Cassidy Johnston didn’t inherit a ranch—but she’s helping reshape the future of ranching with a fresh set of eyes. Raised in suburban Denver, Johnston entered the industry with curiosity and determination.
Now, working with her husband to provide consulting services, she brings a unique, experience-informed perspective to modern beef production. Alongside husband Bert, Johnston runs JRC Ranch Management and Consulting, helping landowners turn sprawling acreage into well-run, sustainable cattle operations.
From Learning to Lifestyle to Sustainable Cattle Operations
Her journey began in college, when a research project on agriculture piqued her interest in ranching. One cold email to a beef production professor led to her first hands-on lesson in artificial insemination and cattle genetics record keeping—and to Bert, her future husband. What started as a summer of learning soon became a lifestyle.
Today, Johnston’s work focuses on beef cattle ranch management for absentee landowners, a growing trend in the Western U.S. As high-net-worth individuals invest in land for recreational or tax purposes, Johnston and her husband provide the operational expertise needed to run the ranches effectively and ethically.
“They’re not buying the cattle business—they’re buying a land asset,” she explains. “Our goal is to make sure the cattle business runs efficiently, and that the ranch is a great place to work.”
Supporting Sustainable Beef Operations with Vision and Collaboration
From managing 70,000 acres and over 1,000 cows to supporting strategic planning and herd health, Johnston believes good ranching requires more than boots on the ground—it demands vision, collaboration, and adaptability.
“Sustainability in large-scale beef operations isn’t just about buzzwords. It’s about improving the genetics, caring for the animals, and managing the land in a way that supports long-term resilience,” she says.
That sustainability is driven by data. In her previous work on seedstock ranches, Johnston tracked detailed records from birth weights to carcass quality. Today, she still uses that background to guide her consulting, especially in operations where precision and genetic progress matter.
Embracing Adaptability to Overcome Cattle Industry Challenges
While industry challenges—from disease traceability to climate volatility—continue to emerge, Johnston is confident that ranchers who are open to evolution will lead the way forward.
Her philosophy is clear: “Adapt or die doesn’t mean abandon tradition. It means reflect, refine, and respond. We can honor what’s worked in the past while building a better future.”
Whether she’s in the saddle or behind a spreadsheet, Johnston brings optimism and grit to every aspect of the job. Her fresh perspective is helping redefine success—not just in terms of profit, but in stewardship, sustainability, and people.
Follow Cassidy Johnston on LinkedIn for daily insight into life on the ranch, beef industry trends, and thoughtful takes on the future of agriculture.
Transcript
This transcript has been edited from its original form to support readability.
Maureen Ballatori: I’m Maureen Ballatori and this is Spilled Salt, a podcast on the thrills and spills from the food, beverage and agriculture industries.
Today’s guest is Cassidy Johnston. She’s a first generation rancher and agriculture consultant. Cassidy is co-founder at JRC Ranch Management and Consulting with her husband Bert, and she’s also a national speaker and consultant.
Cassidy has an adapt or die mentality when it comes to farming and ranching that comes through in every ounce of today’s discussion. She’s got her finger on the pulse of agriculture, especially the beef industry. Today we talk about beef supply and demand, bird flu predictions, and lots of animal health and welfare.
Enjoy the conversation.
Maureen: Hey, Cassidy, how are you? Wonderful, thanks so much for joining me today, I appreciate it. Good, love it. All right, so start us off with your background. Where did you grow up? Where did you go to school? How did you get into agriculture? Take us back to the beginning.
Cassidy Johnston: You bet, I’m excited!
Okay, I’ll try to give the Cliff Notes version of this, because it can get long.
I grew up in a suburb of Denver and had nothing to do with agriculture at all as a kid except for my godmother who lives in Aspen had a neighbor who had a ranch. And so we would go ride horses because I was like a horse girl, like all little girls are, but we lived in town, so I couldn’t have a horse. And that was it.
That was it until I went to college and I went to CU Boulder which is I have a hippie degree from hippie school, but I started in the business school.
So I was working for an entity of the B school called the Business Research Division. So the first semester, our second semester, junior year, we were at a stock show, the National Western Stock Show in Denver, doing an economic impact survey of the stock show on Denver and the surrounding areas.
I was just harassing people with a clipboard, like asking them how much money they were spending which, looking back on it, now we go to stock shows for the rodeo and stuff. But I also go to help out with trade shows. And I’m like, wow, that was probably really annoying. That’s really, really annoying for people, especially if they were there like to show counts or something.
Maureen: Well, it’s kind of like you remember back in the day when you used to walk the mall with your friends when we were kids and somebody would be there inevitably with a clipboard and trying to ask you questions and it was it was like it no I don’t I don’t want to answer your question. So that’s probably what it was like.
Cassidy: Most people were really nice, especially when I explained what it was for, but like, yes, we were just walking around with clipboards. So while I was there, that same semester I was in a class that was kind of geared towards undergrad honors thesis because I was an overachiever.
That’s my lifelong condition. And I was looking for a thesis project that I thought was interesting. So of course it’s stocks show there’s horses. And I was like, Ooh, I wonder if there’s a thesis project that would let me be around horses again.
And in my brain at the time, horses went with cattle, because I didn’t really know how you would, because by that time I was in the environmental studies program. I didn’t know how you’d write an environmental studies program about show horses. Now I’m sure I could come up with something. But I was like, OK, maybe I should talk about ranching. So I went to my thesis advisor and she was like, cool. So this is something you know about. And I’m like, not at all. Nothing.
