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Meaningful Marketplace Podcast

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  • #182 Nothing "Goaty" Here - Lindsey Washkoviak & Ben Elzay, Medicine Bow Creamery

    #182 Nothing "Goaty" Here - Lindsey Washkoviak & Ben Elzay, Medicine Bow Creamery
    May 22 2024
    Before starting the interview, some great news from our Wyoming host, Melissa Hemken. The Wyoming Business Council in conjunction with USDA’s Mountain Regional Business Center has created an online directory of Wyoming food and drink. More great resources from RFBC. Today’s guests from the southern part of Wyoming are Lindsey Washkoviak and Ben Elzay, founders of Medicine Bow Creamery at Brush Creek Ranch. It’s a big name of a big operation. It began 12 years ago when Lindsey and Ben fell in love over food. Lindsey is a Wisconsin native, so cheese is part of her heritage. Ben is a Wyoming native and hunting, fishing, gardening and the processing of food is his background, so their union was destiny. A year after meeting, they began making goat cheese leasing part of a friend’s farm to feed and milk their goats. But when the Wyoming Food Freedom Act passed and they could make value-added products in their unlicensed kitchen, they started Slow Goat Farm. Volume grew to the point in 2017 they needed to grow past their own home. Then in 2019, Brush Creek Ranch contacted them because the Ranch had put in an infrastructure to have a food-to-table program, including craft goat cheeses. The Ranch initially wanted Slow Goat Farm to supply them milk, but Slow Goat could not legally sell them milk, so the conversation turned to cheese and creamery production. Brush Creek wanted to start such a program and since Lindsey and Ben already had the business dialed in, it was a natural to have the couple start up the business inside Brush Creek. The timing was excellent as the couple helped finish the design of the creamery and cheese facilities then fell right into production. COVID lockdown slowed things temporarily but the license came through in 2021 for their new company, Medicine Bow Creamery at Brush Creek Ranch. Every business has startup pangs and Medicine Bow has had theirs. When cheese ages, it needs a specific level of heat and humidity. Wyoming is a dry climate and the first batches of goat cheese did not turn out as planned. However, the company has enjoyed strong sales with feta being a big favorite. Interestingly, Brush Creek Ranch is the biggest client, buying all the yogurt that is produced and much of the other production as well. But as Medicine Bow Creamery ramps up production, the couple is confident they will be reaching markets will outside of the Ranch. The couple is excited about all the varieties of cheese they are making as they experiment to find the cheeses that will be most popular when they are able to expand their marketplace. And the chefs at Brush Creek are terrific sounding boards. A quick look at the Brush Creek Ranch: Going back to its founding in 1884, the ranch has stayed alive by evolving into a luxury resort that has upheld its past and western ranch heritage. The spirit of recreation, adventure, and good times shared together prevails, from famous barn and campfire cookouts to cattle drives and fishing on the renowned Brush Creek. This authentic heritage is visibly apparent and despite a plethora of modern amenities, Brush Creek Ranch is still a true working cattle ranch. Lindsey and Ben keep those standards high with their herd of Alpine, Nubian, and Mini Nigerian goats. Guests can meet and learn how the milking process works from the Dairy Managers, play with the kids, shepherd the herd through a relaxing pasture walk, and get a behind the scenes tour of the goat operation. Their award-winning creamery masterfully instills complex flavors into a variety of cheeses, blending old-world and old-west traditions. Their fresh and lightly aged cheeses lack a strong “goaty” flavor due to special diets and gentle milk handling practices. Visit the website at: https://www.brushcreekranch.com/the-farm/medicine-bow-creamery. Follow them on: Instagram andFacebook: Slow Goat Farm Our hosts: Twitter - @sarahmasoni and @spicymarshall, Instagram - @masoniandmarshall.
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    46 m
  • #181 Fit for a Cowboy - Tyler McCann, Wyoming Cowboy Cuts

