Shaye Koester 00:00
Hey, Hey, it's Shaye Koester and I'm your host for the Casual Cattle Conversations podcast where we foster innovation and enthusiasm in the ranching industry through sharing the stories and practices of different ranchers and beef industry leaders. Be sure to be a greater part of this podcast and become involved on my social media pages. Follow cattleconvos on Instagram, Facebook and Tik Tok or Shaye Koester on LinkedIn to join the conversations around the challenges we face as ranchers and how we can overcome them. You can also find more information about this podcast, all my episodes and how to partner with me on this show, by going to my website, casualcattleconversations.com. With that, thanks for tuning in, and let's see who our guest is today. Here we go with another one! Today we are visiting with Brandon Howlie about empowering the next generation of beef industry leaders. Brandon and his wife Stefnie are highly involved in empowering youth to be entrepreneurial and think outside the box when it comes to operating ag businesses. They also run a highly diverse operation and focus on niche marketing. It’s a fun episode that is sure to get your mind going with how to empower the next generation and find ways to diversify. Speaking of diversifying? How is advertising going for all you seedstock producers?
Cow Camp Promotions 01:47
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Shaye Koester 02:45
I just want to thank Tracey for sponsoring this show and offering this package to seedstock producers. Before we get rolling, please remember to go check out my website casualcattleconversations.com or go to the show notes to learn how to gain access to exclusive content, partner with me and have new episodes and blogs sent straight to your inbox. Remember to follow cattleconvos on social media as well! If you don’t go there already, the shownotes are the description of each episode. Shownotes are where you can find links to the advertiser for each show, any special offers I have AND a quick 3-minute survey that will help me make this podcast YOURS and produce the content YOU want to hear. So get check that out! What is your background in the ranching space?
Brandon Howlie 03:40
Yeah, absolutely. So my background really stems from my grandfather's upbringing of me. From a very early age, I have pictures all the way back to two years old ofa me getting on a horse and going out and working cattle with my grandfather, you know him taking the reins and leading me around as we push cattle. And then I've spent all of my summers and all of my weekends throughout the years, coming out here and running cattle. And at that time, he had quite a large Quarter Horse operation that he was doing in conjunction with the cattle. So I also kind of got a little bit of background in the Quarter Horse world and the cutting world of things when we went into competitions. They also did a little bit of reining at times. But most of my experience was based in the cattle and you know, learning about the genetics and learning about the things that actually went into what makes a good cow what makes a good bull. Those types of fundamentals that a lot of I feel ranch kids get at an early age coming up through this type of system going into the genetics it's going into what types of breeds you're using and what the intention is for the overall objective. Back then my grandfather was more concerned about growing the cow or the steer out to a finished weight as quickly as possible or getting him to that 500 weight and then taking them to the sale barn or doing some type of private treaty to send them on to another ranch. So just kind of being one of those kids that got a taste of this and really a passion for it as I grew up through the years. You know, my summers out here, were crucial, baling hay doing all the grunt work that you know, nobody wants to do, but has to do to come up through the chain. And yeah, that's pretty much all I got my my background and ranching.
Shaye Koester 05:39
So do you want to talk about your operation today? And what you're all doing there?
Brandon Howlie 05:46
Yeah, absolutely. So just to give a little bit of context, our operation was started in 1977 by my grandfather as a conventional cow-calf operation. And there was a period of time between the the end of his career with the ranch and me being in the military that the ranch kind of said, dormant, if you will, and we had to sell off or tie trade down on a lot of our cattle population on cattle herd and our horse herd. And so in 2017, I came into the picture after I got out of the military. And we were at a crossroads as a family and trying to decide what it was that we were going to do with the ranch to maintain its continuity and so I ended up raising my hand at that meeting and telling everybody, you know, this is my plan. This is how I expect to get things done. And then we retro actively converted the ranch to a grass fed and finished and biodynamic and sustainable operation. And then subsequently getting our certifications as a GAP Step Four operator and being certified by the American Grass-fed Association and a couple others. So since then, we've been moving everything up. So we're actually retaining yearlings now or backgrounding. We've filtered out, if you will, some of that color that my grandfather had bred into to our overall herd and then kind of looked like a Picasso picture, you know, at the end of 35 or 40 years. So we cleaned it up, got it back to our Angus roots. And now just for our growth factor, we're doing a SimAngus, three quarter Simmental and a quarter Angus or excuse me, reverse that three quarter Angus a quarter Sim cross. So that's kind of where we are today to catch you up.
