How a Missouri Farmer Built a Direct-to-Consumer Meat Business During Coronavirus

Vance Crowe [00:00:01] As the crow flies on the Vance Crowe podcast,

Matt Stubblefield [00:00:06] Matts double field. Welcome to the podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:09] Thanks for having me on.

Matt Stubblefield [00:00:10] So you are one of my favorite, most important people in the world and this is the first time we've ever met. And that is because when Coronavirus hit and I went to the grocery store for the last time, I saw just how little meat was available and I was really uncomfortable taking all of it just because I could afford it. So I asked my good friend Jason Bachman, who runs Strange Donuts, what would he do if he wanted to fill up his freezer? And he said, oh, you gotta call Brush Creek Farms and see what's up with them. So I got online that night and ordered as much as I could possibly order, and two or three days later you guys showed up, dropped a a few boxes off at my house and my whole family, my, my wife and I, my in-laws, my sister-in-law all had meat. So I am grateful to you and I'm so glad you could take a little bit of time to sit down and talk about local production.

Vance Crowe [00:01:02] Yeah, anytime, man. Anytime.

Matt Stubblefield [00:01:05] So you are outside of St. Louis, Missouri, and you're delivering pork, chicken, and beef. How is it that you're doing this? Because I, I can't go to just any farmer and say, Hey, gimme some chickens. That's not how that works,

Vance Crowe [00:01:19] Right? No. So a couple years ago I decided to make the switch where I wanted to start delivering. And we had to invest in a few things. You know, I got a walk-in freezer. I bought an old keg trailer from a Anheuser-Busch distributing place, scrapped it out, made it to where I could haul meat around and got to know our local butchers that are, you know, state approved or USDA.

Matt Stubblefield [00:01:36] And so what is the process? You, you have a a, you have a cow, assume the audience doesn't know anything at all about this. You get a cow and you raise it on pasture. How are you doing this? And then

Vance Crowe [00:01:48] Walk

Matt Stubblefield [00:01:48] Me all the way to, it gets slaughtered and you deliver it to my house.

Vance Crowe [00:01:51] Okay, so from, you got, you have cow in a bull and we start from that part or you go,

Matt Stubblefield [00:01:56] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:01:58] Cow bull takes cow about nine months after she gets pregnant to have a calf wean that calf about six months. And when that calf gets about 900 pounds, so let's say about about a year, I'll, I'll start feeding it grain. I'll have it on pasture up until that point. And then I like to get to weigh about a thousand to 1100 pounds probably. And I keep it on pasture the whole time, but I feed it out, takes it to the butcher shop and let him take care of it from there.

Matt Stubblefield [00:02:26] And your butcher shop, this is a guy that's also selling out the front door or it's like a meat locker. What, describe this for people that have no idea how butchering works or slaughtering works.

Vance Crowe [00:02:37] Okay. So they've got their own cow herd. You know, they, they raise beef themselves, they buy pork from other producers. So they butcher it and then they can, they have people come up to their front door, fulfill orders so they need it, hamburger steaks, whatnot. Or then they have other farmers bring their product in, they'll butcher it for 'em.

Matt Stubblefield [00:02:54] And so you're bringing in a live cow to them and then they knock it with one of those air guns in the head or how, how do they do that?

Vance Crowe [00:03:02] Yes. Yeah, take care of it real quick. They're good.

Matt Stubblefield [00:03:06] So, so tell me your business when you were starting up. You're doing the local like joelson. So, you know, just for full disclosure, I was a Monsanto guy that actually came to Monsanto really reluctantly. But once I saw, hey, this is the superpower that is hyper efficiency, you can create supply on a level that most people can't imagine. And my brother was doing the Joel Sal method and I remember thinking, oh that's cute, right? Like that's so neat that you can do that and you know, people that want that luxury or that little bit of fatted chicken fine, but that's not really all that important. Fast forward to 2020 and it's probably one of the most Im important things in the world, but there had to have been a time where you were breaking away from the traditional system and doing this. What made you decide like, I'm gonna go break off and start doing my own local thing?