Maureen: You know what, I think there’s something to be said for the curiosity going into that, right? This is something I know nothing about and I want to learn more about it and it seems like an interesting area.
Cassidy: Yes, and it was kind of self-serving too because I was like, horses, woohoo. So she was like, cool, we’re going to have to rope in some people who know about agriculture. And of course, CU does not have an ag school. It’s not our land-grant university.
So I cold emailed the entire beef production department at CSU, Colorado State. And two professors emailed me back. One was Dr. Field, who I think he’s at K-State now, I forget. And he was at NCBA at that time. And then the other was a guy named Dr. Jason Holat. And he was like, I am intrigued. Like, it is not every day I get an email from Boulder that’s not yelling at me. Like, come on down.
So I went up there. And my original idea was sustainability in the beef industry. But at that time, there wasn’t, hold on, tea moment. Sorry, listeners.
It is March. At that time, sustainability was not a field that people were studying. I mean, they were, but it’s not like now. wasn’t a buzzword. It was just starting to be a thing, like a capital T. 2010. 2010. Yes, this was 2010. So it was new.
He’s like, I don’t really think we have enough here for an undergrad on our CSIS, like maybe for a doctorate, like if you were getting your PhD and you were actually conducting studies. and he said, you know, honestly, the first thing that I thought of when I got an email from you is, you know, why is somebody from Boulder, Boulder’s full of environmentalists, environmentalists don’t like ranching.
He was like, what if you wrote about that instead? And I was like, Ooh, yes, conflict. Yes. And as it turned out, there was some conflict, not everybody in Boulder, like one of my thesis advisors really, really did not like my paper.
So, and he also was like, so what do you know about cows? And I’m like, absolutely nothing. Yay. You know, like woohoo. So he was like, okay, we’re going to start, we’re going to have to come to the college farm.
Most linear universities have a couple research stations, if you will. There’s one in Fort Collins called RDEC. The side note of this is that’s where I met my husband. Dr. Ahola has a large sense of humor.
And that was the day they were breeding cows, like AI cows. And he was like, hey, artificial insemination. Yep, did. nope, no, but that time AI, that kind of AI wasn’t a big thing either. And so I was like, oh, this is interesting. He’s like, cool, grab a glove. And I was like, what? What? And my husband, I mean, obviously it wasn’t my husband yet, but he was there because he had just graduated.
Maureen: Artificial insemination, not artificial intelligence, yes, yep.
Cassidy: And he was an AI tech, so he was reading and he said Burt’s going to show you about all this stuff. And I was like, is he? Yes, this is great. And Burt just looked at me and he was like, you’re going to want some more lube.
That was the first conversation we ever had. And it’s like the gallon pump tops of lube, which now I’m intimately familiar with because we’ve bred a lot of cows. But at the time, get in like, you know, just as the visual I’m wearing.
Because it’s May, so in Colorado it can be kind of mucky in May, early May. I’m pretty sure I was wearing Hunter boots because that’s the only thing I had that was waterproof.
Side note, those actually make fabulous summer irrigating boots. Everybody can come at me, but I had a pair of bright pink ones that I got from Nordstrom Rack that I wore for several years because no one would take them. No one would ever.
They would never go missing because they were hot pink. No one would take them. And then you could see me from far away. And so I did that. And I left that interaction very embarrassed, of course. And then Dr. Holow was like, you should probably meet some ranchers.
I called my mom, because that’s what you do when you’re 22, 21, something like that. And she, at the time, was a landman. And so she called up for an oil company. So she called up some of her land clients and one of them, I mean she was basically like, hey, hey, can my daughter who has never lived more than a mile away from a Starbucks in her entire life come live with you? And one family said yes.
The original plan was that I was going to stay there for three weeks and just kind of interview people in the area and learn a little bit. But I ended up staying the whole summer because I really liked it and they taught me how to drive a tractor and that part of Colorado, they put up a ton of hay, like a lot, a lot of hay.
So I drove the rake tractor that summer. They taught me how to move cows on horseback, et cetera. And then after I graduated that December, I went back to work for them full-time. It just so happened that Bert, Dr. Ahola, emailed me because I didn’t have a phone because that was before we had any kind of coverage anywhere. I had a landline where I could call out. No one could call in.
So I had my laptop and I would go either to my boss’s house or to the nearest town, which is Walden, which is 12 people, and go to the diner and eat decent, I mean, decent food when you’re cooking for yourself and check all my emails. And Dr. Holow was like, hey, so you remember Bert? And I’m like, yes, I remember Bert. He’s working on a ranch seven miles. He’s like, I Googled where you are.
And so he played matchmaker a little bit because that area of Colorado, it’s Jackson County, that was our least populated county. There’s nobody there. The town I lived in had 40 people. And so there’s like, a person my age. Like at that point I was like, Because I like being alone, but not quite that much. So we just started to hang out and that’s kind of all she wrote. So I went to work for them.
After I graduated, he came and hired on at that same place to Cavcow’s that spring. And then that fall, that November, we moved to Montana together. And that’s kind of, that was kind of the kickoff. And that’s kind of what we’ve done ever since in various shapes and forms.
Maureen: Yes. And so now you and your husband have a partnership management and consulting company called JRC Ranch, correct?
