Sevan Matossian (00:02):
Bam, we’re live. Hey, thank you to the person who reached out to me yesterday and told me that my I s O is on auto. That’s why when I was leaning into the camera, the exposure was changing. They’re like, dude, when you lean into your camera, you look like a vampire. I’m like, oh, okay. Thank you. Fix that this morning. So now I’m just one exposure. How could I not know that? Oh, sorry. Hey.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Hey, daddy. How are you?
Sevan Matossian (00:37):
Podcast time.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Oh man, I’m so happy for you. You’re crushing it,
Sevan Matossian (00:42):
Dude. Thanks buddy.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Are you on right
Sevan Matossian (00:44):
Now? I am on right now.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Oh shit, man. I have so many important questions to ask you, but crush the podcast. I’ll call you
Sevan Matossian (00:51):
Later. Okay. Talk to you in 90. Bye.
(00:56):
Mr. McIntyre. Dick butter. Hey, good morning, Madeline Eggert. Good morning in the green dress. Brandon, good morning. I started following you the other day, Brandon, a couple days ago. Brandon, did you give someone at the podcast free tickets or were you going to, or We did it already. You did it at the games. Oh, I’m so confused. I shouldn’t even open that door. This morning we have Mary Heffernan coming on on. Holy cow. This is a crazy story. Wild story, good story, healthy story ambition, a human with crazy ambition and horsepower. I think she’s coming on five Mary’s Farms. Five Mary’s Farms, five Mary Farms. I better look up the exact name, annunciation of it. Five Mary’s Meats, five Mary’s Farm, five Mary’s Ranch, raised meats. Man, all their stuff is so nice. I want to see the ranch. Look at this place is crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy. Look at this ranch. Look at that. Oh my goodness. Hey,
Mary Heffernan (02:15):
Good morning.
Sevan Matossian (02:16):
We were just, I call it ogling. My mom told me I’m pronouncing it wrong, and it’s ogling like ogling, but we were ogling your ranch. Crazy.
Mary Heffernan (02:28):
Thank you. It’s a pretty special place.
Sevan Matossian (02:31):
Very few people say that to me when I say I’m ogling their stuff, but you did it. People ale me too. I’m like, well, thank you. Or I’m planning to say it. If anyone ever does say it to me, no one’s ever said it to me.
Mary Heffernan (02:44):
You’re ready.
Sevan Matossian (02:46):
Hey, I was watching another podcast you did before and that, I don’t know if that’s a throw rug or what that is, but that white thing behind you.
Mary Heffernan (02:54):
Yes. My sheet belts.
Sevan Matossian (02:56):
So for the first five minutes of the podcast, I thought that was a giant sheep dog behind you, and I kept waiting for it to move. I’m like, man, her dog is loyal,
Mary Heffernan (03:06):
He’s calm. A few of those sheep dogs that could blend in, but they’re not allowed indoors. They’re wild feral dogs who stay outside and guard the sheep.
Sevan Matossian (03:16):
Mary, what high school did you go to?
Mary Heffernan (03:18):
I went to Sacred Heart in Menlo Park.
Sevan Matossian (03:21):
Okay. I guess, I don’t know Menlo Park so good. I was born in Oakland. Where were you born?
Mary Heffernan (03:26):
Okay. Palo Alto.
Sevan Matossian (03:28):
Okay. I was born at Oakland Children’s Hospital. Are you a home birth kid?
Mary Heffernan (03:33):
Nope. I’m a Stanford hospital.
Sevan Matossian (03:35):
Okay. Oh, good place.
Mary Heffernan (03:37):
Yeah, I think that’s where I had all my kids too.
Sevan Matossian (03:40):
That’s where you go if you’re in the Bay Area and you want actual medical care. I live in Santa Cruz and a kid breaks their arm and the, what are they called? The orthopedist will tell you something. You’re like, oh, okay. Thank you. And then you immediately rush over the hill to Stanford.
