Terry and Linda Dammel

Terry and Linda operate a ranching and beef product operation on their third generation family ranch near Medina, ND

Prairie Public
Tell me about your operation here.

Terry
Well, we generally run a cow/calf operation, all the way from calving our cattle out to selling them in the springtime as a background enterprise. Basically, it’s just raising cattle, raising beef in 4-legged form. Beef is turned into a product. We’re raising protein now. We have diversified that much that it’s not beef or cattle anymore, it’s protein.

Prairie Public
Tell me about your product line.

Linda
We have 5 or 6 products. Beef sticks, smokies, summer sausage, sausage, and sliced turkey. We’re always working on something new,

Our sliced turkey is like the old time rawhide. We have the mild beefsticks which is real popular from little kids all the way to the older crowd. We have the spicy beef sticks. We’ve tweaked that a little bit, and now it really does pack a punch when you eat it. And that’s real popular with the younger teen crowd. And then we have our refrigerated line, which is our all-beef breakfast sausage and our smoked beef and our summer sausage.

Prairie Public
How did you start doing this? What made you think that you wanted to try and make these products and sell them?

Terry
Before we were married we talked about how after we got married we were going to have some lows in cattle prices.

Linda
Before ‘89 it was just an idea. In ’89 we actually started to do something about it. But we had talked the idea around for years soon after we were married.

Terry
That’s true. And we knew that what we were selling wasn’t going to sustain the price that we were getting so we decided to hedge ourselves a little bit and make jerky or at least research the potential of making products out of what we raise. And the more and more we researched the dollar value and return for products, the more surprised we were that nobody else was doing it. And so we just started researching our carcasses and what type of carcasses were appropriate for products and what the consumer really wanted in a product.

Linda
Through the whole process of research, we always had the consumer involved because the only way you’re going to find out what the consumer really wants is to talk to the consumer and ask them questions, and that’s basically what we did.

Terry
As an organic grower concerned about all the inputs in cattle today as far as antibiotics, and the recourses for human consumption, we were concerned beef, as a good product not saturated fats—a healthful product. And some of the stuff that is out there , it’s not what ranchers would call beef.

Prairie Public
So it was a priority to produce a good and healthy product?

Linda
Yeah. Nutrition was high on their priority list. And at that time that we were doing the research, we had 2 small children of our own, and as a young mother, nutrition was high on my list. I wanted things that I could serve to my family that would be good and healthy ­ and we wanted to make those products for other families who wanted the same thing.

Terry
You know we don’t implant, and I don’t think it should be done. If there’s studies 20 years down the road showing that there’s cancer involved in this type of implants, that would not be a good history for us. So we don’t.

Prairie Public
Implant?

Terry
mplants are generally used after a weaning stage to go in the feed lot—they say it converts feed roughages a little better, more efficient gaining, and there are other health benefits I believe, but I don’t know if they’re proven or not. We just decided not to do that.

Prairie Public
How are you selling your products now?

Linda
Basically right now it’s door to door. What we generally do is we go and introduce ourselves. We generally have our shelf life products. We give them to them. We tell them to try them. If they like them and would like to stock them, we’d be more than happy to work with them, and that’s basically what we do now.

Prairie Public
When you say door to door, do you mean door to door or…

Linda
We mean trying to work with businesses that meet our specialty market criteria. Some businesses just don’t fit the specialty market that we are trying to address. Some gas stations for one instance just don’t fit very well. There’s too much competition, and specialty foods just don’t work there.

Terry
The specialty stores we’re looking for are like mom and pop’s, people who own their owns businesses who will take time to produce or show a product they believe in themselves, gift shops those type will really work well for our product.

Otherwise you’re fighting for shelf space and paying huge amounts of money to get the Slim Jims up. And as a small producer as we are, you cannot compete with that. We just don’t have the money to compete with that.

Prairie Public
I understand one of the problems is production costs. How are you able to get around that?

Linda
Start it small.

Terry
Well basically it’s a capitalization problem when you start a business. We’ve been at it basically over 13 years, but it’s been all our own money. We start slow. We take a product. We analyze it. Let the consumers try it, and none of this is really an outgo cash-borrowing problem. It’s just sacrifices we’re made along the way in our own operation and to fund it. The cash flow as far as the products wise, now since we got our labeling costs down, all our production costs, it’s just now just a problem of getting our volume up there to where we can supply, and getting some cash flow.

Prairie Public
Is it hard to get your volume up there with the workforce that you have?

Terry
Yes, the volume part and the cash is getting to be more of a struggle because of our limited labor capacity. Linda and I and our 2 kids are basically the packaging and the marketing plus all those little jobs that are probably very important.

Linda
My folks help out too, and that’s mostly during the shows that we do. They come and they help so that the jobs that they take over frees up Terry and me so that we can do our actual visiting with the customers that come by and want to talk to us and ask us questions about what we do.

Prairie Public
Have you thought about taking the next step and hiring somebody?