Vance Crowe [00:03:58] Oh man. So one of the couple of the reasons, one was I wanted to be able to see guarantee what kind of price I was gonna get. You never know what the market fluctuation was gonna be. And if you bought calves weighing a lot, I mean if you bought calves at a high price and the market dropped, you're kind of screwed. You didn't have a choice over that. Another thing were the numbers. When you're running a traditional system, you gotta run a lot more numbers. The more cattle you run, the harder it is on your ground. The muddier it gets, the more equipment you gotta have, try to keep up with it. It's more of a fight. I got Joel s book was given to me, I got to reading it and it just made sense to me, you know, using pasture to raise your animals, then you set your own price to the market. And what I've seen through this virus is when you have local producers that's kind of like a, like a rock for the community, you know, that's something they can count on. They don't need to count on the grocery stores and the big producers as much.

Matt Stubblefield [00:04:54] So a lot of people don't realize that most cattle producers, they raise their, they have a bunch of land where they can let their cows pasture on it. And then when they get to a certain size, because you want the cow to go from being 900 pounds up to 1100 or 1400 or whatever, they sell 'em into a feeder operation where then they're in pens and you feed them grain. And once you do that, then they get sold to a packing house and that packing house buys those live cows at an auction. And you as the producer, the guy that held the land at the beginning, you're completely dependent on what are the guys at the packing houses wanna sell for. When you break away and you do this system though, now you gotta find customers. So what was how, like you actually were taking some risk when you went to move into this local system. What was it like building up a business from from nothing essentially?

Vance Crowe [00:05:47] Nothing. It was different. It was very different. Told a lot of people about it. A lot of people, whenever I told my friends I was doing it said you're crazy. Some people said it was a good idea. You know, we started off going to farmer's markets and we kinda had that first experience like you were saying, like everyone said that's cute, that's a cute idea. You know, at the farmer's market they wanna support local, walking around with a little bag, buy a couple things from me, not a lot, but once we started getting good clients that really appreciated good meats, good quality meat delivered to 'em efficiently, that's when everything really started turning around for us. Word of mouth has been our best seller for sure.

Matt Stubblefield [00:06:26] It's been shocking to me because, so I grew up in the Midwest. I'm the middle child of seven and so I had pork chops growing up, but I had pork chops that were maybe like a quarter of an inch thick and you know, steamed it down, you know, pressed down. So they were terrible. And when I received this box from you when it showed up and I was like, oh great pork chops. Lots of pork chops. And then I had one and I cooked it sous. So are you familiar with so v

Vance Crowe [00:06:53] No I'm not.

Matt Stubblefield [00:06:54] So sous vide is this like very cool contraption that's like a water bath. And then you put the meat inside of a plastic bag and you suck out all the air and then you put it in this water bath. So for a pork chop, I think I do like 1 45 for four hours. And instead of the meat, like when you put it on a grill where it spikes up to the temperature to kill the pathogens and then you wanna get it off as quick as you can, this takes the meat and just has it at that constant temperature for a really long time. So all of the tougher parts of the meat can break up and then the fat is, is totally ready to be thrown on a grill or on a cast iron skillet where you then have that Millard effect where you get that nice browning crisp. So I have made bad pork chops okay. With the sous, but then I did yours with the sous V and it was like I was eating a, I don't wanna misdescribe it, but like a giant piece of bacon that that was like, it was, it was like the most glorious thing. And I went from being like, I never understood why people ate pork chops to being like, why don't people eat pork chops every day?

Vance Crowe [00:07:56] Well it's amazing that having like pigs on pasture, when they get a variety diet sunshine, fresh air, how much of a difference that tastes with the meat. Like it changes the taste, the taste and the texture altogether.

Matt Stubblefield [00:08:06] It really does. Like the fat that used to be on a pork chop was just gristle, right? You'd chew it up as much as you could to get the flavor out and then kinda like put it down on the side of its plate and hope nobody noticed it. But yours is a totally different experience. It's, it's, it's amazing. And now I look at that and I think, what an amazing time to be alive because there have been this surge of people that have been able to go on and do local producing and getting the word out. How did you, you use a program called Barn to Door or something like that?

Vance Crowe [00:08:41] Yeah.

Matt Stubblefield [00:08:42] So how did you get hooked up with that? How did that all get set up?

Vance Crowe [00:08:45] Now my, they contact my wife one day. I think there was, if I remember, at a Seattle based company and they helped small farmers all over the US with their websites and selling it because that's one thing farmers aren't really good at being tech savvy. So they definitely have a market there, you know, to get contact these people and help 'em walk 'em through the process of, of the business.