Mary Heffernan (03:58):
We do the same thing up here in Fort Jones Medical care. You got to drive a while to find a doctor you trust. We’ve had a few stitches episodes that didn’t end well, but
Sevan Matossian (04:09):
Yeah. How do you, you know when to do stitches? I usually just the other day, my kid snapped his shin in half in the morning, but it wasn’t until nine o’clock until my wife’s like, Hey, man, he’s gone into shock a few times. I think we should take him to the dog there.
Mary Heffernan (04:25):
I’ve heard that if it looks like lips, it needs a stitch.
Sevan Matossian (04:28):
Oh, oh.
Mary Heffernan (04:30):
It’s a good rule. A good life rule, right?
Sevan Matossian (04:32):
Yeah. I like that. I like that. You’re seventh generation California.
Mary Heffernan (04:40):
I’m sixth. My kids are seventh.
Sevan Matossian (04:42):
Yeah, that’s nuts. What year, do you know who originally came to California and why they came
Mary Heffernan (04:48):
And it was actually down by you on my mom’s side in 1850 or 1851, so right around the time of the Gold Rush, they came to Paro Valley and settled in Watsonville and were farmers there
Sevan Matossian (05:04):
Wild. So they didn’t come for gold.
Mary Heffernan (05:08):
They actually were pretty smart. They came and set up a gold rush like mercantile. They sold supplies to the miners, so more of steady income instead of the strike it rich and came from Ireland first and then Croatia, half Croatian, and they started selling gold rush supplies and then farming potatoes that they brought over from Ireland. That’s what they knew how to do, and then eventually did the typical Santa Cruz Valley or Paho Valley crops like lettuce and berries,
Sevan Matossian (05:45):
Tomatoes. So one of those great grandparents was Croatian and the other one was Irish, you know? Did they meet on the journey over?
Mary Heffernan (05:56):
No, they were both Irish at that generation and then one married to Croatian halfway down the generations.
Sevan Matossian (06:04):
A buddy of mine is in Croatia now. Have you been there?
Mary Heffernan (06:07):
No, I haven’t been. We’re trying to plan a family trip to go now that the kids are older.
Sevan Matossian (06:12):
It’s a friend of mine who’s been pretty much everywhere, and I like to think I’ve been everywhere, and he’s like, have you been to Croatia? I said, no. And he said, it is the nicest place he has ever, ever been. Really? Yeah. He said he is never been anywhere nicer on planet Earth.
Mary Heffernan (06:26):
Really?
Sevan Matossian (06:27):
Yeah. People cuisine, landscape, water, the whole shebang. He said It’s nuts,
Mary Heffernan (06:33):
And I think it’s not overrun with tourists yet.
Sevan Matossian (06:37):
Yeah. I mean, I FaceTime with them there. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Yeah, it looked amazing.
Mary Heffernan (06:42):
It’s on my list.
Sevan Matossian (06:43):
Does not look like Oakland, California. Jumping to the end here real quick with the current circumstances that we see so much of the United States going through right now and kind of the reworking, I hope it’s the reworking of civilization and not a collapse of it, but are you pretty excited about where you’re at, the decisions you’ve made to go where you did? Yeah. You’re 10 years up there,
Mary Heffernan (07:10):
Just about 10 years and yeah, we say all the time how lucky we are. We moved when we did because it wasn’t like our kids world old enough to get established or we’d pretty much established ourself in life down there. It was hard to undo, but I’m glad we did it when we did. We’re pretty happy.
Sevan Matossian (07:28):
Yeah. Fort Jones, California. The show’s live, by the way. I don’t know if you knew that, so I’m just going to show people on the map where it’s at. This is in a really, truly incredible spot in the country for those you who’ve ever driven up here. It is, right. Basically. I mean, at least I like to think of it as at the Oregon California border in, you’re north of Shasta,
Mary Heffernan (07:55):
Right? Yeah, California is pretty amazing. People think where you are. Oakland is northern California and we’re six hours farther north
Sevan Matossian (08:05):
And it’s a whole different country.