I imagine in the very early days it would have been different than it is now because now you’re both very hands-on, right, on the farm?
Cassidy: Sort of. So my role has evolved. We are both first generation ranchers. We manage this niche we found ourselves in is managing large operations for absentee owners, which in the Western United States is fairly common. We’ve come up through the industry by working for large operations because that’s who can pay us. And we’ve been in every sector of beef pretty much except for
organic, think, and like a truly regenerative mob grazing kind of thing, because you can’t really do that where we live. Our stocking densities are really, really low because of how dry it is, and our terrain is too rough. So we can’t really do that.
There are people who will argue with me about this, but the best environments for the high density mob grazing, you know, the Will Harris style of things is quite a bit more rain than we receive and quite more forgiving terrain and more people, more people.
We are understaffed on this operation because the owner doesn’t really like to pay money for things. So we have three full-time people, 1,000 cows, 70,000 acres, two divisions. We have several people who helped work and then I fill in whenever I’m needed, but I don’t work here formally for several reasons.
As we started, as we started having kids, my role evolved. At first I was outside with the cowboy crew. And then when we moved to the Silver Spur in Kiowa, Colorado, I moved into the office because that’s a large registered operation. And so was the place in Montana. So I had experience with that.
That requires an absolute gob of record keeping. So we had two of us full time. That was about, I think we had like between 12 and 1400 cows at that division. The Silver Spur Ranch is owned by the largest agricultural landowner in the United States. So it’s one, that division was one of many. And we grow all the bulls for all of the ranches. And so the record keeping was intense. So that was my job.
Maureen: Right, yes. Well, and so before we move on from that, let’s help listeners understand why record keeping is so important. It’s because of genetics, right?
Cassidy: Yes. Race. Yes. And because with registered cattle, you have to have records. So with a commercial cow herd, like the one that we have now, we are raising cattle for beef. Our calves are. And so we don’t have to keep records.
The records we keep are basically inventory that I keep because I can’t not. I just can’t not do that for registered cattle. You have to have tons and tons of information.
So when we say registered, I mean a breed like black Angus, Red Angus, Hereford, Charolais, those are the big white ones. At that division, we had between five and seven registered breeds, depending on how much time we were putting into our Simmental program at the time.
You need to have birth information on every calf. You have to tag at birth, which is really, really, really labor intensive. You have to tag at birth. You have to weigh at birth. Then you have to collect data throughout their lives, like their weaning weights, yearling weights, if you have them.
We send all of that into the Breed Association. But also, since it was a seed stock operation, which means we’re growing bulls and sometimes heifers for, a real seed stock operation would be for sale. This was just to grow the bulls for the rest of the division.
So the ranches didn’t have to buy as many cattle. That whole side of things, genetics are very important. So yes, we have parentage on every animal. We DNA everything.
We utilize artificial insemination in those cases and are really, really careful with the pairings that we have. We can go way into the weeds of it. But we choose things like how big we want calves to be, how fast we want them to grow, what we want for their carcass traits, and how good eating they are. And so when you’re raising cattle for a terminal program but also retaining heifers, you have to balance all of that.
I’m now a bull and semen rep for a seed stock company here. And it’s very similar. It’s a lot of data, tons and tons and tons of data. So you have people who manage that data and what that looks like is you spend a lot of time in the barn next to a squeeze shoot writing stuff down. And you’re ordering ear tags and yes.
Maureen: So that’s the kind of partnership that you and your husband have is that you had moved into the office, but then once your kids were born, now you’re kind of doing more of a hybrid role where you’re primary parent and helping out on the farm in some cases as well.
Cassidy: Yes. Yes. So this fall, when all of my children will be in school full time, I will be horseback most of the fall. I’m very excited. Like I cannot wait. Because right now, Kirby, my youngest, goes to preschool, but there’s no bus. We’re out of town.
And so I drive him in and then I just work at my office because the business that I have built being a rural person, started in… So after the Silver Spur, we moved to New Mexico because working-age families move a lot, tons and tons.
So when the boys were teeny tiny and we moved to New Mexico, we weren’t hired as a couple there, which made sense because we had tiny babies. And I started to slowly lose my mind because I needed something to do with my brain.
So I started being a virtual assistant at that time. And I still have like one and a half of my VA clients still just because I can’t let them go.
And that was kind of the intro to working remotely. And then of course, COVID happened. And now everybody works remotely, which is, COVID was terrible, but it brought grocery pickup to rural America and it brought working remotely to the rest of us. So my business has evolved from being a VA to being in the comms and consulting space.
Maureen: I want to go back to something that you had said about the work that you and your husband are doing at JRC Ranch Management and Consulting. You said that that’s typically for absentee owners and that that’s really common in the Midwest. Is that because there’s a lot of investing going on that it’s typically farmland owned by VCs?
Cassidy: No, this is the Western United States. So when I say West, mean, like draw a line maybe through the middle of Kansas and Nebraska. And I would call that, I mean, Kansas and Nebraska are solidly Midwest.
But when we talk about these ranches, high net worth individuals, usually it’s individuals. Sometimes it’s groups, kind of like what Taylor Sheridan did with the sixes. Usually it’s individuals who are investing in large land assets that have a ranching business.
So they’re investing in the land because of all the benefits land has when you’re a really, really rich person. You put it as part of your portfolio to help make it inflation-proof and yada, yada. So they’re not buying.