Shaye Koester 07:10
Yeah. So in addition to your ranch, I mean, you have more than just the raising cattle. I mean, you're connected with consumers, you have other aspects. So what are those other diversifying factors that you still consider a part of your overall business and what you're doing today?
Brandon Howlie 07:52
Yeah, well, we identified a problem early on, when we started retrofitting everything over to the the grass-fed and finished side, we realized that we weren't netting necessarily what we needed to make a profit every year at the sale barn. So identifying that was the key to allowing us to, I guess, assess all of our options as to where we wanted to go from here. And one of the options that we ended up going forward with was the direct to consumer route. So you know, I created an entire supply chain with our cattle to where we would grow them out, we would background them, you know, we retained some more of those heifers that were in, in line with our program that we were going into, and we in doing so we would go to the farmers market, we were able, we got the capability to approach restaurants, to approach grocery stores to do all of those things, kind of the typical routes that you would assume, with going direct to consumer, though, we were kind of faced with a dilemma, once COVID hit, and then kind of fun, funny, right before COVID hit at one of the farmers markets. We ended up meeting the director of the CTE programs for the Dallas Independent School District. And I didn't know who he was at the time. And he was just kind of a guy in the crowd that was listening in on the conversation and hearing what I had to say about the cattle in our operation and how we care for our beef. He approached me to say, Hey, I'd really appreciate it if you come out and help help kind of get a picture of what we're working with out here at this Seagoville facility. So I said sure. And from there that blossomed into a contract where we not only went out there to consult just on the baselines of what they needed for that to be a sustainable cattle operation on that small of an acreage. But we also identified other ways to create revenue for them by bringing in storefronts, creating the show, working in partnership with the ranch and other ranches to create a pipeline of cattle and ruminant animals that can be used in show. So all of those kind of typical check in the boxes for them that would make their program a lot more robust. But the key thing that I think that we walked away from that situation was, is that we had the ability to create blockchain curriculum. And what this blockchain curriculum essentially was going to do, or it still is going to do, we're still at the planning process is happening with COVID, as it's kind of going along. But what has been discussed is that, you know, you would take one, maybe two weeks at the producer level, and these kids would go through an intensive learning program and see, you know, the dairy side and the beef producing side and the cow calf side, and then they would shift up and then they would see, you know, what does it look like if I did decide to go direct consumer or kind of take maybe a wholesale route or something along those lines, and then what does it look like working with the packer and then we'll be able to see the meat sciences and how to negotiate packing contracts and all those types of things all the way up until they got to a finished product. Module, I'll just call it to where they, you know, see how that finished product looks on the plate, how they market that how they talk like a chef, how they cook like a chef, you know, so that they can go into any situation at any level and be knowledgeable to some degree or at least a professional degree, and hold their own. Now, this was kind of a unique idea in the sense that this was or my intention for it was to create a pathway to an alternative to college credit. So we had gotten with private equity groups. One in particular that I had brought this up to is Jaylon Smith from the Dallas Cowboys. He has a minority entrepreneurship institute that's really big into mentoring and lifting up people that want to get into business that don't necessarily maybe have the means though. So what would happen is that these kiddos would get to the end of this blockchain curriculum. Now, whether that be at the end of junior year or senior year, these are the details that we're trying to work out with the DSD as far as you know, what are the upcoming COVID restrictions? You know, how are How's teaching gonna look? Is it going to be online? Is it gonna be mostly in class, it's all these things. And I think most of those are still trying to figure out some things. But the the part that was kind of unique to that situation is that MBI aspects. So they would, essentially, these kids would take one of those blockchains and create a business plan of their own for it. So they they really have a affinity for meatpacking, or they really have affinity for a cow-calf operation, well, then they would create their own business plan, they would go in and pitch it in like a mini shark tank in a way. And then you know, these Peony guys would essentially say, Hey, I'm gonna, you know, sponsor you and mentorship or we'll fund you up to a certain dollar amount, or we'll fund you all the way. But essentially, it gives them some type of long term guidance that we're not just saying, hey, great job, guys, you did really good, I'm glad you found found yourself in this program. See you later, right, we don't want that to happen, because that's when people start losing confidence in the ability and they face problems that they might not know how to overcome in certain situations. So having that added layer of continuity, to take them out after high school really lends some really unique perspective and really unique abilities to the program. So that's kind of in a nutshell, what we've been working on with the DSD. Now since COVID has happened, we've had to pivot with our ranch operations and with the DSD in a lot of different ways to where we couldn't go on campus, the DSD, we couldn't interact