    #181 Fit for a Cowboy - Tyler McCann, Wyoming Cowboy Cuts
    May 15 2024
    It’s the middle of calving season for ranchers, and if you don’t know what that means, you’re not alone. Tyler and Angela McCann fifth generation ranchers and owners of Wyoming Cowboy Cuts can tell you. It’s when the cows are giving birth to their baby calves and as Tyler says, averages about three a day. That’s intense work and Tyler admits he’s rather tired as he gives his interview. Calves are born and raised on the undulating sagebrush steppe of the family’s Hancock Ranch and when weaned from their mother cows, travel 72 miles to Tyler and Angela McCann’s farm. There, the beef cattle reside in irrigated pastures, and, in addition to their grass diet, eat a corn, oat and barley grain supplement. The McCanns’ daughters, the family ranch’s sixth generation, often pet the beef cattle at their twice daily grain feedings.Here’s the family story on how all this came about. Angela’s grandfather and grandmother purchased the ranchlands where, today, the McCanns’ cattle graze. When Angela’s grandparents married, her grandfather owned a saddle and bedroll, and her grandmother had a few cooking pots and a sewing machine. The McCanns’ honor their family’s hard work by furthering the ranch business’s environmental and financial sustainability for the next generation — their daughters. The family is the epitome of the American Dream. Technically, the ranch is a commercial beef herd raising a mix of Red Angus, Black Angus and Hereford cattle. The idea of “finishing beef” started about 12 years ago when Tyler and Angela married. Finishing is a process of essentially fattening up the cattle with the corn and grain feed instead of selling off the cattle after only grazing them in the pasture. Deciding that they would be losing money on the grazed cattle by selling them at auction, they chose to keep and finish the cattle and found the taste after processing was incredibly good. That led to the path of selling their choice beef direct to the public and eventually added pork and lamb to the product line. Business must be good, as a look at their website shows they are sold out of almost every offering. The company will ship their products, but shipping from central Wyoming poses some challenges. Luckily, the McCann’s have experienced such high sales locally that they haven’t had to do much shipping. The process of landing that delicious piece of beef on someone’s plate is quite an odyssey. The McCann’s time their calving for the spring of the year and after the calves reach around six weeks of age, the branding activity begins. That’s when the company has a solid count of future cattle and the mothers will then continue to raise their calves through the summer. In the fall, the company begins gathering the herd in the pasture, which is 56 square miles in size. The cattle are in pairs, mother and calf, so the calves need to be weaned away then sorted into steers and heifers (boys and girls for us beginners). The ranchers then select the best heifers to keep breeding then sell the majority of steers to a backgrounder, someone who will take the steers from their weight of a little over 500 pounds and put them in a yearling program, meaning keeping them in pasture another summer. The McCann’s also take the cattle they keep and put them in the same program where the beef will grow to the 850-950 pound range. They are then brought to the pasture for the finishing stage, being grain fed twice a day and checked carefully for any maladies. Occasionally, the lucky ones even receive a name (check the website). The company has found that the grasses in their pastures produce a unique flavor and have been experimenting with the combination of grasses and cross-breeding to offer multiple flavors of their products. When products are available, buy online at: https://www.wyomingcowboycuts.com/. Follow them on IG: @wyomingcowboycuts, FB: @wyomingcowboycuts Our hosts: Twitter - @sarahmasoni and @spicymarshall, Instagram - @masoniandmarshall.
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    46 m
  • #180 No Gluten? No Problem - Sara Woods, Wyoming Heritage Grains

    #180 No Gluten? No Problem - Sara Woods, Wyoming Heritage Grains
    May 8 2024
    Today, we welcome a fifth generation farmer, Sara Woods of Wyoming Heritage Grains. Wyoming is great for spreading out and having lots of elbow room to be a farmer, as the population is not huge nor all that concentrated. The family came out to Wyoming in the early 1900s as homesteaders and their current farm, located in Northwest Wyoming, 70 miles east of Yellowstone, was established in 1946. They have grown just about every commodity crop that exists and also raise beef cattle and alfalfa hay. They are focused on regenerative practices and use multiple species of cover crops and mob grazing to ensure rich biodiversity, and healthy soils. As an interesting note, the land once belonged to Buffalo Bill Cody, and was used as a Country club at one point in time. Irrigation became possible from the Shoshone Water Project from 1899-1947,and the water is fed by the Yellowstone Eco-system. The family farm had started a malting company a few years ago and sold to beverage brewers quite successfully. The pandemic put a hold on that business, but the farm began milling flour as the lockdown put a huge demand on that commodity. Sara left the farm at adulthood, but after having a corporate life and kids, she desired a slower lifestyle. So Sara quit her corporate job and returned as the mill had become a thriving business. It turned out to be a very steep learning curve for Sara as producing flour is not the simple process it appears to be from the outside. The company now offers five to six different grains from their mill and their equipment has been upgraded as the company expands and becomes more efficient. Sara also has gone down the proverbial entrepreneur rabbit holes, experimenting with heirloom vegetables, varieties of animals and other commodities that in the end were not good business ventures. Sara points to our changing diet as a driver for their choices of grains. After World War II, wheat was hybridized in order to feed a growing population. That phenomenon has created a very large population of people who are now sensitive to gluten, so that has served to take wheat out of the mix of grains that can be raised and processed for Wyoming Heritage Grains. Now the older varieties of grains are more tolerable, but of course the yield per acre is smaller than the hybridized wheat, so it becomes a price/quantity/quality puzzle for Sara and the family. The big breakthrough has been finding customers who could not eat grains previously and can now eat Wyoming Heritage Grains every day. Filling that market segment of people who cannot tolerate wheat but want the “wheat experience” has been the family’s success to date. For example, their White Sonora grain was originally brought to the Americas in the 1500s and has been very easy to digest for people with gluten sensitivity. And since the company makes a pancake mix out of the flour, it’s a real treat for every family. Wyoming Heritage Grains also sells Einkhorn grain and flour, a grain that has stayed essentially the same for 10,000 years. The family also has experimented with red and blue corn kernels. There is some great news about cooperation amongst food producers who care about the consumer who is eating what they produce. The family communicates with other millers to coordinate what is being grown and milled to make sure consumers are supplied with all the healthy food they desire. You can find their products in farmers markets in Cody and others around Wyoming. They also are about to be stocked in Bayard Grocery stores. Be forgiving when buying online from their website, as it is being re-built and all the recipes were deleted in the process: https://www.wyomingheritagegrains.com/. Follow them on IG, FB and TikTok: wyomingheritagegrains. Our hosts: Twitter - @sarahmasoni and @spicymarshall, Instagram - @masoniandmarshall.
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    41 m
Economía
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