Christoph Weder had to find a different way of doing business. The more he looked at the cattle industry, the less he saw any long-term hope for his mid-sized farm.
Across Canada, with cow-calf operators feeding into a system that typically ends up at Lethbridge feedlots, thousands of farmers have wrestled with those same fears over the past two decades, with the result that thousands of farmers have exited the industry.
Then Weder had his eureka moment. He didn’t have to go it alone.
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The beef producer from Alberta’s Peace River country started rounding up like-minded ranchers from across the Prairie provinces to form Prairie Heritage Beef Producers, which markets “old fashioned” ranched beef, raised without growth hormones, antibiotics or animal byproducts.
Now, the group has 18 members across three provinces, and a solid track record of getting above-market prices for a growing volume of their branded cuts.
The individual farms have given up some autonomy. They’ve had to commit to the group’s positioning statement (Prairie Heritage Beef is a partnership of eco-committed ranch families that work together to sustainably produce and market beef, connecting the ranch gates to the consumer plates) making it not just a marketing statement, but an accurate description of how they farm every day.
They’ve had to accept that who they are and how they farm are key to the overall group’s success, as customers can see by checking out each of their profiles on
As well, group members have also needed to adapt their businesses to the partnership, much as farmers have to accept some curbs on their decision making when they enter any kind of partnership, even if it’s a straightforward machinery-sharing partnership with a cousin down the road.
In return, though, these mid-sized farms have been able to secure their place in the beef industry.
The strategic decision to move in a new direction was a straightforward dollars-and-cents response to a clearcut business problem, Weder says.
“There just isn’t enough money in doing it the other way,” Weder told COUNTRY GUIDE with a rueful chuckle. “Do I need to be any more specific than that? If you look at return on investment, the cow-calf sector is the worst in all of agriculture.”
Weder says the project hasn’t been an easy one to get up and running, but today Prairie Heritage Beef Producers slaughters and markets about 5,000 animals a year, with markets as far away as Europe.
What keeps them going, says Weder, is a shared belief that a strong marketing effort and a focus on building a solid customer base can create the sustainable future that eluded the old model and its unstated assumption that if you produce it, someone will want to buy it.
“I think it goes all the way back to our ag schools,” says Weder, who graduated with a masters degree in range management from Oregon State. “We learn all about production, production, production — but we learn next to nothing about marketing. Maybe we should be learning a whole lot more about marketing.”
That’s meant there had to be a tough paradigm shift for farmers who had been raised in an industry built on the idea that commodities are interchangeable, and that one farm’s beef is identical to any other farm’s beef.