This is something that is coming up a lot on LinkedIn lately, because LinkedIn is where I live. They are not buying the ranching business. They are buying the land asset. The ranching business, cost of these ranches will never, ever be paid for by the cattle. You hope the cattle can cash flow themselves in the ranching part of it and maybe some years can get your interest. Maybe.
But it really is for the ag exemption because you pay less taxes on an agricultural property and because you got to do something with it. You can’t just have these huge places with nothing on them. doesn’t do well environmentally.
So they buy these big ranches and a lot of the time they do it because they want to hunt. That’s what this owner does. Or they just want to be, you know, they always wanted to be a cowboy.
There’s usually some kind of mystique that goes with it. But this is becoming more and more common because land prices are skyrocketing. And unless you are already in the business, like you’re a successful family ranch and you buy, you know, your neighbor’s place or you have some kind of capital.
Normal people cannot afford these places. Like we were talking about this last night because of a comment that I received on LinkedIn. And the owner recently had this place appraised.
And for the whole operation, both the upper and lower, we’re talking $40 to $50 million. There is no way cows, we have 1,000 cows here, are ever going to pay for that. I mean, imagine the mortgage payment on that land.
So that’s not the point of these ranches. And so what we do, and this is more common because for many reasons, families are getting out of the business. And like a great example is the Padlock Ranch in Wyoming. It’s $83 million and it’s mostly public land. It’s mostly leased. It’s bizarre. And that’s changed hands every like 20 years or something like that.
So it’s becoming more common. The issue is we started JRC, which is still in its infancy because many of these individuals are very, you know, they’re usually very successful in another business, not in agriculture.
And agriculture is so vastly different. And ranching is, big ranching in the West, which is our niche, is so vastly different than farming or raising cattle where it rains.
Here we do everything horseback. It’s a whole separate set of skills. It’s just a whole different kind of business. The nicest way to put it is a lot of absentee owners don’t have the skill set to hire for that because why would they? Why would they? I don’t know how to run their companies. So we exist.
Maureen: It’s similar to real estate too, right? Where you typically hire a property management company. They do all the things. They rent the offices, they get the tenants, they make sure the garbage is taken care of. They hire the cleaner, all of that stuff, right? And there are people who specialize in that. It’s the same kind of idea. Why not hire a management company that specializes in agriculture, specifically ranching, to apply to the operation if your goal is to just own the land and be as hands-off as possible.
Cassidy: Right. And it’s kind of new, the way we think of it is a little bit novel because there are range management consulting agencies. There’s tons of them. Most of them though are not focused. Their focus is different.
Some of them are very conservation focused. Some of them are more like, like there’s a lot in Texas and they help you, you know, manage your mineral rights and your water rights. Like it’s more of a boardroom kind of proposition which means that the management on the ground for many of these ranches is quite poor and they’re not good places to work.
That’s an overall problem in the beef industry. And so our experience, a lot of these management consulting companies are attached to a real estate brokerage or have a very close tie. And they are managed by people who maybe they did grow up in ranching or they have a family business, but they haven’t actively been ranching for a while or not on the scale that their clients are.
So for us, ranching, agriculture in general, is a reality-based business. You can’t apply theory here. You can try theory and see how it shakes out. But when you have this disconnect, it causes a lot of problems on the ground. And we’ve worked in some of those circumstances and it’s very frustrating and it’s hard to work for those sorts of people.
Of course, attrition and turnover is very high in ranching already just because of the nature of the business and the poor people management that exists. And it’s even worse. It’s very expensive.
So our goal is to not only manage ranches better, manage the cattle better, manage the grass better, manage the resources better, but also make them really good places to work because you can’t have longevity.
You cannot have a sustainable business plan without considering the cost of turnover and attrition and retention. And those are very common things in corporate America and people talk about it all the time.
Even with corporate owners, it falls apart as soon as you get into ranching with the exception of some of the larger kinds of corporate ranches or some of the families who actually understand what they’re doing.
Maureen: So you’re really applying a true boots on the ground experience that is all well-rounded to be able to optimize the whole business for the investor or the landowner or whoever is kind of hiring you to engage.
I want to take a sharp left turn to ask you, because you’re so knowledgeable about the beef industry in general. I want to ask you a couple of questions about some of the stuff that’s happening in the industry across the board right now.
I keep hearing that there’s a big swing in demand happening right now in beef and demand is really high, right? What can you share about the state of the industry in that regard?
Cassidy: Sure, and I’m not an analyst. So these are things I learned from people who are smarter than me who are analysts.
So demand is high because our inventory is low. It’s supply and demand.
So our inventory is low for several reasons. It kind of started with the droughts several years ago.
So when there is a drought, we can’t keep our cows. We have to sell them because they don’t have anything to eat. And it’s very expensive to feed hay to your cows in July when they would normally be eating grass.
So there’s part of that, wildfires always play into it. So it happens when the cycle, the beef industry is parasitic, all three sectors. So feeding, so cow-calf, that’s us, ranching, you know, the producing side, feeding, which are feed yards, and the packers, not all three, all three of us cannot all be doing well at the same time. If one sector is doing well, it is at the expense of another one.
So in COVID, we saw very, very high prices at the packing side and very low prices at the producer side, some of which is being investigated by the federal government. I’m just going to, yes.
