April 2003

It's been a while since the last newsletter and with the weather warming up it's barbecue time. This month's newsletter is a little long and includes a new product list so if you want to skip ahead just scroll down.

First off, my container of beef has come in. A full load of some of the best meat in the world, shipped to me by my brother straight from the ranch in Nebraska. Our ranch is very unique, we don't just raise normal beef cattle, we raise Japanese beef. Seed stock brought from Japan to see if we couldn't make our own form of Kobe beef in the U.S. It worked and now I have some ready to ship out.

Japan's domestic beef, like Kobe beef, Matsuzaka beef, etc. comes from a breed of cow called Wagyu. This breed is distinct from the type of cattle we normally raise in the US in that it has been bred to produce highly marbled, tender, tasty meat. Other breeds have valued a different set of traits over the years such as rate of growth, feed efficiency, and size. Just like Labrador Retrievers have been bred to fetch ducks and Chihuahuas have been bred to yap a lot and pee on your floor, the difference between the two types of cattle is also substantial. You have to taste it to truly understand - the beef that is. I'll leave the dogs to the Koreans for now, no offence.

The saga started about 15 years ago, my brother came to Japan and became so enamored of the local beef that when he went back home he decided we had to have some of those cows. After a little looking around he found a black market herd of Wagyu cows and bulls. I say black market because they were brought into the states illegally from Japan through Mexico as the result of a thank you present to a doctor in Oklahoma who had performed a surgery on a member of the Japanese Imperial family. I know how this sounds but how could I make this up???

A large sum of money changed hands with the good doctor in Oklahoma and the big day arrived, 14 heifers and two bulls jumped off the truck. And they looked like hell. It turns out that there was originally one male and four females, the subsequent growth in herd size purely due to inbreeding. The good doctor's medical education obviously skipped a couple chapters.

So step one in building up a herd like this is to separate the males from the females and allow both to engage in some planned matings with partners far from their own gene pool. Building up a herd in this manner works along these lines; you take a pure bred and cross it with a different breed, the offspring is half of each, you breed that offspring back again with a pure bred and then you have a ? blood, one more time and you have 7/8 and you are mostly back to what you started with but have enough new blood to eliminate any bad recessive genes.

This works great on paper but to understand the difficulties you must know a little about our ranch. The spread is 10,000 acres in an area called the Sandhills of Nebraska. At any given time we have over 1,000 head of cows scattered across the hills. Some of these cows are harvesting grass to eventually turn it into steak, some are raising calves that we will sell to other ranches who want to better their own herds, and some are our pride and joy - if cattle ranching were horse racing we would have a small number of thoroughbred Kentucky derby winners, gold medal all the way. More info here: www.morganranchinc.com

Our first real problem in raising Japanese beef in America occurred when our new Wagyu bulls became dissatisfied with the females they were provided with. Due to poor planning on our part in the next pasture over were those gold medal girls mentioned earlier. Now when you discover that you've got this ugly, inbred, horny, Japanese bull rampaging through your prize females, I would reckon the feeling is something akin to catching a leather clad, bearded biker in your sixteen-year-old daughter's bedroom. The chase is on involving horses, dogs and a beat-up Ford pick-up truck. The difference is when that bull chooses to launch his one ton mass in an ill-conceived leap into the next pasture you really start to think about exactly how much valuable genetic material is brushing passed the top of a very taut BARBED WIRE FENCE. He made it !

After a few more trials and many more errors everything finally worked out. The ranch in Nebraska still has its herd of gold medal cattle, plus (in part due to the offspring of those jump-the-fence-unplanned-matings) the best herd of Japanese cattle outside of Japan. Nearly all of our production of Japanese beef is sold in the US and Europe but I was able to talk my brother out of a small portion of some of the private reserve. This beef is hormone free, all natural, and 100% traceable back to the source. It is everything great beef should be; highly marbled, very tender, incredibly tasty, and also healthy.

That's all for now.

-jason