The Closet Grass-Fed Revolutionary

I bought my first house 23 days before I resigned. I remember sitting on a street corner in Washington, DC, the final business trip of a job I hated, my eyes glistening with tears. I told my wife over the phone, I just couldn’t do it anymore.

A few days later, I was unemployed, had a looming house payment, and two small children to feed. My wife was telling me everything was gonna be ok, but I knew she needed just as much reassurance. Some of my friends thought I was crazy. A few said I was selfish. Family members didn’t want to say I was irresponsible. They were all speaking the truth. Yet I knew deep down that this was the right decision, really the only way I was going to make things work.

Sometimes you choose the rougher road because you know it’s better; because it’s the only way for you to move forward.

I think Seth and Mica Nitschke of Mariposa Ranch might know a little about that.

“It was a silly story.”

Those are Seth’s words. A rare rancher who can speak effortlessly about his work, life and thoughts on the grass-fed beef range, Seth has a clear tenor voice with just the faintest of accent that you can’t quite place, evidence of a traveler who’s covered some ground early and often in his life. 

“We didn’t set out to be grass-fed ranchers because we had a statement to make, or because we wanted to change the food system.”

From the get-go, Seth asserts he’s no revolutionary. But I don’t believe him for a second.

Modern day grass-fed ranchers are not your run of the mill luddites resisting progress. Grass-fed beef is a tough business. Less than 5% of the market, it’s expensive to raise, complicated to manage, and hard to process. It would be a lot easier to raise cattle for nine months on the same pasture, and then sell them to a feedlot. But Seth has chosen a different path. In fact, whether they admit it or not, guys like Seth are at the vanguard of changing the US agricultural system, and quite possibly saving humanity from itself.

Seth’s grass-fed beef story started innocently enough. He and his wife Mica had moved back to California from Nebraska where he was buying feedlot cattle for Cargill. He had a new job with a specialty meat company trying to make a go of grass-fed beef back in the early 2000s.

“This was before Michael Pollan, before people liked fat,” Seth reminded me. How far we’ve come with the local and sustainable food conversation in the short time since Omnivore’s Dilemma was published.

Life seemed good. Seth bought a house, and had a baby.

But like many good ideas, the company was a bit before its time, and Seth’s new employer struggled to compete with the handful of grass-fed producers already selling in California. 

“We ended up buying cattle out of Nevada, feeding them in Washington, processing them in Fresno, and then shipping them to Chicago. That just didn’t work.”

Times got bad. Seth got laid off.

The next several months were difficult. But not one to dwell on bad news or embrace boredom, Seth started drafting a business plan for a beef company he could get behind, one that he might run himself.

“It was just an intellectual exercise to keep me from tearing my hair out.”

But if he was going to start a beef company, it was going to be grass-fed.

Seth had spent a couple of years living in Western Australia, first as a high school exchange student, then again during college. While there, he’d eaten a lot of grass-fed beef. Unlike in the states, about 80% of Australia’s cattle are finished on grass, mostly because land is cheap, it doesn’t freeze, and corn is expensive.

“Grass-fed was just how [Australians] did it there. That was just the normal thing.”

It was a quality product, and Seth knew he wanted to raise something of equal quality in the US. But I hazard a guess that it went a bit deeper than that, as most small business ideas do. 

I think Seth might have chosen grass-fed beef because its taste reminded him of his time in Australia. Those so important formative years that lay the foundation for adulthood. The friendships Seth built halfway around the world but would keep for a lifetime. The summer he saved his host parents’ ranch from financial disaster. That romantic feeling of being a stranger in a strange land, yet feeling oddly at home.

We all can remember that brief time in our life when every day seemed so clear, and every night felt like a BBQ with friends that would never end.

I think that’s what Seth tastes every time he bites into a grass-fed steak. 

“We weren’t trying to change the world. We just wanted to bring great beef to other people.”

Seth also saw his early business as a “company.” It wasn’t a “ranch” that Seth was building in his head. It was a meat business. And when he branded it as Open Spaces Meats in 2006, it sounded much bigger than a few acres in Hornitos, CA.

“Our idea was that most people don’t make their nutritional decisions in grocery stores and restaurants. We wanted to sound more like a business than a farm or a ranch so that we could target institutions and suppliers.”

And for five years, that’s exactly what Seth did. As a result, many college students across the state are eating his responsibly raised beef in their cafeterias.

But Seth’s heart just wasn’t in the name. He may have had big ambitions to reach further up the food chain, but like all the best changemakers, Seth wanted his business to better reflect his values.

“The truth is we’re not that big business corporate company. We’re family ranchers, and hopefully, we always will be.” 

So, in 2017, Open Spaces changed its name to Mariposa Ranch. “It’s who we are, where we’re from, and what we do.”

For the remainder of my chat with Seth, we had some exciting conversation on sustainable and regenerative agriculture. Seth only grew more animated as we delved into the future of agriculture, pondered climate change, and dissected the Farm Bill. I felt like we could have spent the rest of the afternoon pontificating about our planet and how we feed it. But don’t worry, I’ll save you most of the details, and maybe include some well-edited snippets in a future blog post.

What I will say about Seth Nitschke is that he’s a straight-shooting, common sense, intellectual cowboy businessman of the 21st Century. He may deny that he’s trying to change the world, but I know that if we had more ranchers like him, we’d be a whole lot better off. In this day and age, pragmatism is revolutionary.

Today, Seth is still Head Cowboy of Mariposa Ranch. He has two more children. You should check out Mica’s blogs about their life as ranchers. Seth still works much of the ranch himself, often on horseback. Yet, he finds the time to share the day-to-day challenges of grass-fed ranching via Facebook. Through it all, you get the sense that Seth is someone doing something that he was always meant for.

Walt Disney once said “a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.”

Losing that job you hated can become the reason you find success.

That seems to be the case for Mariposa Ranch.

Next Week I Get into the Weeds with Seth and Whether Or Not Grass-Fed Beef Can Really Save the World.