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A California Rancher’s Legal Crisis Shows What’s Wrong With The American Beef Market

A rancher creating a bespoke protein product has no direct control over the way his cows become meat.

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The meat on your plate has to overcome a long line of barriers to get there, and those barriers limit what you can buy in ways that you might not have noticed. They also mean that your family might be eating mystery meat, sold as something different than the product you think you bought.

If you drive to Justin Pettit’s California ranch, out in the hills on the east side of Bakersfield, you’ll pass truck after truck loaded with carrots. They stop just down the road, at processing plants run by food industry players like Bolthouse Farms.

The giant Central Valley carrot processors end up with tons of waste, a mix of trimmings and rejected carrots that are too ugly for the supermarket. Pettit feeds those carrots to cows, finishing grass-fed beef with a sweet and moist crop that changes the flavor of the nutrient-dense meat. Beef cattle are usually finished – fattened for slaughter – with corn. No one else in the world does what Santa Carota Ranch does, giving them a unique product in a market driven by standardization and corporate mass production. And for now, after years of success and then years of crisis, you mostly can’t buy their product.

For Pettit, the story of what happened to Santa Carota is a story about the barriers to entry in protein markets, and the way those barriers limit supply and product differentiation. Entering the market for beef, he told The Federalist, is like “trying to merge into 80 mile-per-hour traffic on your bicycle.”

Pettit began selling carrot-finished ground beef to a California restaurant chain before the pandemic. Food safety regulations effectively limit the number of beef processors, so Santa Carota’s cows had to leave the Central Valley to be slaughtered in the industrial suburbs of Los Angeles. A processor stood between the supplier and the end user, taking orders from the restaurants and telling the rancher how many head of cattle to truck down to the slaughterhouse to meet the weekly........

© The Federalist