Jeff Dahl

A cattle rancher at Gackle, ND

Prairie Public
What kind of operation do you have there?

Jeff
We’ve got a cattle ranch, strictly cattle. One buffalo.

Prairie Public
Cow/calf?

Jeff
Cow/calf with a background feed lot. And then we retain ownership on our calves through the finishing phase, and we market our own on the rail through an alliance that we’re with, PM Beef. They’re out of Kansas City.

Prairie Public
Where do you finish then?

Jeff
Bloomfield, Nebraska, just south of Yankton just across the border. Then they’re slaughtered at Windom, Minnesota at the PM plant there. That meat is marketed to family-owned chain stores on the East Coast, and they’re trying to get one going now in Minneapolis.

Prairie Public
One of the issues that you guys are involved in is grasslands? What are the issues?

Jeff
Multiple use. Who’s got the right to do what? Originally the grassland in North Dakota was part of the Taylor Grazing Act. Most of it was private land that because of the Depression in the 30s went to the government. And I don’t know the exact wording in the Act, but it will be used for grazing. The way it is now if you lose grazing, then it’s kind of the government reneging on their contract, but multiple use is multiple use. I mean we can’t just limit it to hunters or oil drillers. There’s got to be some use from everybody.

Prairie Public
It’s almost like a treaty that you have.

Jeff
Yeah, kinda. The white man and the Indian.

Prairie Public
Do you own all your land?

Jeff
We rent some. We rent about 700 acres. I think it’s more common to rent. Awhile back when we bought this place, it was like $18.00 an acre. Farmland runs about $150 to $300 an acre now.

Prairie Public
Do you ranch by yourself?

Jeff
No, I ranch with my dad and 2 brothers. We have a partnership.We’ve got 4 breeds—Solair, Red Angus, South Devon, and then a breed we developed kinda on our own was Dakota Red. It’s a cross between those 4 other breeds. Started off with Herfords and then got into the Solair, and then we got into Red Angus and now we’re breeding South Devon and wanted to keep kind of a 50/50 continental British cross.

Prairie Public
What are you trying to create?

Jeff
The perfect cow. One that’ll calve on her own, milk well, has good feet and legs, good muscling, feed efficient, and that’ll carry over into her offspring, and they’ll go into the feedlot and like gain 4, 5 pounds a day and be on feed in a very short amount of time.

Prairie Public
How has ranching changed from when your dad started this place?

Jeff
Some of it’s the same. Still do things on horseback, and we handle cattle kind of the same way; just the technologies have come into play with drugs. Disease is less of a problem probably. How we keep records on the cattle. We use computers for keeping records, and we still do tag every calf by hand and write the numbers in the little book by hand, and then we have to transpose that into the computer. The computer also then figures weaning weights, birth weights, ratios a lot faster than we can do it by hand. We’ve use AI now, artificial insemination. They didn’t have that back then. Let’s us advance genetics a little faster. We were into like I said earlier the PM program, and that’s a source-verified everything. Now we’re kind of basing things more on the consumer, what they’re looking for and kinda coming backwards with it rather than saying, "Here’s what we’ve got, you guys like it" Consumers are telling us they want a lean product that tastes good and is consistent. I mean they want the ultimate cow or the ultimate steer so we’re trying to kind of meet that need. They want the taste, and you get the taste through the marbling, but they don’t want the external fat. And so 10 years ago, they were trimming the external fat off at the packing plant, and now they’re trying to get it bred off and still maintain the marbling and the tenderness.

Prairie Public
How do you find out about what the consumer wants?

Jeff
A lot of that has to do with national organizations. They do surveys. They got the check off. They do a lot of surveys through the check off to find out what the consumer is wanting, and they do a lot of in-store sampling right at the consumer level just asking what is good, what don’t you like type of things, and they filter that back to the cow/calf man.

Prairie Public
What about beef advertising like "Beef, It’s What’s for Dinner"—?