Mary Heffernan (08:07):
It is. It’s mountainous. One side of our ranch feels like Oregon. It’s like 10 degrees cooler, and we’ve got moss and redwood trees, and the south facing side of our ranch is we’ve got sage brush and lots of rock and oak trees, but we’re at 3000 feet at the bottom of our ranch, 4,800 at the top, so we’ve already had, we’re waking up to 30 degree temperatures already.
Sevan Matossian (08:34):
Hey, when did that happen? Two days ago. I came in my office here to do my podcast and I was like, oh, is winter here? Did it just happen a couple days ago?
Mary Heffernan (08:42):
Yeah, it did. That was the first freeze gardens or toast.
Sevan Matossian (08:46):
Yeah. Interesting. Okay. But just to be clear, not that it matters to you, but I’m in Santa Cruz. I got out of there four or five years ago.
Mary Heffernan (08:54):
Oh, okay. You’re even farther south.
Sevan Matossian (08:56):
Yeah. I got neighbors with peacocks and donkeys, and I’m a little insulated from the chaos. It’s still a little podunk down here, at least I like to think of it. Santa
Mary Heffernan (09:08):
Cruz is a great place. It’s a nice little pocket too. That’s pretty special.
Sevan Matossian (09:15):
What year did you graduate from high school?
Mary Heffernan (09:17):
96.
Sevan Matossian (09:19):
Okay, and you said you went to Menlo Park, and then where did you go after that? Did you go to college? Yeah,
Mary Heffernan (09:24):
I went to college at William and Mary in Virginia, which was pretty random, but I just love California family history in California. I knew I wanted to come back to California, so I figured that I should go to college somewhere really different and Virginia was very different, so I was there for four years pre-med. Thought I was going to medical school. I’ve always been an entrepreneur. I just didn’t know that that was a thing. I didn’t know that was a word. I thought I needed to pick a career, traditional career path. And then after college moved back to the Bay Area in 2000, the height of the.com bubble, just blowing up and started tutoring kids while I was taking the mcat, and then that turned into opening a tutoring center. I leased a space downtown Menlo Park where rents were crazy at 22 years old. Had no idea what I was doing, but it worked. It was kind of the land of opportunity. Then I started this tutoring center and just loved the late nights, building a website and putting together brochures and making a logo and getting customers, and it was pretty quickly. I said, I’m not going back to school. I like what I’m doing.
Sevan Matossian (10:37):
Any of those students from when you were 22, you’re still in contact with?
Mary Heffernan (10:40):
Yeah, actually some of ’em I work with on a professional level today and they’re helping me out and I’m like, thanks for doing this. They’re like, thanks for getting me through high school. I couldn’t have done it if I didn’t have your place.
Sevan Matossian (10:53):
Full-blown adults now.
Mary Heffernan (10:55):
Yeah,
Sevan Matossian (10:56):
With kids, their own kids and stuff.
Mary Heffernan (10:58):
Yeah, I know. It’s crazy. It makes you feel old.
Sevan Matossian (11:00):
Wow, nuts. And what was that like being in Menlo Park during that time? I mean, I’m trying to think. I remember my mom buying me the first Apple computer at Macy’s. They sold it at Macy’s when it came out. My mom was making like $13,000 a year, and the computer was like 3,400 bucks. I can’t even now in hindsight, I’m like, what was she thinking buying me that
Mary Heffernan (11:26):
So expensive? The Apple two gss, I think we still have the box from it. My mom refuses to throw away. Yeah,
Sevan Matossian (11:33):
Actually I didn’t have the first Apple. I had the first Macintosh, or maybe it was 84. It was the first Macintosh. Was the two GSS of Macintosh or was that one of those big computers?
Mary Heffernan (11:43):
I think it was a Macintosh. It was a lot bigger than they’re now, but it was desktop.