And there’s the big four which is tricky because they control like 80% of the packing. It’s four companies. There are allegations of collusion, et cetera, that I am not going to comment on because I am not in that position. And because that’s a problem for the federal government, because those corporations are enormous.
But when our supplies dip, we as the rancher, have the power right now. There are fewer cattle. Exactly. We have fewer cattle on, we have record low inventories right now.
This is a very big topic in the beef industry. When are we going to rebuild? Because the market signal that we receive that we are going to be recovering is when people start retaining more heifers.
So heifers are first year female cattle that have never had a calf. We keep a certain percentage of our female calf crop every year to replace our old cows or unproductive cows who are aging out or who are unproductive.
When prices are very, very high, people retain fewer heifers because you can make a lot of money. There’s no reason to keep them if you can handle your own herd decreasing in size for the economic opportunity, which a lot of people are.
We retained fewer heifers last year than we have in years past, because you cannot say no to record high prices. You just can’t. The profit margins in this business are so slim. So we still are not seeing the heifer retention that we thought we would.
At CattleCon, which is our big conference every spring, the CattleFacts, which is our analyst arm, they’re predicting 2027 maybe. So that’s when we’ll start to be retaining heifers. So that’s when the cycle will go back.
Maureen: That’s when the industry will bounce back.
Cassidy: It gives a circle. Of course, that is independent from some kind of, because we are obviously raising animals. We’ve heard about avian flu and the dairy industry. That is pending a crisis.
Maureen: That was one of my next questions for you. How is that currently affecting you? Because we’ve heard about bird flu in dairy cattle. I haven’t heard much of it in beef, but that’s, is it happening or not yet?
Cassidy: Not enough that we’re, I mean, not to us here. The thing about epidemics and bugs, germs, and dairy cattle are generally fed. So first of all, dairy cattle have to milk twice a day, right? So they’re all close. They’re all, yes, at least they’re all close together.
A lot of them are in beautiful barns, right? But they’re in confinement. That’s what we would call that. People say confinement. They think it’s terrible. Just go visit a dairy barn is immaculate. They’re cleaner than my house.
Maureen: Yes, right. Sand, sand beds, water beds. Yes, they’re, yes, hanging out with their girlfriends.
Cassidy: Yes, it’s gorgeous, but it’s similar to a pack of preschoolers playing outside and then they come in and then everybody gets norovirus. It’s just these germs are more easily related when things are in close contact. So cattle, all cattle, all beef cattle spend the majority of their lives on farms and ranges regardless of how they’re finished.
So whether or not they end up in a feed yard at the end of their lives, they live on farms and ranches. So our cattle are dispersed. There’s a lot less likelihood of them spreading germs because they’re not physically next to each other because they don’t have to be.
That’s not a judgment on animal welfare in the dairy business because there’s only so much you can do when you have to have something in your pens twice a day to get milked.
Maureen: And just like you said, it’s a different kind of operation, just like it’s not inhumane to put all of our preschools together, preschoolers together at the school, right? They’re comfortable.
The dairy cows are quite comfortable in their farms. We had someone on the podcast, Alicia Lamb, who is part of a 10,000 cow, dairy cow operation. And one of the first things that they speak to is animal welfare, right? And how much that they want the cows to be healthy because happy healthy cows make good milk and that’s what everybody wants you know so anyway that’s my that’s my rant on that but…
Cassidy: Well, and there is a trade off too that when you have your cows close in a dairy or in a feed yard, you see them every day. We don’t see our cows every day at all. So the only way we know when things are sick is when we’re checking cattle.
Granted they do because they’re out, you know, but people feel they immediately say, well, things on range are treated more humanely. I don’t know if that’s true. I think it’s, I think that we all do our best, but there’s always trade-offs. If you have cattle on range,
We don’t see those cows every day. So if something is sick, it may take us a day or two to get to her. It’s just a trade off. I mean, it’s more of an artificial environment in a feed yard or a dairy, but it’s also more controlled, which means we can control for things like illness and nutrition and weather, all of those things. When we ask cattle to live on range, it’s a different lifestyle.
Yes, I would imagine they tend to get sick, not sick less, but they also have to walk up the sides of mountains and go travel miles for water. It’s just a tradeoff and that’s a really hard nuance to explain, especially when people are just hell bent on hating all of it.
These kinds of disease events happen more often in pork, poultry, and dairy because they’re generally housed inside and in the proximity.
The thing in the beef industry we’ve been keeping an eye on is the Mexican screwworm. They’ve been able to stop it at the Mexican border. But for a while, there were some rules about importing and exporting cattle from Mexico because Mexico and Canada are two biggest trade partners.
Maureen: Yes, because of proximity. That makes sense.
Cassidy: There is a ton of talk in the beef industry about disease traceability and what we’re going to do about that. Because part of the issue with the beef industry is we are, there’s the average herd size in the United States is 40 cows. So it’s like a hobby.
Yes, it’s like a hobby or a side gig or a part-time job for most people. The niche that we operate in is big cattle ranching in the West. So I have never worked on an operation with less than a thousand cattle, fewer than a thousand cattle, which, and I think the last time I checked, the numbers were like more, you know, five or 600 is in the top, like 5% or something.
So these are all top 1-2% branches, just to help people understand the scale. Yes. And so in a lot of people with those smaller herd sizes, they have those cattle in conjunction with their farm.
Maureen: It’s a very different operation, right?
