ABOUT NOLAN RYAN BEEF & THE COOKBOOK

CHARLIE BRADBURY

President and CEO, Nolan Ryan Beef

This book was written by one of the most successful cattle ranchers in Texas. He just happens to be a Hall of Fame pitcher, but I know another side of Nolan Ryan. I first met Nolan in 1981, when I was working for Beefmaster Breeders United, a beef breed association. I was very young, and my task as a field representative was to visit ranches as part of a voluntary classification program—the rancher paid the field reps to come and tell them which cattle they ought to keep and which cattle they ought to cull (remove from the herd because of undesirable traits that hinder profitability).

Once a rancher agreed to have us inspect the herd, though, they were compelled to abide by our decisions. If there was a young heifer or bull presented by the rancher for classification that we didn’t think should retain registration papers, then they would have to surrender the papers—regardless of how they felt about it. It was a very serious process.

Beefmaster Breeders United sent me to Nolan’s place in Alvin, Texas, just outside of Houston. Nolan had not been in the Beefmaster cattle business for long at this point. He’d been pitching for the Houston Astros for a year or so, and this was when he started really putting together his cattle herd. He bought a ranch in Gonzalez, but he still kept a lot of his young cattle at his place in Alvin. He had about two hundred acres and he kept young bulls and heifers on his property.

Nolan loved the fact that his cattle were only about thirty minutes from where he pitched at the Astrodome—even during the baseball season he could tend to his cows when the Astros had a home stand.

One of the things I remember about that first visit with Nolan was that he did not like everything I told him about his cattle. When you are dealing with people who are just getting into the purebred cattle business after being successful in another occupation—whether professional sports or the oil business—you generally run into a lot of egos, and you have to watch your step and be diplomatic. But Nolan was different. From the get-go he had a matter-of-fact approach. He viewed this as a business rather than as a hobby or as something he was dabbling in to make some quick money.

Nolan was not out to make a quick buck in the cattle business. He was very conservative with his money and very careful and thoughtful in his investment strategy. Of course, I knew he was a major league pitcher when we first met, but you’d never know based on his demeanor that he was the first baseball player to sign a million-dollar contract. I was a young whippersnapper coming to his ranch as an expert who was paid to make some important decisions he didn’t necessarily agree with. He could have been upset with me about some of the things I said, but he didn’t come across that way at all—he was interested in and valued my opinion, and he treated me with respect. I could tell he really enjoyed the cattle—it was something he cared about, and that’s what leads to success in what is a very challenging business.

Nolan first got into the cattle business in a sort of roundabout way. He started visiting ranches in South Texas because he was interested in deer hunting. The ranches he visited just happened to be Beefmaster ranches (see here for Nolan Ryan’s Beefmaster Cattle Guide). Homer Herring was the one who got Nolan started, and he tells the story that they went to look at deer but inevitably ended up spending more time driving around looking at the cattle in the pastures. On one of these “deer hunting trips,” Homer remembers that Ruth Ryan was asleep in the backseat of the pickup truck while Nolan and Homer were looking at cows. This was probably not what Homer expected when he invited this hotshot athlete down to South Texas to go deer hunting with him. Nolan really enjoyed Mr. Herring, a fine, old gentleman and quite a character, and he genuinely enjoyed learning about the cattle.

As it happens, Lee Roy Jordan and Chuck Howley of the Dallas Cowboys were both involved in the Beefmaster business at the time, and through those two fellow pro athletes Nolan had the chance to meet Frank Gordon, a barber in Kaufman, Texas, who also happened to raise purebred cattle. Nolan and Frank really hit it off: Nolan would drive around Kaufman to look at Frank’s cattle. Eventually he bought a bull from him, and that got him into seriously investing in cattle. As he developed relationships with these two leading developers of the Beefmaster breed, Homer Herring and Frank Gordon, Nolan put his own program together.

From that first meeting as a field inspector, I soon started seeing Nolan at cattle auctions and other cattle-industry events. Nolan was now a Beefmaster breeder, and that had us traveling in the same business and social circles. By the time I met with Nolan about starting Nolan Ryan Beef in 1999, he had grown his business by leaps and bounds. He had served on the board of the Texas Beef Council and had been very involved with promoting beef as a commodity for several years. Governor George W. Bush had appointed Nolan to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, and that position exposed Nolan to a broader section of the cattle-ranching industry. He was also an active leader in the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, the largest state cattlemen’s organization in the United States.

By 1999, Nolan had been a member of Beefmaster Breeders United and had served on its board and as its vice president (he later became president of that organization). I had grown my business during this twenty-year period from our first meeting and had become a marketer selling cattle. My wife and I owned a business where we put on auctions and sold cattle all over the country, and most of these auctions involved Beefmaster cattle. I served on the Long-Range Planning Committee for Beefmaster, and Nolan’s executive board asked us to take a look at our industry to figure out ways to become more profitable and more efficient.

What we discovered was that the Certified Angus Beef program was so successful that it was impacting the bull-buying decisions of cattle ranchers in traditional markets for Beefmaster cattle. In order for cattle to be eligible for the program, they have to be 51 percent black-hided, with no visible signs of Bos indicus genetics and no visible signs of dairy influence. In other words, these cattle didn’t have to be pure Angus—they just had to be black-hided. The Angus folks convinced the USDA that the only way you could get black-hided cattle was using Angus, which is (in my opinion) questionable logic at best. At the time, though, they were the only show in town and the first USDA-certified beef program, so they were given a lot of latitude in setting up their specification.

