“Making It Work” is a series that follows small business owners trying to persevere through tough times.
When people think of Montana ranches, they conjure up romantic images of vast valleys, cold streams and snow-capped mountains, but few realize what happens to the cows once they leave the range. In fact, most of them don't stay in Montana.
Even in a state with nearly twice as many cattle as people, consulting firm Highland Economics estimates that only about 1 percent of the beef purchased by Montana households is raised and processed locally. As in the rest of the country, many Montanans eat beef from as far away as Brazil.
The typical fate of a Montana pasture-raised cow is as follows: It's bought by one of the big four meatpackers (JBS, Tyson Foods, Cargill, or Marfrig), which process 85% of the nation's beef, then shipped to a company like Sysco or US Foods (a distributor worth more than $50 billion combined), then sold at a Walmart or Costco, which together account for roughly half of the U.S. food bill. Ranchers who want to get out of the system, for example by selling their beef locally rather than as an anonymous commodity crisscrossing the country, are like David among Goliaths.
“Beef processors have a lot of influence,” said Neva Hassanein, a professor at the University of Montana who studies sustainable food systems. “They tend to have a lot of influence throughout the supply chain.” For domestic ranchers, who are seeing their profits slowly dwindle, “this is kind of a trap,” she said.
Cole Mannix is trying to escape that trap.
Mannix, 40, has a penchant for philosophical ramblings (he once thought about becoming a Jesuit priest). He grew up ranching, as his family has since 1882 — baling hay, helping with calf births and leading cattle across the plateau on horseback — and he wants to ensure the next generation, his sixth generation, has the same opportunities.
So in 2021, Mannix co-founded Old Salt Co-op, a company that aims to transform the way people buy meat.
While many Montana ranchers sell their calves before they're a year old to billion-dollar industrial machines, never to see or profit from them again, Old Salt's livestock never leaves the company's hands. Cattle are raised on Old Salt's four member ranches, slaughtered and processed in the company's meat processing facilities, and sold through its farm-to-table restaurants, local events and website. Ranchers with an ownership interest in the company profit every step of the way.
The technical term for this approach, in which a company controls many different elements of the supply chain, is vertical integration. It's not something many smaller meat processing companies attempt because it requires a lot of up-front capital.
“It's a scary time,” Mannix said of the company's heavy debt. “We're really trying to invent something new.”
But, he added, “No matter how risky it is to start a business like Old Salt, the riskier it is to stay the way things are.”
It would have been much easier for Old Salt to just open a meat processing facility, as some ranchers do, and not bother with restaurants and events (which is where much of the national attention is focused: The White House recently pledged to pump $1 billion into independent meat processors, citing a lack of competition from the big packers).
But Mannix said that wouldn't solve another problem ranchers face: difficulty accessing distributors and customers. “It doesn't matter if you have a great processing facility if you can't sell your product,” he said. “You can't rebuild the food system by just throwing a lot of money at one part of it.”
Old Salt is his attempt to reconstruct it all.
And people are taking notice. “Old Salt is a pioneer,” says Robin Kelson, executive director of Abundant Montana, a nonprofit that promotes local ingredients. “They're showing all of us that by stacking companies and working together in creative ways, we can make the system work.”
On a recent Saturday, Union, downtown Helena's newest restaurant, was bustling with activity. The wood-fired grill sizzled as customers ate steaks and short ribs, and bacon and breakfast sausages glistened in the butcher racks at the front of the store, all from Old Salt's member ranches.
The restaurant and butcher shop is Old Salt's newest venture, joining an outpost of a burger stand inside the 117-year-old bar and the second annual Old Salt Festival, a food and music festival celebrating sustainable agriculture held at Mannix Ranch in late June. This is in addition to the company's meat processing facility and meat subscription program.
Old Salt co-founder and head chef Andrew Mace probably wouldn't recommend starting five businesses in three years, but he said it's all part of the company's “hugely ambitious plans to reinvent the local meat industry.”
While Mace wants all Old Salt locations to be profitable, the stores' larger purpose is to act as marketing vehicles for the meat subscription service — so that customers fall in love with Union's ribeye, they'll sign up for the company's “steak and chop combo” delivered every month.
Old Salt aims to sell to 10,000 households annually over the next five years, up from about 800 now — no easy feat, since Americans are accustomed to buying ground beef at grocery stores, not websites.
“It takes a lot of work to explore people's consumption habits and help them understand that they're not just buying meat, they're investing in the local landscape,” Mace said.
That's important to Mannix: He handpicked Old Salt's members from the state's more than 9,000 ranches because they share his dedication to regenerative ranching, a set of principles that aim to revitalize soils and reduce the environmental impact of cattle.
His biggest goal is to give ranchers more money so they can devote more time and money to managing their land (Old Salt's ranches collectively manage more than 200,000 acres, an area larger than Shenandoah National Park).
That's why Old Salt's ranchers own the majority of the company's stock and share in the profits. “We didn't want to be a meat company that buys livestock from ranchers and then, ultimately, as the company grows, has an incentive to pay as little as possible for those livestock,” Mannix says. “That would mean paying less for the time we spend really caring for the ecosystem.”
Combining the four ranches under one brand allowed members to pool product and marketing resources rather than compete with one another.
“It takes a certain amount of boldness to do what they're doing, but you need people to lead the way,” said Hassanein, the University of Montana professor. It may seem ironic considering beef production accounts for about 9 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but she said she supports these ranches because she cares about wildlife and the environment.
“These are well-known ranches, many of them award-winning conservationists,” Dr Hassanein said. “If they can't survive economically, we really have to ask ourselves what is the alternative to them?”
It’s a question on many of Old Salt’s ranchers’ minds as they deal with both economic and environmental pressures. “It’s clear from every angle that we can’t continue doing things the way we’ve been doing them, or we won’t have a ranch for the next generation to pass on to them,” said Cooper Hibbard, a fifth-generation rancher and chairman of the Old Salt board of directors.
“We're trying to create a new model,” he said. “We're really going all out.”