Jeff
It’s a catch phrase, and that’s good advertising. There’s several other companies that have done it in the past "Rather Fight Than Switch"— little catch phrases that consumers catch, and they associate it. I think it’s been good for the industry. Helps keep demand up. When the cattle numbers were highest. It’s cyclical, the cattle numbers in the industry. Prices were good. Everybody keeps cattle. Pretty soon there’s more cattle than there’s demand so then the prices drop down. With the advertising I believe that’s kinda kept the demand up through the high amount of meat or beef period, or higher than it would have been normally, let’s say that so it’s kinda shifted the cycle a little bit. And that’s through advertising and exports and just different marketing that’s been going on that wasn’t there back when my dad was starting ranching.

Prairie Public
Are there things that you’d like to do in the future with your operation?

Jeff
I’d like to get our genetics on our calves so they fit exactly with this program that we’re in. We do have to make some changes to hit all the premiums. Maybe our rib eyes are about right now, but we can get some more premium if we increase it a little bit. Our quality grade is too low for what they’re looking for now, and that goes back to the fat deal. You see at one point they were going we don’t want fat, but in order to get the taste they need some fat, and so we’re kinda trying to fine tune it. There’s talk. You know we were talking earlier about niche marketing. Grass-fed beef is maybe on the horizon. It’s gaining a little popularity in certain segments of the country. There’s been people that haven’t eaten beef for years but if it’s not grain fed and there’s no hormones they’re coming back to eating some beef.

Prairie Public
So maybe you’ll be having your steers here the whole time.

Jeff
Not all of them because there’s not enough grass. I mean it would have to be something that we could handle with the resources that we have so we’d have to look at it a little bit and see what we can run…see what we can do.

Prairie Public
What do you do with your steers now?

Jeff
Now we background them at my brother’s place for about 3 to 4 weeks, and then we send ‘em down to Bloomfield, Nebraska, which is just across from Yankton, South Dakota, finish them there. We’re in a program with PM Beef which is a USDA-verified process, and it’s a source-verified process. What I mean by that is the USDA checks everything from what we do here till the time they go to the retail store. Source-verified means that you can take some meat sold in say New York, and you’ll be able to come back to Gackle, and this is where that calf grew up. And they’re feed restrictions on diet. They have to be fed corn for so many days, and they have to be fed Vitamin E for so many days. And when we market our calves, when they’re done feeding, we get paid on a grid which is if the rib eye meets certain specifications, you get a premium. If it doesn’t, you get a discount. You get a base price which is based off of the futures market for the month that they’re slaughtered in plus a dollar a head now is what it’s at—a dollar a pound I should say. And then you get these premiums and discounts on top of that. So there’s potential there if you’ve got the right cattle to do really well. But the first year you’re in it, until you’ve done it one time, you don’t know what kind of cattle you have so you have to be in it more than one year. You can go in there and really get your butts kicked the first time. But then if you make the right changes, you can turn it around within 3 years, and you should be able to really start realizing some profit from it.

Prairie Public
So you think that may be where your future is?

Jeff
I think that’s where a lot of the future’s gonna be. There’s turmoil now within the industry as far as marketing—who’s getting what percentage of the consumer dollar. Some people say the retailers are getting too much. Some people think the packer is. Cow/calf producers count on a take it or leave it sometimes. It’s like a what’ll you give me for my calf instead of…if you go buy anything in the store the price is marked on it.

If you look at the retail price of beef over the last 5 or 6 years, it’s gone up or stayed the same, and we’re still selling everything we produce. Part of it is what tastes good, what they like, perception of healthiness. I mean that drives the market.

Prairie Public
Are you hoping that someday you’ll be able to put Dahl Ranch on your meat?

Jeff
You mean one with a little picture or brand or something right on the package?

Prairie Public
Exactly.

Jeff
That’d be nice in some ways, but what if it doesn’t taste good? It could come and go both ways. Yeah if it’s a good product, you’d be proud to put your name on it. It’s a guarantee that goes along, you know implied guarantee every time you put your name on something so you want to make sure that the product is going to satisfy. There’s some good and bad with source-verified. What if there’s a disease outbreak? I mean you have to have safeguards installed.. Say we’ve got cattle here, and we send ‘em somewhere to feed or maybe we sell ‘em, and then the next step after that say they get E. coli or something happens, well if the source-verification only comes back to here, it might not have happened here. It might have happened down the road so there’s gotta be some paperwork that goes with it just to keep everything safe for the producer.

