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The Unger Meat Company has teamed up with the Padres Mesa Demonstration Ranch to teach American Indians the art of cattle ranching.
Photography by Diego James Robles
Wonderful things are happening at the Padres Mesa Demonstration Ranch in northeast Arizona. Working with the Office of Navajo and Hopi Indian Relocation, the Minnesota-based Unger Meat Company is helping Navajo, Hopi, and Ute ranchers become self-sufficient by teaching them how to raise Choice beef cattle and turn a tidy profit — no small miracle in today’s risky cattle business.
It is a rare but uplifting story. After all, the reservation lands where most Indian tribes were forced to relocate were specifically chosen because they were so infertile that even skilled farmers and ranchers couldn’t eke out a living. But in the case of Padres Mesa, which is located on a section of the Navajo Nation known as New Lands, the relocation area isn’t simply dry desert. It happens to be pretty good high plains cattle grazing land. And with the help of federal funding and a private company that has taken a personal interest, Native ranchers are learning how to make the most of it.
The historical perspective: In 1974, Congress enacted the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act to resolve escalating land disputes between the two Native tribes, because for decades Hopis were living on federal land reserved for Navajos, and vice versa, in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. As a result of the Act, several thousand Indians, mostly Navajos, were forced to relocate from the formerly shared region to designated land assigned by the federal government.
Unfortunately, the federal government didn’t put enough thought into how the relocated individuals were going to earn a living on these new lands, an oversight that the government is now trying to rectify with the help of private businesses like the Unger Meat Company. “Seeing the severe economic problems and high unemployment among the Navajo people in this area, the Office of Navajo and Hopi Indian Relocation has
undertaken a concerted effort to solve these issues,” says Suzy Baldwin, a Navajo who is a business and project management consultant with the Nahata Dziil Commission Governance. “The Padres Mesa Demonstration Ranch and its partnership with the Unger Meat Company is a prime example of this effort.”
In 2009, on 62,000 acres of tribal ranch land, the Padres Mesa Demonstration Ranch was launched, and cattle expert and lifelong rancher Bill Inman was brought in as ranch manager. Cattle now graze on about 40,000 acres, with another 19,000 acres set to open. Here, Navajo ranchers come to learn the best practices for caring for their cattle, not just by observing but by doing. They take part in roping calves, giving vaccinations, castrating steers, and bringing calves to the branding fire. All the cowboys who work on Padres Mesa are Navajo and speak both English and Navajo. They visit and advise area ranchers, some of whom only speak Navajo, and assist folks who are up in age and cannot do hard physical tasks, like roping and branding, themselves.
One of Inman’s first challenges was the fact that many of the Indian ranchers were often strapped for cash and usually had to sell calves before they were fattened. “So they never got top dollar,” Inman explains. “Most of these ranchers have only a few cattle, sometimes just five or 10, and besides their government checks, that’s all the income they have.” The ranchers were routinely taken advantage of by middlemen, who would offer bottom dollar as soon as they found out the ranchers needed money or were low on feed.
Inman’s other big problem was that reservation cattle had a bad reputation in the marketplace as being low quality. So to counter lingering bad publicity and expand the buyer market, Inman contacted Superior Livestock Auction and showcased Navajo cattle on one of Superior’s video auctions. The video allowed buyers to see the reservation cattle live and determine for themselves whether they were healthy and highly marketable, which these Navajo cattle were.
Billy Hall, director of cattle operations for Unger Meat Company’s Herit-age Ranch project, spotted the Padres Mesa cattle on the video and bought Inman’s first calves. Recalls Hall, who has been involved with Angus beef since he was a kid in 4-H, “A rep from Supe-rior told me what good people they were at Padres Mesa and what they were doing. I decided to go there and see if we could do something with Navajo and Hopi ranchers in that general vicinity and perhaps even return the Choice beef end product to the casino and resort operations around there. We wanted to help them be more progressive and efficient and get top dollar for their efforts.”
Since that time, Unger Meat Company has agreed not only to provide calves for Indians to raise on these lands, but also to buy the cattle when they are fattened and ready for market so long as the ranchers agree to raise them to Unger’s exact standards — guaranteeing the ranchers a fair profit. Unger’s standards are strict and include third-party verification through Unger’s involvement with IMI Global Inc., which verifies that ranchers and meat producers are doing what they say in their marketing claims. Besides source and age verification, for a ranch and product to carry IMI’s WhereFoodComesFrom verification label, producers must implement a variety of environmental and conservation practices, including proof that the cattle are not given hormones and that they are treated humanely.
According to Wayne Lynch, commissioner of the Nahata Dziil Commission Governance, “Our people are now learning new methods of handling livestock and marketing, and with the help of Unger Meat Company, how to make it profitable. Instead of going to a local market, we are specializing [and marketing] our beef to a higher clientele, such as casinos, to maximize top dollar.” Instead of having to sell low to the middleman, Lynch points out, “Our people will now own cattle all the way through the feedlots to the dinner table.”
Yet another economic advantage of the Padres Mesa Demonstration Ranch is its ability to help ranchers ship their cattle to market. When a small rancher has only a handful of cattle, the middleman has a foot on the rancher’s throat, as most cattle get bought by the truckload (anywhere from 70 – 90 head, depending on the size of the cattle). What Inman has done at Padres Mesa is to help individual ranchers combine their animals and to provide temporary storage, so cattle can be consolidated, shipped, and sold by the truckload.
Inman calls Unger Meat Company’s involvement with the project “a godsend” and says he couldn’t be more pleased with the company’s enthusiasm. “I have never seen the president and CEO of a beef company come to a ranch and show such a presence as Joe Unger has. He visited here and not only socialized with the cowboys and let them know how important they are, but he got his hands dirty helping with the branding.”
Inman adds that Unger even brought out the company’s head chef to consult with the cowboys. “His chef brought a hundred pounds of ground beef and cooked it up for all the people who were here and showed that it’s real beef that doesn’t shrink. Eight ounces actually cooks up to be eight ounces. Imagine that!”
By this past summer, Unger Meat had already started selling off some of the burgers and middles of the first cattle they harvested off Padres Mesa. One of Hall’s main responsibilities is to take ranchers back their performance data after their cattle leave the ranch, so they can make better management decisions. “We returned to Bill Inman his first carcass and performance data,” Hall says. “Those numbers were really impressive — 80 percent Choice. The national average is 62 percent.”
Efforts are underway to contract with local Indian casinos to buy the beef and to advertise in their restaurants: “We proudly serve Choice beef raised by Native people in our area.” Those efforts are gaining momentum as word of the beef quality spreads. “A stigma for the Indian ranchers was that they didn’t raise good cattle,” Hall says, “but they are raising top-quality cattle and they are great people.”
Baldwin notes that there are also plenty of associated economic opportunities, such as producing hay and alfalfa and making products out of the hides. “Ranches also need welders and fence menders, and there is the opportunity to become vendors for the products all of these ranches need,” she points out. “These ranchers can now become their own businesspeople and determine their own future instead of having it determined for them.”
The possibilities seem limitless. “The main thing,” Baldwin emphasizes, “is that the young people who see little hope on the reservation will now see a bright horizon.”