Sevan Matossian (11:49):
Yeah. Great. Did you know any of those people being there? Did you ever see any of those people down there? Would you see Steve Jobs down there or all the names that we hear about today?
Mary Heffernan (12:00):
Jobs kids came to my tutoring center. They were clients and all those big families, whether they were tech or vc. When I grew up in Menlo Park, it was a small town. There were families there for generations, lots of kids, everybody knew each other. And then all of a sudden in 2000, it was just like, what is this place? And people would ask, where are you from? And I said Here. And they’re like, no one’s from here. Everyone moves here. Well, no, I’m from here. This small town. It’s not a small town anymore. But yeah, it was crazy. It was lots of wealth and excess and things moving quickly, and I loved the opportunity and the fact that you could do anything quickly and make things happen, but all that wealth comes with a lot of, it’s harder to find that real satisfaction in life and to feel accomplished at the end of the day. I did something when it’s just kind of tech and things moving and funny money and VC money, and that’s what we really found. I think a lot of people that we saw were not happy.
Sevan Matossian (13:17):
This isn’t the point of the podcast, but why not? Why don’t you think they were happy? I always see this connection between people who, and I’m not suggesting you’re saying this, but this connection between people who didn’t earn something and got it, whether it be money or whatever, and their happiness. People don’t realize that if you didn’t earn it, you won’t actually be able to be happy by it.
Mary Heffernan (13:35):
No, I agree. And sometimes they earned it, but it was lucky being at the right time at the right place. The tech world is crazy. There were a lot of people who you think, oh, wealth, and you get your dad’s money, you inherit money, and how can you really see that? But a lot of these people did make a life for themselves with a lot of money, but it would just appeared overnight. Or it’s like stocks. It’s like, is this, how valuable is this? But I think when you are actually creating something or physically working and seeing day-to-day progress, I think that’s really what happiness is. And making money is not a bad thing. I think people put such a weight on, oh, you can’t. Money doesn’t buy happiness, but productivity does. And part of that is making money. And I would just see a lot of people would say, I was in the service business. I had all these small businesses, brick and mortar stores working for the dollar, keeping everybody happy, but every day was like, I’d wake up excited, like a new project. I’m going to put this in at this business. I’m going to do this. I’d physically be building installations or changing businesses around. And I think that’s really what we found at the ranch when we made this move. We didn’t think we’d move here full time. We bought this land to raise really good beef.
Sevan Matossian (15:01):
How much land? Mary?
Mary Heffernan (15:03):
We have 1800 acres here. Okay.
(15:06):
Between, we have about 500 irrigated pastures and then the rest is hill country. So we run a good number of animals here, but not crazy amounts. So we came up here with four little kids in car seats, made that commute every weekend and thought, well, this will be our escape from the Bay area, and the kids can go run around barefoot and play with animals and we’ll have the best of both worlds. And we just quickly realized that that was totally naive to think that we could really put our whole heart into ranching and be the one taking care of our animals and still run businesses in the Bay Area. We’d be up at the ranch and they would call the restaurant, the hood’s filling up with smoke and somebody has to get on the roof and reset it. And my husband’s like, I’m the only one that can do that because somebody else is going to fall and it’s going to be a workers’ comp claim.
(15:58):
And then we’d be down at the restaurants and the ranch hand that we hired be like, oh, the cows got out and they’re doing this, but I’m just going to put ’em here. And Brian’s like, no, they need to stay on feed. It’s really important how we’re raising these animals. So we just looked at each other, packed up one Sunday night to go back to the Bay area and looked at each other and said, we’re going to the wrong direction. We want to stay here. We want to be on this land every day, waking up before the sunrise, working with our hands, working with our kids. That physical labor where at the end of the night you don’t need a sound machine to go to bed, you put your head on the pillow and you’re so tired from working all day. We’re like, that’s what we want, and this is the life we want for our kids.