We’re just basically onto our product being the steers a step or 2 down the line trying to realizea higher percentage of the dollar that they’re worth.

Prairie Public
Tell me about how you’re retaining ownership?

Jeff
We grow the calf, and then from here we, background them, and then we send them to the feedlot. And what we’re doing there is…we haven’t sold that calf up to that point so we’re basically paying the feedlot guy to feed ‘em for us, so much a head per day, and then we sell ‘em when they go to the Windom packing plant.

Prairie Public
When they finally have reached the last stage does that help? Is that working for you?

Jeff
Yeah, in the long run. There’s gonna be certain years where you could make more money selling ‘em off the cow, but I’d say maybe 7 out of 10 years, you’d be money ahead retaining the ownership on ‘em.

Prairie Public
So the computer is something that’s helped you figure that out and to figure how your inputs…

Jeff
Right. And we do sell some calves off. We don’t put all of our calves through this program. You know we kinda cover all our bases if we can. If we’ve got some calves that aren’t in the program, and it looks like that’s where the money’s gonna be, then we might if we can get ‘em in. We might partner with the feed lot guy, might buy part of ‘em or we’ll just sell ‘em through the local auction barn.

Prairie Public
Is this a tough year for you? Have you been dry?

Jeff
We were dry. We were very dry this spring up until July. Then in July we had enough rain that the pastures came on real nice, and since July, it’s been dry again. We’re gonna be short on hay. We’ve bought some hay. We put up CRP hay. We bought a bunch of pellets to help extend the hay crop so we’ll supplement the hay with these pellets.

Prairie Public
What do you see as the future for the industry?

Jeff
Boy, tough questions now. What do you hope for for the future for this industry? I think the future is pretty bright. We’re working on export. We’re working on issues that will move our product. This is some dissention among the ranks so to speak now on how everything’s being marketed, who’s getting the money. I think we can work through that. There’ll be different niches that’ll come along as far as selling the product. I do think the producer that stays on top of things, knows what it costs him to produce his calves, and follows some of these different ways of marketing their calves can be pretty profitable in this business.

Prairie Public
So you don’t think the day of the independent rancher is at a close?

Jeff
No, no, not at all. Nope. In fact, there’s room for more of us.

Prairie Public
What about that whole land ownership thing that’s happening and the grasslands issue? Is that any concern around here? Do you see that changing where people are leasing more?

Jeff
Yeah, especially in people that want to start out, can’t afford the payment for ownership, but they probably lease some land. And i it’s an investment that you have to make to buy the cattle if you’re starting out unless you’ve got some cattle from somewhere else. Plus making a land payment—I don’t think it’s too feasible. But if you’re renting the land, that cheapens it up quite a bit, and you’re not necessarily tied into one locale so to speak. I mean if you got a dry year, you don’t have to use that pasture.

Prairie Public
Are there any other issues that you think the Stockmen’s Association, and that you as the president will be dealing with?

Jeff
Oh I think there’ll be a lot of issues. There’ll be land easements, grassland easements is going to be an issue—terms of it, dollars involved in it type things. I think the private land access is going to be an issue. We’ve all heard the debates that have been going on with that. I think this next session there’s going to be quite a bit of that going on.

The Taylor Grazing Act back in the 30s I believe, ’29, ’30, during The Depression. A lot of that land that’s in western North Dakota was actually homesteaded or privately held land, and during the Depression, farmers and ranchers lost it due to taxes or just the bad economy. So the government came in, and through the Taylor Grazing Act, basically said that this land will be used for agricultural purposes—grazing. That was with the BLM, and I think now the Forest Service controls that land so there’s been some changes, and now multiple use probably doesn’t mean the same as it did back then. But the idea is that it should still be used for grazing.

Prairie Public
Can think of your operation or your industry as it would relate to people on the street?

Jeff
We produce grass is what we produce. Cows are basically our factory that harvests the grass, and they convert it to the calf and the milk, and the calf is how we market our grass…by selling the calf…