Merton Homerã¢â‚¬â„¢s Painted Hills Natural Beef Program
Mehrten Homer, president of Painted Hills Natural Beef, makes a bold shift from mass meat to premium products.
BY PETER BELAND // PHOTOS BY RANDY JOHNSON
Mounted firmly on a cowhide sofa in his log cabin dwelling overlooking the rolling hills nearly Fossil, Mehrten Homer, president of Painted Hills Natural Beef, is watching a late-season Beavers game. The phone rings and he turns downward the TV. Dressed in a pressed cowboy shirt and jeans, he picks up the phone and speaks swiftly into the receiver, not wasting a breath every bit he arranges a coin transfer to one of his producers. Never heed that Mehrten oversees an functioning with 30,000 head of cattle and more than than $30 meg in revenue, formal business meetings aren't needed when a telephone call will practice. "We trade millions of dollars this way," the 4th-generation rancher says, not without a satisfied wait.
For years Mehrten, 65, and his wife, Glenda, 63, ranched like virtually ranchers have for decades: They raised cattle and sold them to a broker who then sold them to a processor. Though they raised option-grade Angus, "When yous sell cattle to a banker, they go sent to a feed lot and become mixed up with lower-grade cattle," says Glenda, who is the full general manager.
 |
| Painted Hills Natural Beefiness |
| President: Mehrten Homer |
| Founded: 1996 |
| 2009 Gross revenue: $32 meg |
| Member ranches: fourscore |
| Cattle purchases: $800,000 each week from local ranchers |
Governed by a commodity market place in which the value of calves had increased little from the 1960s to the 1990s, they were selling their calves at a meager 60 cents a pound when in 1996 the Homers and six other Fossil-area ranchers pooled their resources and started Painted Hills in an effort to milkshake off the middlemen.
They planned to control all aspects of their business; to raise, process and market their grass-fed, corn-finished cattle raised without antibiotics or hormones. And they would enquire a premium price for their beefiness. With the help of a grant from the governor's reserve fund, they hired an analyst to identify markets where they could sell their beef. "Information technology was a mess, simply a mess," says Glenda with a weary laugh. Afterwards six months, the grant ran out and Mehrten and Glenda hopped in their car and drove beyond the Northwest to build relationships with marketplace owners and ranchers. Despite their efforts, afterward four years they were $425,000 in the red. "Nosotros told ourselves we'd lose [another] $25,000 and call information technology good," Mehrten says.
Painted Hills was processing 10 head of cattle a month in the early years, losing coin because it didn't process enough to make it economical and because it didn't get money for offal, the not-meat parts of the cow. In 1999 the visitor approached Washington Beef (at present AB Foods) in Toppenish, Launder., to become a better processing bargain, but the constitute told them they needed to provide at least sixty caput of cattle a month to brand it work. Once again, Mehrten and Glenda got in their car and drove off, this time to Seattle to convince market concatenation Associated Grocers to sell their beef. Washington Beef gave them the green calorie-free to process more cattle and that month they lost less money. Six months afterwards they were making money.
"We gotta try this once more," Mehrten remembers proverb. And then they jumped in the automobile again and again to convince more than ranchers to join. Glenda would drive out to where she could get cell phone service to jot downwardly orders when the office landline was out.
Many ranchers were wary at first of changing how they raised their cattle, but realized the worth of natural beef when Tyson Fresh Meats in Wallula, Wash., came calling in 2004. Tyson had stopped accepting cattle from its regular Canadian producers because of the incidence of mad cow affliction in that state. In a deal with Tyson, Painted Hills was able to cutting downwardly its processing costs, received a great offal credit deal, and was able to improve labeling and packaging to better differentiate its products from conventional beef.
Painted Hills at present processes about two,000 head of cattle a calendar month and is paid for its offal. The increase in production was the upshot of getting enough ranches — 80 to date —and consumers on board with the idea of natural beef, a job that took years of educating both groups nearly Painted Hills' natural, all-vegetarian feeding program. Fifteen years later, Painted Hills' network of small markets and ranchers, forged over handshakes and coffee, is paying off. Now playing the role of producer, broker and marketer, Painted Hills is able to conditions changes in the volatile article marketplace.
Mehrten and Glenda can relax a chip more than while their son, Will (the operations manager), and other family members accept over major portions of the company's direction. Those cowhide sofas are comfortable.
Yet fifty-fifty with their loyal network of ranchers and buyers and their ambitious drive to detect new markets on the East Coast and elsewhere, Mehrten does not entirely rest.
"We've gotta hell of a lot of beef and there's only so many days," Mehrten says, his booming voice tinged with something that most sounds like regret.
Source: https://www.oregonbusiness.com/article/archives/item/6413-painted-hills-natural-beef