Cassidy: You know, it’s a, they have a piece of land that they can’t farm. So they throw some cows on it to make some extra money or they have, they live in a place where there’s enough rain that they can, you know, raise 10 cows on like 10 acres and they just live there. You know, it’s, it’s a fairly hands off sort of deal and the cattle are not the primary business.
When cattle are the primary business, things change. But the problem with that is it makes disease traceability very hard because we don’t have, there are some talks about mandatory EIDs, so electronic ID tags and having a nationwide inventory of cattle, the data protection implications for that system are enormous, especially because we are not good at data security in the agriculture business. And so we don’t have a way to track it really. You know, it’s when stuff starts to get sick and when your cattle are kind of a part-time endeavor.
Someone may not be as skilled at recognizing illness in cattle when it’s not your main job to look at them all day, you know, which is a benefit of scale. You know, we see so many cattle that it’s really easy to tell when something is wrong. That can be harder. It’s a muscle.
I say that and then people get mad because they’re small family farms. And I’m like, I’m not saying anything bad about them.
Maureen: I think you’re making good points about the pros and cons to all sides of those things. And so as it relates to bird flu in particular, and then, you know, some of the others that you’ve mentioned too, just kind of animal health and welfare across the board, your stance on that is essentially that you are doing the best that you can to look for that.
And being that you’re engaged to keep the health of this thousand plus herd operation, you know what to look for and you can look for these things and smaller farm operations should do the same as much as they are able.
Everyone should kind of do the best that they can to keep animal health and welfare top of mind. But when things like this come down the pike, like bird flu, there’s only so much that you can do to mitigate it.
Cassidy: Yes. if you are, you know, if it’s especially part of the thing, is that when you ranch or farm as your primary source of income, it’s a different endeavor than a side hustle. I think that’s true in all businesses.
You know, somebody who does something full time for their main source of income is going to have a different perspective and a different level of expertise oftentimes. And animal husbandry is an art that isn’t, it’s A, it’s, I wouldn’t say it’s hard to learn, but in my opinion, the best way to learn it is by seeing as many animals as possible.
So you know, you know, we want our doctors to interact with as many patients as possible. So they learn to understand the nuances and the differences.
It’s very regional too. So things we deal with here may not be a situation, you know, down south. That’s why we all work with our vets to vaccinate appropriately and use the best antibiotics that we can and we know the times of year when we have to look out for things like pneumonia. But that can be difficult.
We’ve had a lot of times where we’ve had neighbors in all of the places that we’ve lived who have maybe 10 cows or something and something gets sick and they don’t know what to do.
Not because they’re stupid, but because they’ve never seen it before. Because they’ve never seen it before. So they’ll call Bert and Bert will be like, yes, that’s, you know, grass, tetany, milk fever, pneumonia, whatever. And they’re like, how did you know? And he’s like, I just doctored 10 calves for pneumonia this morning.
So it doesn’t surprise me that you guys have that too. And it’s, but it’s the same thing as maybe seeing a specialist versus seeing a generalist in medicine or the welders who can do those super crazy welds that I know nothing about, but I know, because my husband welds a little bit and like, I can appreciate a good weld now, things I never thought I would say.
But there’s some very fancy things that really skilled people can do that doesn’t mean that you’re an idiot or you’re unqualified if you can’t do those things. It’s just kind of a different level.
So when you have your hands on thousands of animals every year, it’s a whole different proposition. And we are a very independent bunch. We don’t cooperate with each other very well, which makes disease traceability really hard because we don’t always share things the way that we ought to.
Maureen: I think some of that also goes back to, I think it’s a couple of things. I think one is data security and fear over where information is going to go in terms of where would that information live, as well as, I I grew up on a dairy farm and I think farmers, they’re very open and sharing and also hold cards close to the chest, you know, in different ways where my dad would always, anybody who asked, you know, I’m happy to help, you know, here it’s this.
And just like you mentioned with Burt, like the neighbor calls and it’s this. Farmers are very willing to share in that regard, but then also apprehensive to share in other ways in terms of where is this data going? So I think it’s interesting to have sort of both sides of that.
I’m going to ask you two final questions for today’s discussion. This is a podcast on the thrills and spills. So give me one of each, a high point and a low point from your career.
Cassidy: I think I spent so long just wanting to be helpful and just wanting to be, I still, I still have a little bit of imposter syndrome, but there have been several times when somebody has asked me a question or involved me in a conversation or mentioned something and yes, I’m here. I’m on the level.
We were at a branding last year with a family who’s pretty big in the ranching business in Colorado. And they were asking my opinions on genetics. Most people, especially because I’m a woman, it was just kind of wild.
Me? Yes. I do have opinions. I have so many opinions because they were specifically talking about the company that I work with. And there’s just been a couple of times where I’ve kind of looked around and I’m like, I’m here now.
Like you said, once you’re in, you’re in, in the agriculture industry, but it takes a long time to get in.
Maureen: You’re so right about that. One of the reasons why Agency 29 is able to build quick trust with ag clients is because I grew up on a farm. I tell people that and they’re like, oh, she gets it. I don’t have to explain the basic ag terminology. On the flip side of that, just like you’re saying, it takes some time to get in.
Cassidy: Yes, that’s the number one thing I work with Ag Tech consulting clients about is how do you build your network? Because it’s slow. You can’t go, it’s not a top-down approach in Ag Tech. A lot of people miss that. They go straight for the top for the money.
