Sara Faivre-Davis holds one of Wild Type Ranch’s calves. The farm uses science, and proper management, to produce the tender marbled meat their customers desire.
--Staff photo by Coppedge
Good management yields tastier beef
By CLAY COPPEDGE, Country World Staff Writer
April 17, 2008 - A satisfied but slightly misguided customer of Wild Type Ranch beef recently asked co-owner Sara Faivre-Davis what kind of seasoning she put in her meat. She replied that she didn’t put any seasoning in the meat; it just tastes like it.
“That was a compliment because we try to produce the best-tasting meat that we can,” said the Milam County rancher.
That’s not the only misconception some people have about Wild Type’s products. Some customers assume the beef is entirely grass-fed but it’s not, nor is it certified organic. Both notions are only slightly off the mark.
Though not organic, Wild Type beef is raised without hormone implants or confinement. And while the cattle are primarily grass-fed, Faivre-Davis and her husband Ralph Mitchell supplement the grass with a small amount of grain containing Omega-3 oils.
“Think of it as putting Omega-3 oils on your corn flakes,” she says. “We would love to go all grass-fed but we do it this way for the marbling.”
Faivre-Davis grew up on a large corn and soybean farm in northern Illinois. Her brother wrote some of the family farm’s first computer programs more than 20 years ago and she learned how to install the programs on a computer.
With a strong agriculture and technology background, she attended Iowa State University, eventually earning a Ph.D. in genetics. She worked on the human genome project as a professor at Texas A&M University, and later started one of the state’s first bovine genetics companies in Austin.
Four years ago, she decided that she wanted to spend time with her two sons (now ages 6 and 8) and watch them grow up. She and her husband purchased 333 acres of Milam County farmland where they put their combined agriculture and technology backgrounds to work raising the best tasting beef they could. They also sell cattle as registered breeding stock.
“At capacity, we run about 100 mama cows and can take an extra 30 beef steers. It’s all registered stock. We harvest about 30 to 35 beef animals a year. We hope to push that up to about 50 cows a year.”
The two key components of the Wild Type operation are genetics and management, she said. She performs embryo transplants, artificial insemination, carcass ultrasounds and tests the DNA of the ranch’s animals all year to find the genetic markers for tenderness and taste that she is looking for.
“All our meat grades out at prime or close to prime,” she says. “I think a lot of our customers come to us initially for the health benefits and to buy locally grown beef. But most of them come back for the way it tastes. We taste test every harvest. We cook it unseasoned and eat it to make sure it meets our standards.”
During this calving season, about 45 percent of the ranch’s calves are embryo transfers, 32 percent are the result of artifical insemination and the rest are produced through natural service. The cattle are tested for brucellosis, BVD, and other diseases.
Not only do Faivre-Davis and her husband keep a complete record of each and every cow on the place, but they also name the cows.Some are named for planets while others are named for favorite songs. Most of the ranch’s Red Brangus cattle are named for Beatles songs like “Lucy in the Sky.”
“People ask us how we can sell or eat the cattle after we’ve named them,” she said. “We don’t think the animal has any less worth because it’s named. Some of our customers want to know the name of the animal they’re buying and others don’t even want to think about that aspect of it.”
“Wild Type” is a scientific term used to describe a naturally occurring normal, non-mutated gene. Faivre-Davis can tell you all about it and how it applies to the ranch’s operation but she knows that most of her customers are more interested in the breeding capabilities of her cattle and the taste of the meat; neither has anything to do with seasoning.
