Subscribers receive changing mix of beef products

By LISA LIEBERMAN

For the Capital Press

Consumers these days are much more conscious of where their food comes from and how it's grown.

That's why an increasing number of people are buying naturally raised, grass-fed meat from producers like Bob Carey, owner of Brandon Natural Beef in San Francisco.

Carey started his business four years ago. The first year, his business expanded by 100 percent. Between 2009 and 2010, business grew by 40 to 50 percent.

"We would have had higher growth, but we ran out of product earlier that year," Carey said.

Carey has a select base of customers, most of whom are concerned about how the animals live and that they're slaughtered humanely. Most live in relatively small houses and apartments and don't have big freezers. Unlike people in rural areas, they cannot store whole butchered cows.

Most of his customers have a subscription, much like traditional community-supported operations, which deliver fruit and vegetable boxes to customers on a regular basis.

"We have different monthly packages where we deliver to customers different items," Carey said.

He mixes the packages' contents to keep them interesting for customers. He delivers different combinations of steaks, briskets, short ribs and ground beef. He also has a program where customers can buy 10 pounds of ground beef a month for a reduced price.

Although he's based in San Francisco, where most of his customers are, Carey has family roots in Colorado. He works with a rancher there who raises his cattle -- mostly Angus and Herefords.

The company sells about 140 cattle a year, which are raised at altitudes of 14,000 feet in the Colorado mountains. Since the winters are inhospitable there, the season generally lasts from late April to mid-October.

Generally, the rancher Carey contracts with purchases the cattle at 600 pounds and gets them up to weight -- usually an extra 300 pounds -- before harvesting them.

"We get an affidavit saying they were never fed anything but grass after they were weaned, and then we take them up to the mountain pasture to feed them all summer long," Carey said. "It's amazing how good the grass is. It's very rich and a great place to finish them and get them up to weight."

The difference between Carey and many cattle ranchers, he said, is that he's raising cows the way they were meant to be raised -- on grass and not anything else.

Even on some organic farms, cows may be fed certified organic grain and not get the same types of nutrition as purely grass-fed cows, he said. On big feedlots, the animals are raised to eat as much as possible as quickly as possible.

In Colorado, the slaughterhouse is a 90-minute drive from the ranch. The cattle -- usually between 12 to 30 at a time -- are put in a trailers, usually the day or night before the slaughter takes place.

"The objective is to get them there early enough so they have some time to calm down before they're killed. They're less afraid and there's less adrenaline running through them," Carey said.

That makes for higher quality, better-tasting meat, Carey said. Ultimately, he would like to slaughter the cattle at the ranch. That's not possible yet, because his meat is transported across state lines.

"We think within a few years, it will be fairly normal thing for smaller producers like us to slaughter our own meat and have a USDA-inspected product which we can transport across state lines," Carey said.

Carey could probably raise cattle in California, but for right now, he prefers Colorado.

Just like wine, there are differences between the way beef tastes, depending on where its grown and harvested, Carey said.

"We think our product has a delicate, broader and fuller taste than California-raised beef, which is more robust," Carey said. "It all depends on where it's raised. There are several factors that affect the taste, the most important being the types of grasses in the soil and the rainfall. The water in the mountains is very pure and that's one of the reasons our beef tastes like it does."