Terry
We’re not really taking the next step. Our next step is into the packaging part to make sure we are into a volume scenario when more people would like our product. We hope so, and we are making steps to address more capitalization as far as borrowed funds to access building and equipment to make us more of a viable business I guess. We’re just a small rancher trying to diversify into products that consumers like.

Prairie Public
Is it working out for you? Is it something that you're able to make some profit on?

Linda
If we didn’t feel that way, I don’t think we would be doing as much as we are. I don’t think we would be persistent, and I don’t think that our patience would have lasted this long if we really didn’t feel that there has to be some profit potential in the end. So yeah, I do think that’s what we pretty much have felt as we’ve gone through with this.

Terry
And we’ve proven that through your records. We increase our gross profit 50% a year. It might say something when you’re large, but when you’re small, it does say something that you’re increasing your market.

Prairie Public
So you are making a net profit?

Terry
Yeah, that’s the name of the game, and we have clients all over the state who really appreciate our products. Some don't, but some really do.

Linda
We’re always working on something different. We’re always thinking. I mean wherever we’re at or whatever we’re doing. One of your greatest educations is just walk through the grocery store. See what’s out there. Look in your grocery’s freezer or anything, and it’s a great education because it gives you an idea of what’s out there. Watch the people what they buy, what goes in their carts. And by doing those kinds of things and watching, why it gives us an idea of what maybe a direction that we should probably go in. We’re always trying to think of things to do that would work with what we are doing.

Prairie Public
How is ranching today? You know part of this piece is just talking about the life and the thin margins. What has been your experience with the life you’ve chosen?

Terry
Ranching is a good…it is a nice profession and is a good profession. But I don’t think it can sustain family farms much longer. It’s become an industrialized system. We all know it’s business.

Linda
You know it’s way more of a world market now than it was when we first got married 19 years ago. It’s a wonderful place to raise a family and to live, but for us to encourage our son or our daughter to continue this on, we don’t feel that it’s something we want to do.

Terry
I think in order for a family farm to survive, we have to be vertically integrated with either other ranchers or in products like we’re trying to develop. I think that’s the key to survival in any business - product and product development and an ongoing one.

Prairie Public
So ranchers need to think completely differently about their role?

Terry
I think so. I believe ranchers, and some maybe would disagree with me, but I think as a seed stock producer or even as a cow/calf person, we are selling protein, and that’s the bottom line. And whatever form we present it to the consumer, it’ll be bought if it’s presented correctly. But if it’s not, it won’t be sold. It won’t be bought.

Prairie Public
You’re doing some direct selling to restaurants?

Terry
Yes. Initially when we were analyzing our meat production, we were just cow/calf people. We weren’t into meat production and tenderness and quality grade and yield grade. That was something that we were not exposed to. And so we asked our state ag department if they could help us with a chef to analyze our products, to see where we were at, and where we should go. The North Dakota Ag Department introduced us to Kim Holmes out of Saunders 1904 in Grand Forks. And so at the initial introduction, we asked him if he would be willing to try some of our home-raised North Dakota beef, and he was elated to try it in his restaurant. And he analyzed it and said it was very good, and he would like more, and that’s where the problems came in about volume. And when we analyzed that, we said okay how can we supply a restaurant of this quality with this type of product consistently, and it just blew our mind.

Linda
What do we do with all the rest? So you know as we went on, we knew we had to evolve into something that would take the complete carcass and not just part of the carcass. So through our research, we started to evolve more into the jerkies and the beefsticks and then the refrigerated products that we did just kind of followed after that. But that was the way we started is we found that in order for us to really go with this, we had to have a program that we could us a complete carcass with.

Terry
And not only just the quality grade. It would be the carcass that did not come up to specs as far as tenderness and quality grade. So we needed an avenue that would utilize basically ground beef other than that, and that’s where the high volume or high dollar products processed and already to eat are coming into our program really very acceptable.

We’ve sold to the Bistro in Bismarck, and we delivered some just recently for a special project by the Ag Department. Mary Weathers was a client of ours. We very much liked to work with the Green Earth in Bismarck but they’re not in business anymore.

Prairie Public
So what are your hopes for how your business is going to evolve?

Terry
Well we hope that we can quit the ranching industry and move directly into marketing and have other ranchers join us in producing quality product, raw as well as the finished products and also into the meal products as well. I don’t see anything else.

We know that the consumer more and more spends less time in the kitchen in preparation of meals. And we see more and more businesses getting into that—Schwanz is basically one. There are others that you can see in the grocery market frozen foods. So why not be a part of that industry? If we’re going to be providing raw product, why not be into the meals as well? And so we’ve come up with two recipes that we enjoy, maybe because of our ethnic background. We’ve developed sort of a scalloped potato with our smoked beef. The smoked beef is very lean. It uses the top round. Part of the carcass that’s not utilized very well. It’s very low in fat and very nutritious, and it complements some of the vegetables and also the products that are raised in the state also. And so it’s very easy to make, and I think it tastes good.

One of the other products that we have is our smoked beef used in a white sauce. We were looking for a lot of breakfast entrees, and the smoked beef doesn’t work very well as a breakfast entrée, and this is also used in a white sauce with toast. I think a lot of people have different names for it, and I think this is also very, very good.

