A Lesson from Oregon

Shenandoah Valley Hosts Innovative Ranchers of Direct-Marketing Beef Co-op

Andrew Jenner
Virginia Correspondent

HARRISONBURG, Va. — It was during the farm crisis of the 1980s, when the bank threatened to sell off some of their cattle, that Oregon ranchers Doc and Connie Hatfield realized they had to stop living at the mercy of the commodity markets.

Instead, they decided to gauge local demand, and found that people were willing to pay a values-based premium for sustainably and humanely raised, hormone-free beef that’s healthy for the consumer, for the land, and for the family ranch. Before long the Hatfields and about a dozen other ranchers had gotten together and formed a cooperative – Country Natural Beef – to cater to that demand.

They hashed out a structure (each member individually owns his or her beef from birth to retailer), developed a marketing plan, found a slaughterhouse to process their animals, pinned down a few retailers to buy their beef and sold a few hundred head of cattle that first year. (It sounds so easy in retrospect, doesn’t it?)

Twenty-two years later, Country Natural Beef has grown to more than 100 family ranches in 12 Western states (the majority are in Oregon). Together, these ranches have 120,000 cows on 6 million acres; Country Natural Beef sold 45,000 head last year. The group now includes 11 young families that have decided to keep ranching for a second generation with Country Natural Beef, and the at the group’s last meeting, said Connie Hatfield, 25 kids younger than five kept the babysitter occupied – which, she said, sounds like the epitome of sustainability.   

Today, 2,000 miles to the east, ideas about “local foods” and “direct marketing” and “agricultural sustainability” are catching fire among producers and consumers alike in the Shenandoah Valley. Thus, the Hatfields earned an invitation from Eric Bendfeldt, a community viability specialist with Virginia Cooperative Extension, to share their experiences with local beef producers.

They began their visit in Page County, where they met with several beef producers and spoke before about 80 people at a meeting of the Page County Farmers Association. The Hatfields spent the next day with Rockingham County producers, and then spoke about Country Natural Beef that evening to a crowd of about 100 people at Mrs. Rowe’s restaurant near Harrisonburg. Between the two meetings, about 30 producers in and near the Shenandoah Valley expressed interest in further discussing the idea of a local beef direct-marketing cooperative, said Bendfeldt, who hopes to organize a follow-up meeting soon.

“I think we need something to keep agriculture viable. We need to keep changing with the times,” said Kevin K. Craun, a beef producer from Grottoes, Va. who helped organize the Hatfields’ visit.

One of the major appeals of an outfit like Country Natural Beef is the control it offers the farming community over its own products, Craun said. Once widespread, local control over the production and processing of Valley agricultural products has more or less disappeared (with a few exceptions) over the last few decades, Craun said.

“I think we need to find a way to bring local control back to the Valley,” he said.

While the will to buy and sell locally already exists, doing so isn’t always easy, as the intermediary local marketing and processing infrastructure has also mostly disappeared.

“The logistics of getting the products from the farm to the consumers is one of the bigger issues,” said Ian Boden, chef and owner of Staunton Grocery, an upscale local restaurant committed to using local ingredients.

Craun expects the major obstacle to launching something similar to Country Natural Beef locally will be getting local beef producers to cooperate, understand and work well each other.

He wasn’t the only one concerned about that.

Getting a group of beef producers to work together well “is probably the biggest thing I have a hard time envisioning,” said Jamey Altman, an Orange County cow-calf producer who also said he’s very interested in learning more about direct marketing.

In his comments before the crowd in Rockingham County last week, Doc Hatfield also acknowledged the challenges of cooperation. After all, he said, the last thing a bunch of leathery, stubborn Oregon ranchers want to do is “sit around and collaborate.” But at some point, he said, when times on the ranch got tough enough to put the entire operation in jeopardy, a group of those same ranchers began to realize that to maintain their independence, they were going to have to work together better.