If Bayer gives you a ton of money, that’s great, but that doesn’t make us trust you. It probably makes us trust you even less. And so really spending the time. And the thing is it’s slow to start, but once you’re, you don’t gatekeep good stuff amongst ourselves. We absolutely don’t.
So once you’re in and you’ve invested that time, because it really is time. No amount of money is going to be able to buy you a network here. It’s kind of a low and slow sort of affair, but once you have it, then it becomes like passive advocacy, because that’s how we learn.
We learn from each other. I don’t know a specific low point. We’ve had some really… I mean, it’s ranching. We’ve had some hard moves. We’ve had some hard calving seasons.
We spent some time, we moved away from this operation. So we’ve been here for almost six years. If you don’t count the time, we went to another operation in 2023 for about eight months. And that was a disaster. That was a very low point, mostly because it was, I don’t like to bad mouth my own industry, but there can be some really not great people in the beef industry, like every other industry.
The problem is that when you’re in our position and they control your housing and your healthcare and all of those things, it can feel really tough. And that was hard. That’s why we came back here. The hardest, if I had to choose a moment we had when we were calving cows in Montana. So because we were at Seedstock Operation, we started calving in January, which in Montana is terrible. It’s terrible.
We timed AI’d, so we had a lot of calves at once. And we had, we were calving heifers. and I remember this because we were all, it was me and Bert and then another couple, the cow boss and his wife. And it was just the four of us calving out. I think that year we had several hundred heifers and then we had all like 1400 cows. I mean, and that’s registered. Like, and so we were talking about that. Everything comes through the barn.
It’s very, you have all night long, you have a night caver, because you have to make sure everything is alive and it’s safe and it doesn’t freeze. And we were having calves born with enterotoxemia, which is pretty [terrible] in baby calves, it kills them so fast.
So they were getting it in utero and we didn’t, that’s very weird. And the only reason we knew that is because we were taking calves to the vet to have them, autopsy basically.
We were having all these calves posted. We were losing calves and we didn’t understand why they were being born sick, which is very unusual. and we were, we were losing so many and that is, and it’s cold and you’re exhausted and, you’re pulling calves, you’re doctoring calves and things just aren’t, that was really hard.
Once we figured it out, once we understood what we were, what we were up against, we were able to treat the mothers and treat the calves a little more effectively and then change our plan for the next year.
When you are in the trenches of calving a big herd and you have 40 calves a night and it is, you can’t keep up, you just can’t. We are tagging every, I mean, we were, we were, we were triaging.
We had all these ways to keep track of everything because you had to make sure you knew which baby knew, went with which mom, not just, not just because, you know, they need to stay together, but we need to know those genetics because the genetics, that’s what we’re selling to our customers.
Maureen: Yes, especially with four people and with all that paperwork that you mentioned.
Cassidy: And I mean, I’m not a big crier, but I am an exhausted or angry crier. And Jenna and I, we were just, there were lots of tears. We were exhausted. So those are the times that I think of when it’s like, and that’s the thing about caring for animals is when stuff happens like that, you can’t tap out. You can’t. Like you have to figure out how to keep going because if you don’t, animals will die.
And that’s kind of the tension that I experience, especially when we talk about how to relate. Like I had an interesting conversation. It was on LinkedIn, so not a conversation about DEI in ranching. And these two ladies really thought, it was on a post about sexism, but these two ladies really thought that we should be employing DEI policy in the agriculture business. And I said, first of all, top-down policy.
We don’t have hiring managers. Policy is not how we manage things in the ag business.
They were giving me all these opportunities or all these examples and all of these things. I’m like, just, things are so different because our primary concern is that people have the expertise to keep themselves and the other people and the animals safe and alive.
It’s a very dangerous industry. And when you’re working with sentient, large, autonomous animals, things can go very wrong. And so those are the times that things have been the hardest.
Things are going wrong and the only way out is through. And those are the times that I point to when I’m talking to younger people especially, you have to be resilient and gritty to be in this business.
You don’t have to be special. This is not a special industry, but you have to be able to have the reserves that you tap into. It’s kind of like being a, being a mom, you know, if you have a kid who’s up all night with colic or something, you can’t like, I like, I’m out, you know, and if you have a partner, hopefully you can tag team a little bit.
You can’t just tap out when life is involved. And those are the times that it is but those are the times when you learn to and it’s also like, well, golly, if I can do that, I can do you know, throw it at me.
Maureen: Well, and it reminds me of what we were just talking about too, in terms of building trust within the industry, right? Is that ultimately that’s likely a large reason why, because it’s can this person hack it, right? It’s really what the question is, especially in the hands-on work that you’re doing, right?
Sometimes I get an existential crisis about the work that we do, because I just tell myself like, it’s just marketing. We’re not opening baby’s hearts as my husband likes to say, right? It’s just marketing. It’s not that serious.
However, marketing is critically important for storytelling and for a business’s survival and to be able to thrive and succeed in an industry. And yet we are not talking about life and death and you are, right? So it is wildly different when we’re talking about building trust in the agriculture industry.
For me, I can just say, oh, I grew up on a farm. We’ve got this previous track record of working with these folks in the industry. And for you, when you’re looking to hire someone, can I trust them to be able to go all the way with what needs to be done for the safety of these animals and the operation of the whole?
