Old-fashioned family cattle farms—like the dying embers of a campfire—are on the brink of being snuffed out into ashes in the United States.
But it might not be too late to save them.
So says Avery Claire, 30, who grew up on one before moving to Jersey island, off the coast of France, where she worked in finance and eventually met her husband, Marc, 32. That was until she got a phone call from her dad, Needham Mallory, telling her they were selling the farm she grew up on. Avery wasn’t about to let that happen.
“In the U.S., we lose around 2,000 acres of farm and ranchland every day and I refused to let our family farm become part of that statistic,” she told The Epoch Times. So, to rescue the ranch, she and Marc made a life-altering decision to pull up, quit their jobs, and move to LaGrange, Georgia, in 2019. “Saving the family farm for generations to come was the driving force behind this,” she said.
But that would be easier said than done. They faced challenges on multiple fronts.
For one, although her father and grandfather were cowboys, she was trained in English equestrian and ballet and that skillset didn’t necessarily translate into moving cattle and raising livestock.
For another, her father’s herd—in its heyday numbering 500 strong—had dwindled down to 80-head (not including calves). They would have to rebuild that to a sustainable number, and then some.
And even if they did, the business was proving to be unprofitable—not just for those like her dad, who are older and can’t manage the strenuous lifestyle, but simply as a business model for family-run ranches in general across the nation. Mallory had started selling off his herd to cover costs, which in turn plunged the venture further into a downward spiral.
“He was at the age where it was really hard for him to continue doing the day-to-day operational side of it, and also financially, it wasn’t turning a profit anymore. The herd had been dwindled down to 80-head, which was very under capacity for the size [of the] tract of land we have,” she said. “The business just wasn’t covering its land-carrying costs. It was losing money every year.”
So, did Avery and Marc manage to turn it around and make a profit? Yes, but not without first rethinking the family ranch marketing model.
First, they had to ramp the herd back up in numbers. That started with an investment in 2020: They started buying cattle from a renowned breeder—100 at first, then another 200—rebuilding the herd. “We needed to get a critical mass back where we could support some of the land-carrying cost and operational expenses that were just flying through the roof with inflation,” Avery said.
“That really is when we were able to take the farm to the next level because we had gotten our genetics under control,” she said. “We could then really start improving the quality of our meat and efficiency of our cattle.”
The problem was, they kept Mallory’s practice of selling calves commercially to feed lots, who then sent the meat to packers, who eventually distributed it to supermarkets—which wasn’t proving financially viable. The middlemen were setting the price, driving producers out of business.
They continued building their herd and selling cattle like this—commercially—for two years with zero headway. “We weren’t going to make it,“ she said. ”We kept running the numbers every which way, and even at 300-head we just best-case-scenario [were] selling our cattle for $1,000 apiece.”
If they didn’t act decisively, the farm would never recoup and end up folding. So, they sharpened their wits and charted a new, technologically-savvy course that neither Mallory nor earlier generations had ever dreamt of.
“We were running at a loss every year. … We have to do this now or never, or we’re not going to make it another year,” she said. “In August of this year is when we launched our direct beef sell.” The web made this possible.
But tradition, the thing Avery aimed to save in the first place, remained the bedrock of the operation.
Merging seamlessly new with the old, they incorporated the ingenious grazing implementations that Mallory introduced years ago. For example, the technique of “rotational grazing.” It’s different from the standard way of “continuous grazing,” where cattle remain in and deplete the same plot of land year-round. Marc and Avery have a little over 30 separate pastures; they rotate their cattle to graze from one to the next throughout the year.
“It’s much more sustainable, we’re able to recycle all those nutrients by keeping them out on pasture,” Avery said. “It mimics the bison, how they used to move across the grasslands daily to forage. They didn’t stay in one spot.”
Avery is also set on saddling up and learning traditional cowboying.
“We’ve gotten a couple of horses that we were working with to start transitioning back into that old-school way of doing things,” she said. “You can get a feel for the cattle a lot better on horseback.”
Since taking over, they’ve ramped up the herd to 300-head (excluding calves)—mostly black Angus from Virginia. They don’t want to match her dad’s previous 500 as they feel they have found a “sweet spot,” an optimal balance where the number of cattle benefit the pasture, and vice versa, without overgrazing. Besides fertilizing it with their manure, the cattle also trample and aerate the soil, making it lush and fertile. To keep the rotational cycle going year-round, the couple implemented winter grazing techniques.
Not only did they continue what Mallory started; they have furnished additions. “We’ve added over six new pastures,” Avery said, adding that some land was repurposed and improved.
So, did the investment pay off? Did their gambit to save Avery’s farm using direct selling and tech-savvy social media work? Yes, it became profitable but they’re not out of the woods yet.
Recently, Avery told The Epoch Times that December was the first month where they turned a profit and they were “extremely busy.” “It has really given us hope,” she said, adding that although the farm will never make them rich, it could offer security and a comfortable life for their family.
She hopes their success encourages other family ranchers to keep the tradition alive, as it was handed down to them. Yet she admits, in today’s world of industrialized meat production and development, both the system and odds are stacked against the family farmer.
Developers and industry will pay “crazy money” for farmland. “Either the current farmers that are retiring sell out or, when it gets passed down, inherited to the next generation, all those kids would just be like, ‘Yeah, let’s sell it to [the] developer, I will make a million,’” Avery said. “Then it’s lost forever. Some of that land can’t—or it would be extremely difficult to transition it back into farmland.”
