By Jen Welch
I have built my business primarily around the growing of pigs and the production of pork. From the breeding board to the farrowing stall to the finishing paddock to the butcher to the fork, I do pork and I do it well. So it should come as no surprise that when I opened my food truck, pork would sit front and center on the menu. When customers ask me what they should try, I usually suggest the roasted pork street tacos – a recipe that is my dad’s and was the inspiration for opening a food truck in the first place. But not everyone is familiar with street tacos and empanadas and, on occasion, we get a customer who just wants a burger and fries. But I don’t have that on my menu, and I’ll tell you why.
Beef
A Farmer Far Afield – Beef: It’s Really Not for Dinner
by John Mattingly In my last two columns about the beef business, I discussed the cow-calf end of the supply chain, explaining how feedlot operations benefit from the various subsidies enjoyed by cow-calf ranchers. My basic claim is that the foundation of the beef business, the cow-calf operation, is financially irrational. The beef business persists …
Beef – It’s What Eats the Rancher’s Lunch
by John Mattingly After my last month’s column that took a somewhat sanguine look at the cow-calf end of the beef business, suggesting that cow-calf ranchers are basically keeping large pets, I trust readers will have sold the 100 virtual cows I gifted them for exactly what they paid for them. Not because they didn’t …
Beef, Part 1 – Producing It Will Eat Your Lunch
by John Mattingly Anyone who eats beef might enjoy the “watching sausage being made” details of how it is produced, starting with the cow-calf end of the business. So let’s pretend that you, the reader, just bought 100 running age cows, three to eight years old, and open, meaning they are ready to breed. There …
Texas Longhorns: Lean but not mean
Sidebar by Ed Quillen
Beef – September 1998 – Colorado Central Magazine
AFTER LOOKING HARD at the fence and wondering how fast I could get over it, I hesitantly followed Ron Jones into his corral several miles west of Salida.
The critters — a bull, along with cows and their calves, a couple dozen all told — appeared rather placid, ignoring us as they concentrated on swishing their tails and shaking their heads to discourage the flies on this summer morning.