New England Cattleman Turns Old Breed Into Prime Beef

Guy Steucek
New England Correspondent

HARDWICK, Mass. — How do you find Ridge Shinn in the small town of Hardwick, Mass.? Simply stop at the town common and talk to Leon Teachers who will drive you through the countryside on dirt roads to Hardwick Post and Beam and the Bakewell Reproductive Center.

Ridge Shinn will admit that he has bitten off more than he could chew more than once during several career paths. However, after conversation with him you will conclude that he doesn’t chew more than he has bitten off. The exception is when he has had his teeth into some of his first-rate Devon beef – it’s just too good to swallow.

An enormous amount of effort and skill goes into producing prime beef, which makes up less than 4 percent of beef graded. Genetic stock, good nutrition, sound animal handling, skilled butchering, and appropriate aging all influence the flavor you savor when eating beef. Ridge’s grass-finished New York strip steak fared well against the best beef in the land (Omaha Steaks and Niman Ranch) in a steak evaluation featured in Wine Spectator (Nov. 15, 2002).

Traveling through life following his nose, Shinn learned to farm based on the way it was done in the early 1800s. He learned to hay with a scythe. After study of political science and environmental affairs in college, he went to work for the Population Institute in Washington, D.C. After two years of organizing conferences and dealing with the population and political mire, he decided to get involved with the production side of the population problem. Where better to learn about agriculture than Old Sturbridge Village, Sturbridge, Mass.? He took a job there and didn’t know what his pay would be until the end of his first week.

One of his missions at Sturbridge was to recreate the 1790-1830 breed of cattle. This was done by mongrelizing old breeds of native red cattle. He studied European paintings to see what the cattle of Devonshire extraction looked like. These were some of the first cattle to arrive in the New World.

Tina, his intern, found 10 Devon bull lines and 50 cows in Connecticut where Devon cattle were popular as oxen in pulling teams. These farmers lived within 25 miles of each other and didn’t know one another. With this information, Shinn organized the American Milking Devon Association in 1978. Subsequently he was founding director of the American Breeds Conservancy (now the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, www.albc.org).

While at Sturbridge, Shinn learned to do timber framing and subsequently formed Hardwick Post and Beam (www.hardwickpostandbeam.com). Now with one foot in the timber frame world and the other in the realm of cattle breeding, he had the goal of “making a lot of money and then farm.”

However, at the age of 50 he realized that it wasn’t going to happen. He wondered if he could do much with rare breeds with the remainder of his life.

On a visit to Polly Hill Arboretum on Cape Cod, he looked down and read a sign that the arboretum was started by Polly when she was 50 and she was running around the Arboretum at 97 then. He started breeding cattle in earnest.

In 2001 Shinn founded the New England Livestock Alliance (NELA) in order to revitalize farming in the Northeast by linking farmers to markets with the desire for wholesome beef. At that time, grass-finished beef was rather variable, so Shinn and his colleagues set out to do a long term analysis of cattle. NELA had funds and Gearld Fry, he used a good number of linear measurements and ultrasound scanning to identify the best cattle. He found a Devon cow to be at the top of the chart with this analysis. The Devon meat has good intramuscular fat and it was tender and tasted good.

Shinn found that the muscle fat in grass-finished cows is related to the butterfat content of the milk. With this in mind, Guernseys would produce the best beef, but they have too little of it. Devon cows were reared to be used as draft animals, for milk and for flesh. Doug Flack, Flack Family Farm, in Vermont sells raw Devon milk with a butterfat content of 7 percent. Shinn said that Doug filled a Mason jar with Devon cream one evening and placed it the refrigerator, the next morning he held the jar upside down and nothing came out.

Finishing Devons on corn is a “disaster” said Shinn — they gain too much weight and the meat is too fatty.

Next to the timber frame shop is a patch of woods called the “spa” or “shrink tank” where Shinn places a chubby cow with one flake of hay per day until they lose a few hundred ponds and are back in breeding condition.

Now Shinn looked for the desired Devon cows. Basically he was looking for old style cattle: bulls wide in the shoulder and cows wide in the rump. For every inch of the girth of a cow is longer than the top-line you add 37 pounds of ribeye.

About 30,000 Devons are raised in Brazil, but hoof and mouth disease there prohibits importing these animals to the U.S. So Shinn sent an associate looking for good Devon cows to New Zealand and Australia.

The first stop was pay dirt. Ken McDowell was cultivating Devons in New Zealand on the basis of looking for “good sound animals.” He had no linear measurement and no ultrasound observations, just a keen eye for prime beef animals. His bulls were very docile as are Shinn ’s. Well, Shinn bought 12 heifers and flew them home to Hardwick, Mass. The selling of harvested embryos paid for the first-class heifers seats on Quantas.

To address the male side of the Devons, Shinn established the Bakewell Reproductive Center (www.bakewellrepo.com) where he distributes embryos and semen. The Rotokawa Devon semen is in global demand and one bull has sired approximately 15,000 offspring.

Growing prime beef is only part of the equation; marketing it was the next Shinn enterprise.

Hardwick Beef is his brainchild. They work with slaughterhouses in Maine, Pennsylvania and Vermont. While Shinn is aware of 20 years of feasibility studies that have come to nothing, he knows what is important in marketing beef. If you have great cows that produce consistent quality and skilled butchers, the marketing takes care of itself. New Zealand lamb is a hit in North America because of consistent quality, said Shinn.

Grass-finished beef could revive New England agriculture because of the proximity to the huge markets in Boston and New York, and this depends upon consistent quality. Shinn noted that “Lobel Rouge” or target goal in France rewards farmers for 15 to 20 percent for premium carcasses with desired fat cover and shape. While the cows may look different on the outside, the premium carcasses are very similar. Producers take time and effort to receive the premium. Chefs delight in securing premium beef and despair over “consistently poor quality, bland beef with no texture.” Their reaction to low quality beef is to mask mystery meat with exotic sauces and accoutrements.

Shinn has submitted his grass-finished beef to tenderness tests at Clemson University where his beef scored 3.1 (tender) versus 4.1 for corn-finished competition. According to Shinn, the omega-3:omega-6 ratio is the fingerprint of grass verses corn-finished beef. Hardwick Beef had a ratio of 1:1.2 whereas corn-finished beef was 1:10 or 20. The low ratio is best for the health of the consumer.

How does Shinn arrive at a price for beef? The cost of producing premium beef is the starting point for Hardwick Beef. The 12 percent profit for Hardwick is placed on top of cost of the beef. They figure that the sustainable price paid the farmer is $1.75 hot carcass weight. This can be paid because the Devon cows yield a higher percentage of high price cuts and they send this to the farmer. Also, they cut the carcass as the French do; they cut at the 13th rib to separate the high and low quality meat. With offspring from the Rotokawa line the cut out jumps from 58-62 percent to 65-75 percent according to Shinn.

Well, the proof of the pudding is the eating. When Dartmouth College complained about the cost of Hardwick’s grass-finished beef, Shinn went to the student center and setup a cook-off. The students were told that the brand X burgers grilled for them would cost $4.50 and the grass-finished burgers would cost $6.85. After tasting each, 87 of the 91 students voted for the Hardwick grass-finished beef.

Consistent, high quality grass-finished beef could do much to sustain agriculture in New England and the Mid-Atlantic region. Hardwick beef harvests 10 animals a week and is always looking for farmers who want to be rewarded with premium prices for premium beef.