with the kids, we had to do zoom, you know, everything pretty much. And our timelines for for everything, essentially, with the training or teaching or however it was done was cut in half. Everything had to be faster, faster, faster. And then we're, we were picking up contracts with the ranch, you know, on the restaurant side of things and doing those types of things. We were losing out because then the restaurants had to shutter and the chef's no longer could cook and people couldn't go to restaurants. So in a very short amount of time, we lost a lot of our revenue base. So what we did is we pivoted yet again so we now have this DSD thing that we were kind of controlling all the way through COVID The best we could on top of it Creating a chef collaborative, called Cowboys and Bohemians out here at the ranch, where we took all of the chefs from Dallas are the ones willing to come out here and work with us, to the ranch created this r&d kitchen for them, so that they can continue their craft. And we bring people out here we host the private dinners, we do things like that. I think one of the more fun things that we did was our brunches. The way that works is that we pick you up from East house, we drive you out here, when you checked out with your your ticket, you'd be able to pick one of two activities, you either do a health and wellness or you do skeet shooting. So I'll take you out and you skeet shooting with me for an hour. And then we come back up and you can watch the chef prepare a four course brunch. So and then we take care of all your transportation and everything like that. So it's those things that allowed us to continue normal operations, but we had to remain and stay very creative and ingenuitive. The other things that we've been trying to do is that since recent legislations kind of been passed, we've been reaching out to more international partners or potential partners, to see if we can accommodate or offset any of their demand that they're having to face that they can't necessarily capture. So you know, we're working with a contractor in Korea, there's one in Bahrain potentially. So these are all kind of little caveats of what we're doing out here.
Shaye Koester 16:34
Well, that's awesome. So there's a lot we can touch on with each one of those segments. But you guys have really done what sounds like an outstanding job of pivoting when needed and making sure you always have a cash flow somewhere. But going back to that CTE program, so these students you're working with, obviously, if they're in there, they're interested in Ag in some space, do all of them come from ag background, or are a majority from non ag backgrounds? What are the types of kids you're working with?
Brandon Howlie 17:03
So it's right now, for COVID restrictions, it was mostly ag kids that were allowed to go to those facilities, because they were already in those types of programs before and they didn't want to, I guess inundate the facility with a bunch of people just trying to see if they liked it. The idea is, is for it not to be just the Ag kids, for anyone really, that wants to show an interest in and it's across multiple CTE programs. So, you know, if, you know, we touch on hydroponics, we get hydroponics, CTE kids, or if we touch on land management, or you know, ag and then you know, culinary gets involved as well on that finished product side of things when we're, you know, negotiating contracts with restaurants or, you know, talking about finished dishes and bringing that kind of professional language into their vocabulary, so that they can communicate effectively on that level. So, no, I, that was the overall intention. I think that's why DIC really liked the ideas because it was so inclusive, that any walk of life can come in here and get something out of it. But I think with you know, budgets, and the Coronavirus, couldn't restrictions that they're going to look at it a little bit differently in the sense that they only really want people that are looking at this as something serious and not as an inquiry. They don't want you to just come out for, you know, a couple classes or whatnot or anything like that they want you to commit. So typically, what we've found thus far is that the people that have committed there were ag or they have some type of ag affinity in their background.
Shaye Koester 19:00
Okay, so what has been like the most rewarding part for you? I mean, I know you're still in some of the planning stages, and you've had to deal a lot with COVID. But what's been the most rewarding part of being able to build a program like this for youth?
Brandon Howlie 19:17
Well, there's a lot of things and I think that the largest one was being able to collaborate with the the directors of facilities and really get their insight as to what they were lacking. And then giving them a product that they can be proud of and put their name on and, you know, allow these kids to have access to the facilities and the equipment and everything that they'll need, but that the ISD might not be able to provide on their own. I think that giving them that ability has really increased my insight into how the public school system works and why It's so important to have channel partners like happy Hollow Ranch and, you know all these other like Virgin hotels and Peter Barlow, all these, these people that are involved in this program come in and donate their time or, you know, donate their equipment or whatever capacity to enhance that experience and to enhance that learning. Is what is the most rewarding for me.
Shaye Koester 20:22
So outside of the COVID challenges, what were some of the other challenges that you faced?
Brandon Howlie 20:30
I think budgetary challenges justifying certain things and making sure that the program was built out the way it needed to be. And we weren't going to cut corners in a sense when you're dealing with an entire school district. And there's a lot of ins and outs as far as what they need for that year. Sometimes your ideas get shuffled to the bottom, but you have to justify it and overcome that obstacle to make sure that you're staying on the ball.