The upshot is that ranchers became convinced that the only way they would get a premium price for their calves is if they were black. Beefmasters were not black, and they exhibited visible signs of Bos indicus genetics because they are adapted to southern latitudes, and that was a marketing problem for our organization. The only way we were going to be able to fight this was to come up with our own branded beef program using Beefmaster and other breeds of cattle adapted to the hotter climates of the southern United States, while trying to build a direct bridge to the consumer with a quality product.

Our first step was to dig very deeply into the science of producing great-tasting beef. We worked with some of the best and brightest minds in the academic world of beef to develop unique technology that allows us to ensure that our brand only goes on beef that will produce a tender and flavorful eating experience every time.

We went to the USDA and told them that we wanted to set up a certified program that was based on certifying only tender beef. We first had to convince them that we had the science behind our process. Then we had to come up with a name for the brand. After some initial consumer research, we became convinced that the best branding option was to call our product Beefmaster Beef.

The plan was to produce Beefmaster Beef based on a methodology similar to the Certified Angus Beef model. The USDA told us that in the twenty years since Certified Angus Beef had started, though, things had changed: the USDA had written a regulation that if you wanted to call a brand of beef by a breed name, you then had to prove that each and every animal in your program was at least 50 percent of that breeding. That’s a huge undertaking when you can’t make the point for purity based on color. It is easy to prove that at least 50 percent of your breed is black if that’s the only color, but for a breed without a standard color—Beefmaster cattle can be red, paint, dun, and many other colors—it’s much more complicated. We realized it was not feasible to use Beefmaster as our registered brand name.

We had to go back to the drawing board—probably the best thing that ever happened, because that was when we decided to put Nolan’s name on the brand. We went to a grocery store in Alvin, Texas, and bought packages of Earl Campbell sausage, Jimmy Dean pork sausage, and Phyllis George’s “Chicken by George.” We put them in a cooler and drove to the Express Bank, the bank Nolan owned at the time. We all crowded into his small office and stacked these products on his desk. Nolan looked at us as if we were crazy! We told him we wanted him to lend his name to the brand, and in typical Nolan fashion he was very reserved and told us he would think it over.

When he eventually made the decision to move forward, he said something profound that has marked our course ever since. He said that his name on the product would probably convince consumers to try it one time; however, if we did not do our job and manage the process correctly to ensure that the quality was there, they would not be back a second time.

Once he decided to get behind the creation of Nolan Ryan Beef, Nolan’s excellent reputation virtually guaranteed the success of the company and its branding operations. We had done some research and found that 73 percent of American households knew who Nolan Ryan was and that he had among the highest approval ratings of any athlete in the history of the survey.

Nolan Ryan Beef uses the most wholesome ingredients from cattle raised in a stress-free environment. Our beef cattle are not born and raised in a crate, as movies like Fast Food Nation would lead you to believe, and they are certainly not raised on “factory farms.”

These cattle are born on grass on ranches, they are raised by their mother, and they have six to eight months until they are weaned and moved to more grass. Typically, after weaning, the calf is then sold to another rancher, often called a stocker or backgrounder, who specializes in raising yearlings. The stocker turns the calves back out on pastures to feed on more grass. They arrive at their new ranch at around 500 pounds and then grow to about 850 pounds by the time they are eighteen to twenty months old.

That is a slow process—1½ to 2 pounds per day, depending on climate. Some calves are raised on wheat until the crop has to be harvested in the spring, while other calves might be raised on native pasture (long-lush grass) in the Flint Hills of Kansas and Nebraska. Cattle have the unique ability to convert low-quality roughage into high-quality protein while grazing rangeland that could never be farmed. Nolan raises many of the cattle that go into our program on his ranches in South Texas and the Texas Hill Country. His cattle typically are grazing native pastures and improved Bermuda grasses.

When the cattle reach a desired target weight of approximately 850 pounds, they are moved to a feedlot where they are fed a grain-based diet for 140 to 160 days prior to harvest. A feedlot is a pretty nice place for a cow to live. Cattle are herd animals by nature; they never like to be alone. In a feedlot they have plenty of room to move around in groups, with a hillside to roam on, fresh water, shade, all the high-quality food they want to eat, and plenty of their buddies to keep them company.

The science says that happy cattle produce great product; it turns out that stress is the single biggest cause of tough steaks. Nolan and other cattle owners treat the animals under their control in a humane way that ensures a safe, pure, and healthy product. Their motivation to do that is the simple truth that contented cattle are more profitable.

The goal for Nolan and our company is to produce quality beef for wonderful meals. That’s why we worked with Cristobal Vazquez, executive chef at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington and Nolan’s personal chef, to produce a practical and inspiring cookbook that will allow you to prepare beef in so many creative ways, based on the southwestern dishes that Nolan enjoyed growing up in Texas. Today, we sell fresh and frozen beef to restaurants and retail customers, and the business is growing rapidly. For more information, visit nolanryanbeef.com.