Linda
We’ve also done this with the biscuits or the breakfast entrée too. We’ve done it with a biscuit, and that’s really good.

Prairie Public
What are your ideas about how you would package those financially?

Terry
That’s something we’re researching now. We would hope that a food company—if we can get connected with a food processor that does this already would help us or do it for us so that we could get this into the marketplace.

Prairie Public
Now I understand your sausage and other things are lower fat—is that true?

Terry
Yes. We’ll use all our beef. It’s no other products or raw products. We are ranchers, and we raise cattle so we wanted to stay with 100% beef, and so we use in all our ground products, we use 87% to 90% lean raw product to start with. And that’s basically where it’s at all the time. We don’t like saturated fats. The consumer doesn’t want ‘em so why produce it?

Prairie
Talk about the hay situation this year and the dry conditions. Tell me what’s going on with this area here and how you’re going to make it through this winter?

Terry
Well the feed stuff—since the drought has occurred, we’re lacking about half of what our production usually is. We have already liquidated some cattle, and we’ll probably do a little more tighter culling this fall, and that gets to be a large question for us is survivability. When you’re reducing cattle numbers, that’s reducing gross margins, and evidently the cost of producing the feed stuffs already has increased. So we’re analyzing that, and if it’s profitable for us to continue, we may but we may not.

Prairie Public
Profitable for you to continue ranching at all?

Terry
Yes. You know we’ve liquidated quite a few already, and to get back in—you know I’m almost 50. I’ve done other things. I would like to do other things, and this was one of my passions was beef products. If that can’t get up to volume or to speed for it to sustain us in a salary based position, I guess the 9 to 5 doesn’t look so bad.

Prairie Public
So this is a critical year for you?

Terry
Yeah it is. It is, and it’s one that we knew was going to be coming, but we didn’t know it would happen this quickly, and the weather just kind of pushed it along that much faster.

Prairie Public
If this business size gets going more this winter, that will make a difference for you?

Terry
Oh yes, and it doesn’t take many cattle to justify it as a full-time business so we’re looking forward to being solely providing this product to the consumer.

Prairie Public
But you can’t tell me where you’ll be next year?

Terry
Oh that’s hard to tell—no. We like to plan, and the bankers always like a 3- to 5-year projection, but I think that’s something I won’t get into. It’s just too hard. If we have a lot of stores and consumers that are calling for our product, I think we will be on the ranch, and we will be in our business providing that product.

Prairie Public
If you were to decide that you needed to sell, would you move ?

Terry
We like the country. We like rural living.

Linda
We like where we live. I mean we really like it here. The thought of moving just…ah it would kill me, but on the other hand you have to be business-like about it. You have to go where you need to go to get where you need to be. So you know if it came down to that, I supposed we’d have to decide that, but boy at this time it’d be really difficult.

Terry
This is a third generation ranch or farm so you know they always say it was hardest on the one that had to leave, and you know you have to make that decision. If you can’t survive here, you gotta do something else. There’s a lot of stories out there of that same epilogue.

Prairie Public
Has it been hard doing without in order to continue to ranch on your family?

Linda
I don’t think we’ve worried too much about doing without. I know at this point in time that there are things that we need to change, and our home is one, and we know that. And it’s basically just because the kids are just growing out of it. They’re getting big. But I think really you know as far as to say we’ve sacrificed this or that and we’ve really noticed it and really felt it, I don’t think we have.

Terry
I think we’re pretty much grounded that the sacrifices weren’t—you know if it was health reasons and something really was—that hasn’t affected us. There’s financial sacrifices, and some people could see that, but we all make those whoever we are, and this is what we chose. I think we’re still young enough to do something different if we choose, and I don’t think we’ll look back.

Prairie Public
How is the region today compared to when you grew up here?

Terry
Well my dad would talk about past generations where every quarrter section of land, a person was there.. And they were neighbors whether they were friendly or not. That was the settlement of this country - people and labor. And it has changed a lot. Now I wondered if there is one per 2 sections here, and I’m sure with time it probably will change some more. For the good or bad I don’t know.

Prairie Public
Is your school going to stay open?

Terry
The school is looking at quite a few problems just because of enrollment, and we certainly don’t want to see that. I think small school education is more basically one on one, but there’s another sacrifice that’s going to be made.

Prairie Public
Anything else that I need to ask about your product or ranch life?

Terry
A lot of consumers today think that some farmers are subsidized, and the urban consumer seems to think that it’s only subsidizing the farmer. A lot of farmers have disagreed with that and said well we’re subsidizing the urban cheap food policy. We have to come together on this as far as consumers for the betterment of our children to see if we have good products and we continue to have the supply. I believe that the world situation and corporate America does not care whether it’s grown here or Europe or South America, and I believe the security of our food system is also at risk. I think the larger production systems are more volatile. Disease or contaminants could affect a lot of food in just the blink of an eye. But the powers that be, and they’re not us, have to decide that or we have to make sure they decide for us.I think there’s a lot of issues that have to be ironed out or at least looked at for generations to come.