Matt Stubblefield [00:09:05] And so they help you guys do all the, like the selling and the buying and the, you know, organizing that, that kind of stuff. And then you can focus on being a farmer, eh?

Vance Crowe [00:09:14] Yeah. Yeah. They help with the website and like inventory and stuff like that.

Matt Stubblefield [00:09:19] So you were telling me before we turned the camera on that you, your family used to own, own an auction house and yeah. And be a part of like the ma and you still are, you're selling most of your cattle to the major packing houses. What do you think is going on with coronavirus? You're probably watching the plant closures as as much as anybody. What, what do you think's going on there?

Vance Crowe [00:09:42] Man, it's hard to say. I know the market's dropped quite a bit in the last couple weeks. And I mean it can have two, it can go two ways with the market drops like this, what really could happen is a lot of farmers could start selling off their product because they don't have any money in it. They don't wanna, you know, start selling their, their breeding stock 'cause there's no money in it and they don't wanna be able to keep something that costs them money. You know what I mean?

Matt Stubblefield [00:10:06] I think most people don't realize that it costs money to keep cattle. Not only do you have to, if you don't have 'em on pasture, you gotta give 'em grain, but you also gotta keep 'em vaccinated, keep 'em from getting sick, keep 'em from having any of those problems. So every day you have a cow that's not be that's ready to be sold, that's not sold, you're losing money.

Vance Crowe [00:10:23] Absolutely. Absolutely. Losing money and start selling off, they'll flood the market and when they flood the market, they'll keep the price. So what I, what I think would happen if something like that did happen in a couple years, the price would go back up and it'll level itself off. But I don't know.

Matt Stubblefield [00:10:45] And so as we were talking before, I was saying one of the realizations that I've had in the last few days is that we really genuinely are in a post coronavirus world. Meaning that the world that we were in that doesn't exist, that and we are going to be in something different. And now I'm starting to anticipate maybe not that we'll be in the total quarantine lockdown for 18 months, but that no matter what big things have changed for the next 18 months. When I look at that, I look at, hey, I gotta pivot my business. I gotta change what I'm offering my customers, how much I'm doing stuff online. What does 18 months of, of Coronavirus world look like for you and your family and your business?

Vance Crowe [00:11:33] 18 months of, of Coronavirus world. That's gonna be a pretty crazy time. I see our internet sales going up quite a bit. I really dunno how to answer that man. I

Matt Stubblefield [00:11:47] Don't think anybody does, right? I don't think anybody does. When, when, so you're in a, in a great position because you found a way to, to have a butcher, right? I think there are a lot of guys right now in the country that are saying, Hey, I got these cows. I know there's consumer demand right now. What would you recommend about them if they wanted to pivot their business in some way to be able to supplement where the market may be falling off in,

Vance Crowe [00:12:16] Right? I was just once talking to their local butchers, finding out when they have days open, talk to their fa friends and family, see if they know anybody where they're getting their meat from. You know, see if they can't fulfill orders that way. And you know, social media has been a great help for us. Talk about what you do on the farm. People always wanna hear a background story.

Matt Stubblefield [00:12:36] How has been social media in the past it was probably a lot of like, oh it's so cute to see your cows and now it's probably a little more panicked,

Vance Crowe [00:12:44] Right? Yeah. It used to be a lot more, it's a lot. It's really cute to see your cows, how sweet that is. You and your family are doing this together to, how can I get your meat? Please apply it to me. We need it now.

Matt Stubblefield [00:12:54] Yeah. It's

Vance Crowe [00:12:55] A different ball game.

Matt Stubblefield [00:12:57] And you have a, you have a unique system in that, in the people can buy come to your website and they can buy like, hey, I wanna get some beef, or hey, I wanna get some chicken. Or you actually allow a form of almost futures trading, right? Which is you can buy a box of meat on a monthly basis. Talk about that. 'cause I, that's why I loved what you guys were doing so much.