(16:39):
So it was the easiest decision we ever made to just say, we’re leaving it all behind. We’re going to go full. We’re moving into a town of 600 people and from a house, a suburban house that we’d worked so hard for. I was like, gosh, I’m so lucky to live in this beautiful house to a 760 square foot cabin, no heat wood stove only, no dishwashers, no amenities with six of us. And it felt right. It felt like this is where we’re supposed to be. So it was an easy decision, but it was hard to unwind the life we’d built there. My husband had a law practice. We had eight brick and mortar shops. We had a house. We lived right near my parents. It was just a huge
Sevan Matossian (17:18):
Eight brick and mortar shops.
Mary Heffernan (17:20):
Yeah,
Sevan Matossian (17:21):
See, it’s so fucked up when you say that because then I’m like, God, that could be a whole show right there. I was trying to get my head wrapped around you. There’s no way to get, I need to explain to people that it’s impossible to get your head wrapped around Mary’s life. Mary, how many businesses in totality? No business. Too small. No business too big. Do you think that you have been involved in either started or worked at in your entire life, roughly?
Mary Heffernan (17:49):
Well, I’ve only worked for one place and it lasted two weeks. I was like, oh, I can’t work for someone else. I have to do my own thing.
Sevan Matossian (17:56):
Where did you work?
Mary Heffernan (17:58):
Well,
Sevan Matossian (17:59):
It was McDonald’s. Please tell me it was McDonald’s.
Mary Heffernan (18:01):
No, I had waitressing jobs in college. I’ve worked more places, but doing my own thing is really what I’m passionate about and just the way my brain is wired. But I think it’s between 20 and 25 businesses.
Sevan Matossian (18:15):
Okay. And what’s the smallest business you ever ran? The yearly income of the revenue of the smallest business you ran?
Mary Heffernan (18:27):
Gosh, that’s a great question. Probably a few hundred thousand a year.
Sevan Matossian (18:35):
That’s the smallest. That’s the revenue of the smallest.
Mary Heffernan (18:38):
Yeah. I mean, they were all, I put everything into a mall until they were successful, and then I’d either sell it or keep it going. But even my tutoring center, I still ran without being there for years and finally sold it right before Covid and then the girl, it tanked somehow.
Sevan Matossian (18:56):
You had that business for 19 years.
Mary Heffernan (18:58):
Yeah.
Sevan Matossian (18:59):
Did you cry when it tanked?
Mary Heffernan (19:01):
No, not attached to businesses.
Sevan Matossian (19:04):
Okay. Okay. So smallest is several hundred thousand. And how many employees do you think that you’ve had in your entrepreneurial life?
Mary Heffernan (19:19):
Wow, that’s a great question.
Sevan Matossian (19:21):
Thousand. You’re on the greatest podcast ever. I should have. I always forget to apologize to people when they come on. I say with zero humility from here. It’s all downhill. I should have told you. I should have told. I
Mary Heffernan (19:32):
Love it. No, that’s a really good question. 10,000 probably.
Sevan Matossian (19:38):
Oh my God.
Mary Heffernan (19:39):
But small business, maybe that’s, maybe it’s 5,000. I don’t know. It’s somewhere in the multiple,
Sevan Matossian (19:45):
But uncountable to you. Yeah, I get it. Yeah. You’re more likely to tell me how many cars you’ve owned than how many employees you’ve had.
Mary Heffernan (19:51):
Yes.
Sevan Matossian (19:52):
How many cars have you owned do you think, in your life?
Mary Heffernan (19:55):
My life. I started with the Jeep Wrangler when I turned 16 that I still wish I kept not many. Five, six.
Sevan Matossian (20:02):
Yeah. What are you driving today?
Mary Heffernan (20:05):
I either drive a truck or an expedition,
Sevan Matossian (20:08):
And the expedition is kids get in the car, we’re going to town.
Mary Heffernan (20:12):
Yes, that’s a town car. My husband bought it for me because I needed a town car.
Sevan Matossian (20:20):
Going to total, I guess different direction. Why did you have kids? Super entrepreneur, how do kids fit in?
