Real Ranching

ROWS OF PINK and red cuts of meat are graded, labeled, and stocked in an open case on the far wall of the supermarket. Shrouded in plastic, steaks, burgers, or ground beef is selected, purchased, and brought home to feed a family without much consideration.

In 1991, Mike Callicrate realized the industrial model of meat production and consumption needed an alternative. As the owner of Callicrate Cattle Company in St. Francis, Kansas, he developed practices yielding quality meat while also acting as a caretaker of the land and his animals.

After the cattle are processed on-site at his custom-built Mobile Meat Processing unit (instead of trucking the livestock to a slaughterhouse), Callicrate works quickly to get his product directly into the hands of the consumer. Through his retail outlet, Ranch Foods Direct, and his distribution company, Peak to Plains, both in Colorado Springs, customers can buy premium beef, fruit, vegetables, and other goods while supporting the locals who produce them.

“I changed my whole thinking around ranching to a more humane and sustainable—and now what we call a regenerative way—of producing livestock,” Callicrate says. “The land is healed, and we use rotational grazing and the right breeds to produce the right quality of meat.”

Callicrate bred Angus Wagyu cattle for his heifer development program. The cross-breed minimizes discomfort in the calving process and sets the heifers up for success, he says. “Peak to Plains is a means of distribution from producer to consumer and getting around the big processors and retailers,” Callicrate says. In all of the Callicrate ventures—from the Callicrate Bander, a humane method of castration, to Cowpool, an online liaison service connecting ranchers to buyers who want to purchase a whole animal—stewardship to the land and to the animals is his number-one priority.

“I want to talk about the regenerative approach to agriculture where we turn it all around when we put livestock back on farms again,” Callicrate says, “where the livestock eat what the farm produces and the manure goes back on the soil.”

Callicrate tends to his own soil using bone-char, a type of biochar made with the bones leftover from processing. This type of fertilizer is high in calcium and phosphorous and completes the progressive cycle Callicrate is so passionate about.

“To fix what we have messed up, we need this regenerative type of agriculture,” he says. “It is well beyond sustainability.”

As an advocate for animal welfare and an industry leader in regenerative ranching techniques, Callicrate does work that is crucial for a system where Americans can still get their meat, but where the land, the ranchers, and the animals themselves are not just an afterthought.

FRESH DIRECT: Shop Mike Callicrate’s goods online at ranchfoodsdirect.com or at 1228 East Fillmore Street in Colorado Springs, Colorado.