Vance Crowe [00:13:18] Okay, yeah. We have what's called a subscription program. So you buy a subscription box once in a month we will drop this box off at your house and it's an insulated box so you don't have to be home. And it's a packed full, about 20 to 30 pounds of frozen meat and it's a variety of beef, chicken and pork. If you're a subscriber, we will give you guys the first chance to get the meat and we'll deliver it once a month. So you're locked in every month, you're gonna get a box and, and that's, go ahead.

Matt Stubblefield [00:13:42] I mean I love that because it allows you to start saying like, Hey, how much, how much of our livestock can we put to this system? It, it allows actually like a futures trading without me doing it in the commodities market, but actually helping do futures for my own house, my own family.

Vance Crowe [00:13:58] Right. It's a good investment I think.

Matt Stubblefield [00:14:00] So how has, how's business been, man? What's, what's the difference between Precor Corona and now post Corona?

Vance Crowe [00:14:09] People ask a lot more about their orders when their orders are coming in.

Matt Stubblefield [00:14:13] I bet

Vance Crowe [00:14:15] It used to be kind of like, I think when people used to buy Crum uss more of like a fun thing to do. Like let's try this local farm route. Let's see what kind of steaks he has. Let's give him a shot. Now it's, can you supply my family with 20 pounds of ground beef every month kind of thing?

Matt Stubblefield [00:14:28] And how, how do you think you're gonna be able to keep up with the demand?

Vance Crowe [00:14:32] I think so. So right now it happened so quick. We started selling out inventory, we started doing pre-orders, we're doing everything we can to, to let everybody know what's going on. But now that we've had time to kind of step back and look at the business, I can bring in more cattle, I could put more butcher orders. And so from here on out we can definitely expand and keep getting more customers, you know?

Matt Stubblefield [00:14:56] So how about you and your family? Like, this has gotta be a weird time because you're, you're a business that is essential and so you're doing well, but you've also gotta be a little afraid for, you know, your own health and the health of your system. What, what's going on in your mind?

Vance Crowe [00:15:12] Well, it's kind of a weird thing. Like, you know, we're trying to keep social distancing, that's a thing. We're staying at home quarantine, except whenever I'm farming, which is basically quarantine outside, that's not a big deal. Then we take precautions during delivery and really just taking every precaution because we just, we just can't risk it. You know what I mean? We, we do have a good business going on and I don't wanna, if I'm out of work then I don't want to, you know, shore people on their food supply.

Matt Stubblefield [00:15:45] Amen. I think that if there's one thing that has come out of this, it is that there's a widened attention on the food supply, but I would say probably the biggest danger that we have right now in the country is that people don't understand the food supply system. Right? Like, and on the one hand you don't wanna create a panic because the packing houses have done a good job of continuing to run, continuing to move cattle and pork through. But then you start seeing these closures and you start like, at least I am wincing a little bit. Like, I'm like, oh man, what happens if you take off one of the largest pork processors in in the country? What happens if they go offline? I, I don't know, I don't know how long our cold supplies are. I don't, I don't know how much we were exporting and now we can hold back for, for imports. But it seems to me like we're in a precarious time.

Vance Crowe [00:16:33] You know, I think that's gonna be one of the big effects of the coronavirus. I think you're gonna see a lot more of these big packing plants close and you're gonna see a lot more small butcher shops, open up local farmers, things like that.

Matt Stubblefield [00:16:43] Yeah, I imagine if you had found a parent that just a few months ago had been like, my son or daughter wants to be a butcher, they'd be losing their minds. But now, I mean that is a, a real career. There is a super demand for butchers right now.

Vance Crowe [00:16:59] It's a lost start that people are really learning now.

Matt Stubblefield [00:17:02] Do you know how to do it? Can you slaughter a a a cow?

Vance Crowe [00:17:07] Never done a beep. I've, I used to do a lot of pigs. I used to butcher a pig every year for a barbecue ahead of my house and I just kind of old school like that. My uncle had a little butcher shop made at his farm. We used to process 'em there when I was a kid.

Matt Stubblefield [00:17:20] Yeah, I mean it's definitely a lost art. I was in the Peace corps and I had the opportunity or the honor one time to slit the throat of a goat and, and that was an unbelievable experience that I remember at the time thinking like, I'm gonna walk past how horrifying this is and just deal with it. And now I'm like, man, everybody should be somewhat closer to it having done it at least once. If you've never killed a chicken or you've never killed a goat, you don't really know how vital and important a butcher is.

