Teamwork on the Range

Bay Area Ranchers Co-op creates solutions together

Kevin Maloney’s rugged individualism is not unusual in the ranching world. Maloney, a fifth-generation rancher who raises beef, lamb, pork, chicken and eggs at his family’s Fallon Hills Ranch in Tomales, describes himself as someone who has always kept his head down, working hard and running his business.

“I’ve done my own thing,” he says. “I’m just not a big group person.”

How then, did Maloney find himself not only joining the board of the Bay Area Ranchers Co-operative (BAR-C), a recently formed meat processing co-op based in West Marin, but becoming president of the board?

Maloney’s new-found leadership role has everything to do with the fact that he, like many small-scale Bay Area ranchers and farmers, has had to drive his livestock hundreds of miles to reach one of the few USDA-approved slaughterhouses in the state. In Maloney’s case, he drives 500 miles on an 11- to 12-hour loop to a slaughtering facility in Eureka.

“It’s a very long day,” he says. “I like the people in Eureka, but I do not like the drive.”

Maloney’s personal story, that of a rancher who joined forces with other ranchers in his region to craft a solution to a growing and urgent problem—lack of access to meat processing for small to midsize ranchers and farmers—sits in the context of a much larger story. The bigger picture is that for 50-plus years the meat processing industry has been consolidating, a trend that leaves smaller producers at a disadvantage and undercuts efforts to establish a viable local, sustainable and humane food system.

“The root of what brought ranchers to this place goes back to the steady, relentless consolidation in the meat packing and processing industry, which has led to fewer and fewer slaughter plants,” says Vince Trotter, sustainable ag coordinator for the UC Co-operative Extension of Marin. Trotter works with the local North Bay agricultural community to find solutions that lead to environmental and economic sustainability. He has had a front row seat, watching as small-scale local ranches bump up against large-scale capitalist forces.

“Increasingly, processing plants are owned by companies that are completely vertically integrated,” says Trotter. “These large-scale companies raise the animals, do the processing and then they sell to their own labels.” In most cases, these companies make their facilities accessible only to producers who are working within the umbrella brand, so not only has the number of plants shrunk, but those that remain are not necessarily accessible to what are called “private label,” the small to midsize direct-to-consumer producers.

That’s the bad news. However, Trotter points out, there is some good news in the form of another agricultural trend: “Concurrent with consolidation, there has been a positive trend. This trend is an interest in locally produced products—vegetables and meat—and an encouragement by organizations that support agricultural producers to direct-market their products to the community, to shift their business models to sell products under their own name direct to consumers.”

In the Bay Area, where health-conscious and environmentally conscientious consumers are looking for local organic, sustainable and humanely raised food, this direct-marketing of “value added” products works.

This second trend has led to stability and success for local ranchers and farmers over the past two decades, but the meat sector of local agriculture, dependent upon processing plants to butcher, faces a unique challenge that has caused the two trend lines to collide in recent years.

“In order for someone to sell their own meat directly to consumers, it has to be slaughtered and cut and wrapped under USDA inspection,” says Trotter. “So, we have ranchers lining up to run their own labels and sell their own products, but we have processors increasingly backing away. This is true here in the North Bay, [elsewhere] in California, and all over the country.”

According to USDA data, four corporations slaughter 80% of the cattle in the United States today, and the pandemic has only exacerbated the dysfunction of the system. Over the past year and a half, Covid outbreaks struck plants nationwide, sickening large numbers of employees. A March 2021 USDA report counted 53,000 workers at 569 meatpacking plants in the United States who had tested positive for the coronavirus, and at least 277 had died as of February 2021. Beyond the tragic human toll, the pandemic completely shut down some facilities and slowed production in others, creating meat shortages and highlighting the vulnerability of the industry— and our nation’s food supply. Meat producers of all sizes have turned to a limited number of local processors and waitlists have burgeoned, aggravating an already-problematic situation for local ranchers and farmers. The established system both favors big ag and is exceptionally vulnerable.

This brings us back to Kevin Maloney and BAR-C. Approximately 80 ranchers from the greater Bay Area foodshed first came together in January 2020 to address the pressing issue they were all facing; by late spring of that year a group of 16 of those (referred to as the “Founding Members” of BAR-C) had put together a plan to purchase and operate a mobile slaughter unit (MSU). By early summer, the group had determined that the co-operative model was the best option to run the business, and had appointed a nine-person board of directors.

On July 28, 2020, after six months of meetings, research and market analysis, the Bay Area Ranchers Co-operative was legally formed and the group filed papers with the State of California to become the only California co-operative agricultural enterprise currently in the meat processing realm.

According to the California Center for Co-operative Development, agricultural co-operatives are organized to help farmers gain market power by joining together to market their crops (or, in the case of BAR-C, their services), to increase bargaining power by achieving economies of scale, to process their commodity to add value, and/or to purchase supplies and services. Any profits are distributed equally to members of the co-operative.

“What I love about the co-op model is that the business is in the hands of the ranchers,” says Maloney. “We are not beholden to any individual who can dictate who they will do business with or can take the ball and go home.”

After BAR-C’s state paperwork was taken care of, the team’s fundraising phase began. To raise the funds needed to purchase and install the MSU, BAR-C offered two options to potential investors: Class B Preferred Stock for investments of $50,000 or more, and a Class C Crowd-Funded Stock for investments of $500—$49,999. By the following spring, BAR-C had raised enough money to purchase both an MSU and an ideal property to house the unit in West Marin. All this, while the BAR-C team members were running their own individual businesses, amidst a pandemic.

“The board is a unique group,” says Maloney. “We’ve got people who are multigenerational ranchers and people who are first-gen ranchers. People who have run major companies to people who raise just a few animals. We have a good mix of individuals.”

Among that good mix is Kathy Webster of TomKat Ranch in Pescadero, a grass-fed cattle ranch established in 2006. Webster is TomKat’s food advocacy manager and is also in charge of their LeftCoast GrassFed Beef label. Although TomKat is based in the South Bay, Webster had established relationships with North Bay farmers and ranchers who faced the same seemingly intractable processing problem.

“I have been working on ‘bottleneck issues’—the issues around access to meat processing—for as long as we have been processing,” says Webster, whose career is highlighted by her community activism to strengthen the local food system. Webster, like others who have joined BAR-C, has experienced multiple rounds of whiplash over the past decade and a half.

For many years local producers took their livestock to a Petaluma facility called Rancho. In 2014, Rancho was shut down due to USDA violations and David Evans, proprietor of Marin Sun Farms based in Pt. Reyes, took over the facility. For a few years Bay Area ranchers were able to process their animals at Evans’ facility, but in early in 2020 Evans announced he would no longer be able to process animals outside of the Marin Sun Farms label, and regional livestock producers were out of luck again.

Over the past handful of years, Webster has had no choice but to transport TomKat cattle to a facility in Merced. She and other BAR-C members point out that the transportation miles counter their sustainability efforts, in addition to stressing animals, which is both inhumane and affects the quality of the meat as adrenaline due to duress is known to impact the flavor and texture of meat. When Webster was invited to meet with the group of North Bay ranchers to explore the idea of purchasing a mobile processing unit, she was eager to join.

“After that first meeting of 80, I became one of the 16 founding members and joined the mobile unit slaughterhouse committee. We were responsible for looking at different models. We spent months running numbers, looking at inputs, talking to people. We knew we wanted to be a multi-species processor, so we met with others [already successful at this.]”