as someone who raises grass finished beef and recently wrote a book about the challenges of making a profit farming, it strikes me that the demise of Belcampo offers an important moment for reflection on the industry at large.
Doug Stonebreaker, the founder and former CEO of Prather Ranch Meat Company (PRMC), another 30,000-acre operation in Northern California, has spent a lot of time thinking about what it will take to get more consumers eating beef from animals raised on pasture, at a time when the vast majority are not.
On a recent phone call, Stonebreaker was sanguine about the lessons Belcampo has to teach the rest of us in the industry. “Instead of saying, ‘That model can’t work,’” he said, “we should look at what mistakes might have been made and keep forging ahead.”
Pasture Raised Animals are Truly Slow Food
The Belcampo model tried to overcome one of the most basic laws of raising animals entirely on grass: it is a slow and unpredictable business. Although almost all beef cattle are raised on grass for the first six to nine months, most are then taken to feedlots, where they eat grain—predominantly corn and soy—that fattens them up in 16-18 months.
In a pasture-based system, however, you cannot finish cattle quickly (it takes 24 to 30 months), and there is no way to raise livestock in mass quantities. Plus, on pasture, each animal needs far more space than they do when they are standing around in a feedlot, and even with the 27,000 acres Belcampo had, there are only so many animals one could raise and herds one could manage. And, depending on the rain (which falls sparingly in California), the health of your soil, and the variety of plants you have in your pasture, the speed at which the animals grow is largely up to Mother Nature.
Which all speaks to the unpredictability of getting food from field to plate. Although you might not know it by looking at the meat case at your local grocery store, everything has a season, and unless a ranch freezes and stores its cuts (which also has high costs and challenges), it is impossible to have every cut of every animal available for consumers at every moment. Chickens can’t be pastured in cold winter months, and California’s increasingly dry summers mean that cattle there don’t reach their target weight in June, July, August, or September (unless farms irrigate, using precious groundwater to grow grass).
Consumers are fickle, too, wanting steaks in the summer for BBQs and roasts for winter stews, making it a logistical challenge for ranches trying to sell fresh meat and make the most of every whole animal.
Can a Single Farm Service Multiple Stores and Restaurants?
Yet even with these limitations, Belcampo attempted to service not one, but five (and at times more) restaurants with static menus that served traditional foods like sirloin steaks and chicken breasts.
“I just don’t see any way that I could manage my inventory in a way that would make that work,” Will Harris of White Oak Pastures recently told me on the phone. Harris’ farm, which is about one-tenth the size of Belcampo’s California operation at 3,200 acres, but raises roughly the same number of animals due to the higher annual rainfall and lush foliage in the South. White Oak also raises food for their restaurant in the small town of Bluffton, Georgia, and for an on-farm store. “But for us, those operations are in service of the farm, not the other way around,” Jenni Harris, Will’s daughter and White Oak Pastures’ marketing manager, added.
Think about it this way. Each 1,200-pound cow only has only about 16 pounds of tenderloin. That means that in order to serve 100 people an eight-ounce tenderloin steak, you would need to have four whole animals processed. But that would also yield an additional 1,896 pounds* of beef—meat that the ranch and restaurant must sell in order to stay afloat financially and live up to the moral obligation to utilize the whole animal to the best of their ability.
“You have to be processing what you’re raising, and marketing what you’re processing, otherwise you end up with a million dollars of ground beef in the freezer,” Will Harris explained.