Vance Crowe [00:17:53] Oh my god. Yeah. And it's, you need that connection. You need to know where your food comes from. You need to know it was a living, breathing thing. You know, you don't need to take, take that for granted.

Matt Stubblefield [00:18:02] Yeah, I have some buddies, Joseph and Michael Ring, who are the ring brothers and they run a feeding operation and they were showing me like sometimes they have to get cows slaughtered and they showed me the head being cut and having the blood come out of it. And it was like, you know, it is a really good thing to know that this is what's going on. That there's a live animal there and that, you know, it, it was breathing just before this. It, I don't know. It it definitely connects you in a way that we have been distanced because of our grocery store.

Vance Crowe [00:18:33] No, and that's, that is a big thing and that's, you hear a lot of people, they have such a disconnect of where their food comes from. It's almost unbelievable. You know what I mean? They don't understand the process of it at all.

Matt Stubblefield [00:18:44] So how is Missouri, the state of Missouri for processing and certification? Is there anything that could be removed that would make food still be safe but make it easier to get to market,

Vance Crowe [00:18:55] Make it more efficient, make it quicker? I haven't really had any problems finding the butcher shop or deli having the license to deliver the meat or anything like that.

Matt Stubblefield [00:19:04] That's, that's great to hear.

Vance Crowe [00:19:06] Yeah, it's pretty efficient.

Matt Stubblefield [00:19:09] So just as, as a guy that's producing livestock, you've gotta be thinking pretty far ahead. What, what are your next moves? How are you gonna pivot your business? What, what are your plans here?

Vance Crowe [00:19:24] Well, definitely holding more back for butcher because I do, I definitely see the, the demand for it and I might sort of concentrate on selling some bread cattle, maybe something. 'cause I think there's gonna be a lot of people that wanna start farming themselves. Oh,

Matt Stubblefield [00:19:37] Tell, say more about that.

Vance Crowe [00:19:40] Well, I just, we've had a lot of people call us wanting to know where to buy chickens, things like that. So I started selling, actually I have about a hundred laying hens. I was gonna start this spring instead of selling the eggs, I'm just gonna start selling the chickens off of them. Oh. There's a lot of people there wanting or interested in being able to farm themselves and take care of their own family. I'm sure you're gonna see a lot of greenhouses go up for sale too.

Matt Stubblefield [00:20:02] I, I bet. Do you also grow your own produce? I mean, are you guys relatively self-sufficient?

Vance Crowe [00:20:08] Yeah. My, my dad, he, he loves having a garden. He always has. And we've always had chickens taking care of ourselves that way. Absolutely.

Matt Stubblefield [00:20:17] And so how far away do you guys deliver? So right now, if somebody's listening and they live outside of St. Louis, like how far will you guys go?

Vance Crowe [00:20:26] Well, we live in Crawford County, which is about, if you live in long I 44, we'll deliver anywhere between Crawford County and St. Louis. That direction we'll deliver to Raleigh, Missouri, which is the opposite direction. It's about 30 minutes out. And we have a couple customers that are asking about Jeff City and we're starting to head down that way.

Matt Stubblefield [00:20:45] And as people want to find you, how, how do they find your website? How do they look in on you on Facebook?

Vance Crowe [00:20:52] So our website's, brush creek valley.com. Facebook, I think it's, I think it's the same thing. Brush Creek Valley Farms.

Matt Stubblefield [00:20:59] Well,

Vance Crowe [00:21:00] Instagram or social media.

Matt Stubblefield [00:21:02] It, it was, I I will remember the day that you guys dropped a box of food off at my house and I was watching you guys drive your truck away. I just came out a little too late and I, I, I felt a sense of gratitude and Thanksgiving like I'd never felt before. And so thank you man. I, I I want your business to succeed wildly. I hope, I hope you get tons of orders in and if there's anything that we can do to help you guys be more successful, just let me know.

Vance Crowe [00:21:30] Well, I appreciate it and thank you for having me on the podcast so I can talk to people about it. I really appreciate it.

Matt Stubblefield [00:21:35] Great man. Well thank you so much for your time. I, I really appreciate this. Thanks. Get back to farming, man. Alright

Vance Crowe [00:21:41] Man. Have a good one.