Shaye Koester 21:02
Okay, so what advice do you have for someone who is interested in helping youth in some educational fashion with agriculture, whether that's through school districts, or through other independent organizations, what advice you have for them,
Brandon Howlie 21:19
I would say go into it with open eyes and well intentions. If you're doing this for the money, or you're you've got some, you know, other alternative to your motives. It's going to hinder your ability to effectively accomplish your your goals. You really want to go into something like this was being an altruistic person and saying, Hey, this is for the kiddos. And we need to keep that. Keep that in mind.
Shaye Koester 21:52
Awesome. Thank you very much. So shifting gears back to like, how you've diversified and done so many different things there. When you look at what your next move is, is this something where you decide that kind of right away when you see a problem? Or do you kind of have like a list? I mean, I know your wife's a part of the operation, too. And whoever else is a part, do you guys have like a list of like, dreams or potential options where you can diversify when the time is right? Or how do you make that decision.
Brandon Howlie 22:24
So it is just me and my wife, and then one employee out here. So it's, it's pretty easy to get a meeting of the minds at times, I think that we have some really, really big dreams. But I wouldn't say per se, say we have a list of things. I think that, you know, learning what we've learned over this past year with all the change and you know, dynamics of legislation have kept us adaptable, and not so fixed on one thing, we have kind of like a general thing that we would like to accomplish, and we formulate that vision as it gets built out. But yeah, I think that we would like to build out that Chef collaborative, because I see there's a future and that and really cultivate those relationships to where, you know, when restaurants do come back online. We give those restaurants the ability to take their consumers out to the ranch and say, Hey, this is where your food comes from, let us educate you from the on-the-ground position. And give you a taste of what you've been missing. Because when you go to the Cisco's and US foods and things like that the National tech or suppliers, distributors, their disconnection, you know, you don't get to see where it's grown, you don't get to see what was done to it or anything like that you have no background, no transparency. And for a lot of these restaurants and a lot of these supply chains now, that's kind of what I've been noticing more and probably where our point of focus is going to be more directed to is these more regionalized supply chains. So the other thing that I'm doing for the DSD is building out a book of businesses so that they can go out if there was ever a national shutdown, again, they couldn't source from US Foods or Cisco or something like that. They could then whip out this book of businesses and say, Okay, we need beef, we need chicken, we need eggs, you know, find all their proteins, vegetables and fruits from a localized area. And I hope to take that model and extrapolate it out across the nation to where we're increasing the the nutritional diversity of assisted lunch programs. So that's kind of my my arm's length goal is to get involved with the assisted lunch programs and really have an impact on that on a larger scale. But that requires working with the Government. So currently we're, we brought that up to Senator Bob Hall and we'll discuss that further as it as it develops.
Shaye Koester 25:11
Well, that's outstanding. So as we wrap up here today, you really did a thorough job explaining everything you do. And so is there anything else you'd really like to add or share?
Brandon Howlie 25:23
Well, if y'all ever want to come on to happy Hollow Ranch, for door's always open, and we love to host people. Keep up with us on Instagram at happyhollow.beef and happyhollowbeef.com is our website. So you can go on and order a package of curated beef or drop me a line. But it was an absolute pleasure doing this interview. And thank you so much for bringing me on. I think that this is fantastic. You asked great questions, and I really appreciate the robust conversation.
Shaye Koester 26:00
That’s a wrap on that one and I just want to remind you that
Cow Camp Promotions 26:03
Bull sale season is fast approaching so it's a good time to evaluate if your promotion is effective. Ask yourself these questions: Is your bull sale as successful as you had hoped? Are you skeptical if anyone sees your ads? Have you analyzed and adjusted your promotional budget this year? Many factors can make seedstock producers nervous before their sale. They simply worry that no one will show up and raise their hand when the auction starts. Take the guesswork out of promoting your bull sale. The Cattalyst Hybrid Media Strategy revolutionizes promotion and elevates you above the competition. The tactics and practices help you build long-lasting relationships with your current customers plus attract new buyers. The Cattalyst strategy even takes the pain out of writing those dreaded footnotes when it comes to catalog time. If you want to spur the success of your bull sale, head over to CowCampPromotions.com and schedule a time to visit. Thank you for tuning in again, thank you Brandon for sharing your story with this audience and thank you Tracey sponsoring this episode. Please remember to go check out my website casualcattleconversations.com or go to the show notes to learn how to gain access to exclusive content, partner with me and have new episodes and blogs sent straight to your inbox. Remember to follow cattleconvos on social media as well! If you don’t go there already, the shownotes are the description of each episode. Shownotes are where you can find links to the advertiser for each show, any special offers I have AND a quick 3-minute survey that will help me make this podcast YOURS and produce the content YOU want to hear. So get check that out!- Take care and have a great day!
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