Mary Heffernan (20:31):
My husband and I are both from big families. We’re both from Catholic families, lots of kids. Family’s really important to us. Food and family is what our life centers around. It was always first priority and still is. I think that’s the beauty of the entrepreneurial lifestyle is that your kids come right along with you. I had four babies in under five years and they always were with me, just tagging along whatever I was doing. And now they’re such a big part of what we do. We had a big shipping day yesterday here. We ship all of our meats across the country to customers, and we ran a special and had a thousand orders come through, which packing a thousand meat boxes is no small task because each one, it’s frozen meat, special cuts, we put dry ice. The boxes have to be packed really kind of as a specialty.
(21:25):
And two of my kids, we do kind of a mixture of homeschool and regular school, but two of the kids who didn’t have school, they were here helping pack boxes and get those orders out with our team. And they really see a lot. They see mistakes that you make. They see the things that make it successful. They see that if you want. They’re really into rodeo. They’re all competitive rodeo girls, but they’re like, if I want a new horse, I got to work for it, but here’s the opportunity. It’s not like, how am I going to make money? They’re like, I see lots of ways I can make money. I can sell something through my parents’ site, I can help work there. I can think of my own thing and find customers. They’ll raise beef and sell it through four H. So I think that kids in an entrepreneurial lifestyle go well together.
Sevan Matossian (22:15):
Lemme see if I can follow that. You’re Catholic, so you’re not allowed to use contraception. That was my takeaway.
Mary Heffernan (22:22):
No.
Sevan Matossian (22:25):
Okay. I missed it. Sorry. So food and family. Food and family.
Mary Heffernan (22:35):
And that’s kind of what we built our businesses on. All the businesses that I’ve done, I’ve centered around families, and to me it’s recession proof. If you have a business where people are investing in their kids or family or even good food, that’s the last thing to go. They might cut back on fancy vacations or gym memberships, but people are always going to pay for their kids before anything else.
Sevan Matossian (23:06):
I’m a hundred percent there with you. I never cut stuff for my kids. I’ll cut everything else first. Everything. Yeah. I can’t remember the last time my wife and I go out and spend money on clothes like we did before we had kids. That shit’s over $1,600 a month for tennis. You don’t buy clothes anymore,
Mary Heffernan (23:24):
And your kids have nicer clothes than you do.
Sevan Matossian (23:26):
Of course. Of course. Heidi Krum from Madison, Wisconsin. What is the key to starting a business and getting it up and running successfully?
Mary Heffernan (23:36):
That is a great question, Heidi. So I believe the secret is you have to just do it all yourself and just make it happen. So when I think a lot of ideas get stuck in the, gosh, I have this great idea, but I have to find someone to help me execute it. There must be a specialist who can tell me if this is a good idea and make it happen. Then I got to hire someone to build a website for me, make a logo for me. You’re going to get stuck because these people aren’t going to have your same vision. It’s going to be expensive to pay all these people. Nobody cares about that idea has the passion like you do when you have an idea. In this day and age, you can make that happen. You can have a business running in five days.
(24:19):
You can build a website, you can make a logo, you can create a brand, you can find customers, you can take payments, whatever idea it is. Some things are harder than others if it’s, you got to get f d a clearance, but it’s still possible. But you’re the only one who’s going to be passionate enough to make that happen. So you got to just go for it. And we actually started a course. We have a small business academy. My husband and I have compiled all the resources we learned in these 25 businesses that we started, and it’s called M five Entrepreneurs. And our tagline is, you can do it. You have to be scrappy and you have to figure these things out to just make it happen yourself.
Sevan Matossian (25:01):
Sorry, lead me to this again. I really want people to see this. Go to
Mary Heffernan (25:04):
The M five Academy.
Sevan Matossian (25:06):
Okay, got it.