Cassidy: Yes, like if I’m going to send, if, you know, bird and somebody, whoever we have working for us is going to go out and drag and rope a cow and rope and drag a cow into a trailer because she’s got something going on and she needs to come back to the house.
I need to know that that other guy is going to, and that’s where sexism comes in a little bit. And it’s, it’s just, this is, I was talking to my mentor the other night about this post, because these gals kind of came for me.
And he said, agriculture and ranching is the definition of a meritocracy. You have to be able to do the job. I don’t care what your other qualifications are. You have to be able and you have to be able to do the job in the moment.
I’m a woman, right? So I can do anything a man can. It may take me longer and I may have to do it differently. But when push comes to shove, I can’t lift 250 pounds of something quickly, you know? And that’s the tension.
It’s how do we put the right people in the right places to not only help them succeed and like I’m very helpful on a ranching operation if it were something that was more of a farming, like a beef farming, you know, less of a cowboy deal. Sure, sign me up.
When it comes, I am not the person I would choose to help Burt rope and drag a bowl into a trailer. I’m not that guy. I know other women that absolutely, yes, please do. You are fantastic, but it’s not me.
That’s not like a judgment on my gender, it’s on my skill set. And everybody has different skills. so, but when it does come down to life and death, because it really does, it does a lot. We’re also not opening baby’s hearts, right? But it’s also just because you’re not doing this doesn’t mean your work is not an important kind of deal. Cause we, it’s real, we’re really good at that. I’d be like, Oh, it’s just marketing. Listen, no, you need people to buy your things. If you want to be a thing.
Maureen: Absolutely, it’s critically important, yes. In a different way, yes.
Cassidy: But when you, yes, but that’s part of when people say they trust you, they understand. Like if they say, hey, Maureen, I’m so sorry I didn’t get back to you. We had a wreck last night and we have, you know, 17 sick calves or our bulls got out or I don’t know what the dairy equivalent is. Something has gone very, very wrong. And I, this was at the bottom of my pile, not because it’s not important, but because the things at the top of my pile are alive.
Maureen: Well, and the seasonality too, right? You have to constantly be aware of the seasonality in the ag industry too, because it’s, when it’s harvest, it is harvest. And you have to get out there and put in the time to get the harvest out of the fields or, you know, whatever harvest means for the various aspects of your ag operation.
Sometimes it’s apple picking and sometimes it’s calving and whatever the heavy seasons are, that is something to be aware of too. I was just talking last week to an agritourism operation in California and they open in September.
And now today is, we’re recording this on March 17th. And so when I was talking with them last week, I said, we’ve only got so much time to get some of this stuff done before your season opens.
And then we’re going to have to talk again in January because once your season opens in September and they’re flat out, September, October, November, December, that is their season for the whole year. That’s where they make their money.
So whatever we can get done before then is great. After that it’s going to have to wait and it’s a part of the industry, right? But there’s different aspects of agriculture that are happy to engage at that time of year.
Ag in the fall is just hard across the board. Again, it’s harvest, but nevertheless, I love your statement too about the idea that the only way out is through is that you’ve just got to push through in some cases.
Final question for you and then I’ll let you go. Give me one statement that you think sums up the future of the cattle industry.
Cassidy: If I’m being honest, it’s adapt or die. We’re going to have to figure out how to, or grow or die, but I don’t mean grow size-wise.
I mean, we’re going to have to figure out how to grow as people and grow as a business, which does not mean getting bigger. We are going to have to change how we do things. We’re going to have to adapt.
And we need to see a little bit, a lot less of this is how we’ve always done it. Because I really think the people who say this is how we’ve always done it and have no other tool for reflection or any other metrics for success, I think they’re going to have a really hard time moving forward.
It is going to be kind of an “adapt or die [situation]”, which doesn’t necessarily mean becoming robots. Take all the AI, like whenever I say that, people are like, but I’m traditional.
Yes, we have a lot of other ways that we can do that. We can adapt our genetics to be more efficient. We can maybe look for some income diversification opportunities so we are not so embroiled in risk.
We can maybe consider some different models, but all I ask is that we start to consider what we can do individually on our operations and at the beef industry as a whole to make us more resilient. And that’s going to involve some adaptation.
We talked about that in some groups there. The pitchforks or the frozen tomahawk steak, which is, if I had to choose a meat as a weapon, it would be a frozen tomahawk. Those come out. But that is something I will never stop talking about.
Adaptation doesn’t mean leaving tradition by the wayside, but it means looking very intentionally and critically about what we do and why we do it and leaving what no longer serves us.
Maureen: Totally agree. Well said. And I’m glad you mentioned AI in that because I do think Ag tech is, it’s coming and once it is embraced widely and implemented widely, it is absolutely here. It is not as widespread as it should be. It hasn’t moved and grown as fast in the Ag industry as it has in other industries.
But once that trust builds and once that happens, right, that Ag tech is more widely used. I think that that’s one case where it will be widely different. And then we were also talking about marketing too.
I think that in some cases, the answer is a shift in marketing and positioning of what you’re doing to sell it differently, aligned with your customer in a little bit of a different way. So yes, adapt or die. Sounds great.
Cassidy, thank you so much for taking time with me today. I appreciate your insights on this and look forward to for anybody, all of our listeners out there, if you’re not following Cassidy on LinkedIn, she is a hoot and a wealth of knowledge that she shares frequently there too. So give her a follow. Thanks for joining me.
Cassidy: Thank you, it was great.