September 2010 - Features

Burgundy Fields

By Katrina Waters

Not all feeding operations look the same. Lifelong cattleman Jon Taggart and his family
have found their place in a niche market. He shares his unique perspective on finishing cattle,
pasture management and satisfying an ever-changing consumer.

Three Things

Taggart says to produce a high-quality grass-fed product, you need three things:
1. the genetics to make a good product to start with;
2. the knowledge and ability to manage for good pasture year-round;
3. and the knowledge to know when the cattle are properly finished.

"You can't kill an 800-pound steer off of grass or off of feed [and expect a good result]. He hasn't even grown to his full mature size, much less had the time to marble."

Jon Taggart, Grandview, has been actively involved in every segment of the cattle industry. He has been a cow-calf producer, he's run stockers and he's fed cattle in the feedyard. He has sold cattle on the hoof and on the grid. But for the last 11 years or so, he's been involved in several aspects at once and filling a niche as a co-owner of Burgundy Pasture Beef.

The transition was largely based on economics, says Taggart, who 12 years ago was running cattle and farming wheat – both with high input costs – until he devised a plan to switch to a low-input (almost no-input) operation. That's when Burgundy Pasture Beef was born.

Nowadays, Taggart is still a cattleman, but runs only feeders – on grass. But he's also a packer, wholesaler, retailer and restaurant owner.

Good genetics, low-stress management key

In the early days of Burgundy Pasture Beef, Taggart was raising his own calves for the program. But, as sales grew, he no longer had the ranch resources to keep up. It was time to find a supplier. He now gets all of the cattle – all Angus – from Jimmy and Brett Sterling, Coahoma, who can fill big orders for uniform animals with the genetics to marble well. Those "outstanding genetics" are especially important for cattle that will be finished on grass.

"If an animal has the ability to marble – the genetics to marble – I don't care what the diet is. If there are enough calories and energy there, the animal will marble," Taggart says.

He says when the cattle arrive at his place, they weigh about 900 pounds on average and have reached an age where they are "pretty much bulletproof" when it comes to health, saving him time, labor and money.

"Plus," he says, "they are coming straight from where they were raised and they have gone from his pasture to my pasture in half a day. The lack of stress is a big part of it. They don't even see a chute when they get here. They go straight to the pasture."

'We just use grass'

Taggart prefers to feed heifers when possible, citing better results on Burgundy's strictly grass diet (the only feed supplement used is alfalfa hay in the winter). He says in his experience, the heifers are a little easier to finish on grass and get fat quicker because of their smaller frame size.

"The heifers are generally going to be properly finished at about 1,250 pounds while their steer counterparts may require another 150 or 200 pounds just to fill their frame and get fat. [And that 200 pounds is important to us because] we look at this place like it is a feedlot – we just use grass."

Like the traditional feeding operations, Taggart doesn't have a target weight, but rather a target degree of finish, which he looks for weekly when sorting and evaluating the cattle.

"Her frame may say she is fat at 1,100 pounds or it may be at 1,200 pounds. Or [another] might be fat at 1,450. I can't rush it – I just take them when they are ready," he says.

Taggart says finishing cattle on grass is still kind of a "live and learn" situation that has taken him some time to figure out, whereas the traditional cattle feeding industry is more scientific and has more research to back up the best practices.

"The feedlot industry is a science," he says. "They know exactly what they've got to do and how they've got to do it. In finishing cattle on grass, there's not really a textbook to go to and there's not really a lot of research."

Not being a typical feeder selling to a typical packer, Taggart has one advantage that helps create a symbiotic relationship between him and his source of cattle – he can buy older animals, like any 2-year-old heifers that came back open.

"To a feeder, a 2-year-old is a killer cow. A dinosaur. Not a feeder," Taggart says.

But, since Burgundy Pasture Beef harvests animals on a much smaller scale, they are able to use 30-month-old carcasses.

"We just debone it and do what USDA regulations tell us to do," he says.

Rotating for pastures – and pest control

Since the quality of grass on Taggart's property has a direct effect on his bottom line, good pasture management is vital. But it's not just about profits – it's also about being a good steward of the land, something close to Taggart's heart.

"Overgrazing," he says with a sigh, "I can't stand it. I drive down the road and see some of these places and it just makes my skin crawl."

But by using an intensive grazing management plan and frequently rotating pastures, he has found he isn't just protecting the land. He says he's also lowering the incidence of pest problems.

Taggart is a proponent of using integrated pest management practices such as fly parasites. He releases them every two weeks during the fly season in areas where the cattle spend most of their lounging time (where most of the manure will be).

"The fly parasites lay their eggs in the manure and their larvae eat the fly larvae," Taggart explains. "Since flies are basically pretty lazy and unable to travel very far, if they don't find a host within one-half of a mile, well, they are not going to find one. So, during the fly season, I try to move the cattle a little farther [when rotating pastures] and mess the flies up. They can't find the cows. They hatch out and there's no host, so it's a dead-end road for them."

He says the same concept helps with worm control.

When a worm egg hatches out of manure and that larva has to crawl up the grass, if the cattle are already gone, the cycle ends. Taggart adds that, additionally, if a pasture is overgrazed, the worms don't have to crawl up as high to find a host.

"But, if the cattle are grazing the tops, the worm larvae cannot travel fast enough to reach the host's mouth," he says.

Weed control: A state of mind

To Taggart, weed control is a "mindset thing" and his is admittedly a little different.

"A few weeds bother some people – they want a monoculture and they want it to be pretty," he says. "But I've got a different mindset. A cow will eat a lot of weeds, so go in and use her as a tool."

He explains that while some dormant kleingrass may not be the animal's first choice, if you give him or her something like an alfalfa supplement in a way where the animal isn't waiting for you to come back every day, it will get eaten and the animal will get enough protein.

"They'll work for you instead of you working for them," Taggart says, matter-of-factly.

Selling the finished product

Over the last decade, Burgundy Pasture Beef has grown to include a meat market and restaurant – The Burgundy Boucherie – and is continually adding to its list of specialty retailers and gourmet restaurants where their meat is found. But, for customers who can't make it to one of those locations, it's still pretty easy to get their hands on some Burgundy Beef. For those who live in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, the company delivers orders to homes or businesses, alternating Saturdays in the Dallas and Fort Worth areas. Customers living outside the metroplex (or those who need their order on a specific day) can take advantage of Burgundy's reasonable nationwide shipping rates.

About the segment switch, Taggart says, "We run fewer cattle and don't get the most pounds per acre, but if you look at our low input costs, we don't have to. When your costs go down that much, even if production decreases a little, there's still room for profit.

"We make more per cow, meaning we don't have to run as many cows. And at this stage of my life, after working my tail off all those years, I don't have to work at it near as hard as I used to."

 

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"Burgundy Fields" is from the September 2010 issue of The Cattleman magazine.