Mary Heffernan (25:09):
Yeah. So we call it M five Entrepreneurs Ways to Grow Your Business. There’s 40 different workshops on everything from branding to entity formation and insurance. Like do you need an L L C? Can you be a sole proprietor? That’s where my husband’s background in law has been helpful. Email marketing I think is so important these days. That’s your number one tool as an entrepreneur. So we have a little free email marketing course, but a lot of people in this community, we have an app where people can come and ask questions. And we have over 4,000 entrepreneurs in this course. And it’s really just about empowerment and giving entrepreneurs the tools to say, okay, I’m not waiting around for somebody else to do this. I’m going to go make this happen.
Sevan Matossian (25:57):
I bring you onto the show to let people know that there’s a good place where they can get healthy meat. Because I think the people who follow this show are pretty food conscious and they’re big consumers of meat. And then here we are, the small business course. Hey, what’s the most, what’s some of the most successful stories you’ve heard out of people who’ve been shot out of this course?
Mary Heffernan (26:22):
There’s a lot of people who’ve just started from scratch and have built these amazing businesses. Hannah and Daniel Neman in Utah, they run ballerina farm. And they came to us when we started and said, we want to do what you guys are doing. How do we do it? And we said, well, here’s all the materials. Hannah came to one of my workshops and she’s got and a half million followers on Instagram. They’ve built a farm, a dairy, a creamery, a farm store. They’re wildly successful. There’s lots of people like that, whether it’s on a larger scale like that or what I think has been really neat is to see a lot of people in the agricultural industry, which is traditionally change is bad. We do the same thing. Generation after generation, well, times have changed. And you can’t necessarily make a good living, especially to feed multiple components in a family.
(27:13):
There’s multiple kids and they have kids and everybody wants to keep the farm going. You got to find different outlets. And the direct to consumer market is what we realized when we started as first generation ranchers. There are so many inputs every day you need a new tractor, you need a silo, you need irrigation, you need fencing. It’s so expensive, the barrier for entry, but direct to consumer, you control the price of that meat. There’s no middleman in traditional commercial operation selling beef. That beef will change hands seven times and the margins that are killed every time and the trust and the quality just are not there. So by doing this direct to consumer beef operation like we do, you control the price and you get directly to the customers. So you can put more into it. We spend a lot of money to raise really great quality beef.
(28:04):
And that’s genetics. It’s your feeding program, it’s your finishing program. It’s keeping them on feed long enough. And then it’s the butchering. We’re the only ranch in the country that’s doing it from birth and breeding. We do ai. We do artificial insemination for our breeding because we get the best quality genetics. And we can say We want to pick great ribeye quality, we want to pick great ribeye size, we want the steaks to matter. And then we harvest on the ranch. So we built a U SS D a harvest facility where the animals never have to get on a trailer. My husband worked with Temple Grandin, who’s the guru of animal handling, the autistic woman. She’s amazing. It’s all designed for animal handling. So we harvest on the ranch and then those carcasses are taken to A U S D A butchery we built right here in Fort Jones.
(28:54):
We dry age to really extremes. We’ve got these dry aging coolers and that’s kind of the secret to the finishing with a really great quality. And we dry age our whole carcass. So even our ground beef is dry aged, which you really can’t find the dry aging. You lose volume. There’s so many reasons people don’t do it because lose money, but we know that the quality is there so we can charge more for this meat because the flavor, the tenderness is amazing. And then we have our own team of craft butchers who are putting everything in packages and then shipping it directly to customers. Doorsteps So long Sorry,
Sevan Matossian (29:32):
Go ahead. Go ahead. You go
Mary Heffernan (29:33):
Ahead. So we’ve been able to do that, which to us is what the ultimate goal was, to have this whole integration. And I’ve seen a lot of other farmers and ranchers say, Hey, we got to get to that. We got to do this direct to consumer thing, but how do we do it? And this course I’ve just seen love to see the empowerment that it gives people, especially women to say, Hey, I know you don’t like change, but I want my kids to be around. I.
The above transcript is generated using AI technology and therefore may contain errors.
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