When Todd Churchill couldn’t find decent beef locally, he decided to provide it.
A farm boy-turned-accountant, he later began marketing grass-fed beef through the Thousand Hills Cattle Co., which he founded in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, in 2003.
“Like a lot of rural kids, I did not have any intention of being involved in agriculture. Growing up, I saw that it meant you had to spend a lot of time driving a tractor and being elbow deep in a vat of chemicals,” he said, speaking at the Manitoba Forage Council’s seminar on grass-fed beef.
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“So I went to the big city, got an education and went into business.”
His company processes 20 head per week of grass-fed cattle raised under a strict production protocol to grocery stores, specialty butcher shops, restaurants and colleges in the Minneapolis area.
After reading Michael Pollan’s article entitled This Steer’s Life, published in 2002 in the New York Times, Churchill realized that he had stopped eating beef years before.
“That was quite a shock to me. Beef doesn’t taste good anymore,” he said, adding that like most consumers, he had also come to believe that chicken and pork were healthier meat.
The son of an attorney who also operated a corn-soy row crop operation and 500-head feedlot remembered liking beef as a youth.
“I started wondering if the reason I didn’t like beef was because of what the feedlot diet and experience does to quality.”
He sought out two small grass-fed operations and bought a quarter of beef from each.
“To my untrained eye, their production systems looked identical,” he said.
“The first quarter was the best my wife and I had ever eaten. The other quarter was the worst. My dog ate the whole thing.”
With the germ of a business plan forming in his mind, he realized that capitalizing on the health benefits of grass-fed was not enough. It had to taste good, too.
“I knew that if I could find a consistent supply of beef that was like that first quarter, I could market that,” he said. “I knew how to build the brand, do the marketing, find the customers and put the distribution system together.”
His biggest hurdle was learning how to identify and buy animals that would be good eating. At the time, he didn’t own cattle, so he taught himself to select animals that would produce a consistently good product.
Instead of being a breed-driven company, he decided to create a production protocol that would back marketing claims that would appeal to his consumer targets such as antibiotic-free, grass-fed raised on family farms with no confinement.
He started off in 2003 supplying one store with one animal per week.
“Another store heard that their competitor had grass-fed beef and then they wanted it as well,” he said.
“It slowly grew from there to the point where today we have over 100 accounts, 50 retail locations in the Twin Cities and 55 restaurants and colleges.”
The success or failure of a marketing operation depends on keeping promises to customers. Aside from the production protocol, the most important promise Churchill’s company makes is that the product is “always available, fresh, year-round.”
Convenience is paramount to building a customer base, especially when selling beef for double the commodity price, he added.
That means that once he convinces a grocer or restaurant to stock his beef, he must never allow them to run out of stock.
“We’ve taken that very seriously. I’ve had as much as $250,000 in inventory in the freezer at one time because if just once you tell somebody who’s counting on you, ‘sorry, I don’t have it,’ that’s the end,” he said.
“As much as the customers would like to sell grass-fed beef raised in Manitoba, they won’t do it if they have any hint that you’re going to let them down and make them look foolish.”
If an operation can stick around for three years, it will find its sales soar as cautious fence-sitters jump on the bandwagon.
Churchill sources his cattle from 45 ranches within eight hours of the Twin Cities and pays $1.75 per pound hot on the rail, regardless of the commodity price.
Ranchers who follow his production protocol find that they can make a decent living without having 10,000 acres and $500,000 invested in equipment, he said, adding that his grass-fed business model could help attract the best and brightest back to farming.
“You can achieve gross income of $500 per acre on permanent pasture and grazing, ” said Churchill.
“Once you get your fences, watering system and pastures seeded down, you are very well insulated from rising costs because you don’t have a lot of inputs after that.”
