UKIAH, Ore. — Reliable meat supplies wouldn’t seem like a problem for restaurants that raise their own livestock.

After all, keeping cattle at a close proximity has an immediate and understandable appeal for restaurateurs like Rick Christian.

“You can see the pasture they’re born in from the front door of the restaurant,” said Christian, a rancher who owns The Thicket in rural Ukiah, Ore.

But as grower-owned eateries across the Northwest have learned, such self-sufficiency doesn’t solve every logistical dilemma, and usually creates new ones.

An ‘amazing story’

The “continuum” of raising, cooking and serving one’s own meat is a “compelling” way to differentiate a restaurant, but each step involves its own complications, said Lauren Gwin, community food systems specialist with Oregon State University Extension.

“You probably wouldn’t do it because it’s cheaper. You do it because you’re telling this amazing story about Oregon agriculture and your family,” she said.

Aligning a ranch’s cattle production with a restaurant’s beef demand is no easy feat, particularly when the pipeline between them is controlled by third-party slaughterhouses.

Due to the scarcity of independent meat processors, it’s extremely valuable for a farmer-owned restaurant to have a strong relationship with the nearest slaughter facility.

However, that close partnership also puts them in a precarious position, as they depend on another company’s decisions and financial health.

“If something were to happen to them, we wouldn’t be able to do it anymore,” Christian said.

Managing meat production from farm to table can impose costs that make the arrangement difficult to justify financially.

Though their business model isn’t exactly common, farmer-restaurateurs say they’ve found intangible but rewarding reasons to make it work despite the challenges.

Human connection

Serving beef from one’s own ranch is a marketing advantage, but it’s also more than that, as it deepens the human connection between a restaurant and its customers, said Melissa Thiessen, a rancher who owns the T-Post Tavern in Walla Walla, Wash.

“When you’re buying that burger, you’re helping to pay for my kids’ Little League fees,” Thiessen said.

Running a restaurant also expands the economic opportunities within a family business and the local community, creating jobs that may entice one’s children and others to remain in a rural area, said Bridget Coon, a rancher who operates Sonny’s Tavern in Washtucna, Wash.

“How does this look in the big picture?” Coon said.

The arrangement does have some practical benefits, such as diversifying a ranch’s sales and insulating it from downturns in the beef market, she said.

Steaks and other prime cuts are an easy sell at farmers markets but each slaughtered steer also contains about 200 pounds of ground beef, said Melissa Thiessen.

“What are you going to do with the rest of that animal?” asks Dan Thiessen, her husband.

Burgers offer an important sales outlet for that ground beef at their T-Post Tavern, which also offers various other beef cuts from the family’s ranch on a rotating basis, he said.

“It keeps people coming back to see what’s new each week,” Dan Thiessen said.

While raising livestock does offer advantages to farmer-restaurateurs, they say reducing meat costs is generally not among them — quite the opposite, actually.

“We could buy the most expensive beef and it would cost us less than our program cost us,” said Peter Kircher, who raised cattle for his Golden Valley Brewery restaurants in McMinnville and Beaverton, Ore.

For a couple decades, Kircher fed his cattle with spent grain from his brewery, then served the beef at his restaurants. Though the closed-loop system kept his feed prices down, it didn’t provide the economy of scale needed to produce meat inexpensively.

Forced to make a switch

“It’s not cost effective at all, it’s just something we believed in,” he said. “It made wonderful beef but financially it was not brilliant.”

Kircher’s example is also instructive of the risks faced by farmer-restaurateurs who rely on a local slaughter facility.

After a change in ownership, a nearby processor decided the partnership was no longer feasible, prompting Kircher to end his self-sufficient beef program earlier this year.

The Golden Valley Brewery restaurants still serve about 5,000 pounds of vegetables grown at the Kircher family farm each year, and continue getting their meat from Oregon ranchers through the Country Natural Beef cooperative.

“They do a great program and it’s still all natural and responsibly raised, but it’s not coming off our farm,” Kircher said.

Entrepreneurs each face unique logistical considerations and must work out for themselves whether supplying their own meat is worthwhile financially, he said.

Until running into processing problems, it was feasible for Golden Valley Brewery due to the company’s ready source of livestock feed and more importantly, the discernment of its customers, Kircher said.

“It’s doable if you have the clientele who understands what you’re doing and is willing to pay for that,” he said.

The diners who eat at Gathering Together Farm’s out-of-the-way restaurant outside Philomath, Ore., expect to be served locally grown food, which is why owner John Eveland raises his own poultry.

“I’m sure we could buy Costco chicken a lot cheaper,” he said. “It certainly adds to it when you can say they were raised on our farm.”

Gathering Together Farm has always been closely linked to the restaurant industry, as Eveland started growing vegetables to supply his sister’s eatery in nearby Corvallis, Ore.

His farm soon produced more vegetables than her restaurant needed, forcing Eveland to diversify into additional market channels — including lunches and dinners served at his farmstand.

Though the restaurant consumes only a fraction of the crops grown by the farm, the dining operation punches far above its weight in contributing to the company’s overall profit, he said.

Offering on-farm meals also reinforces customer loyalty, improving sales through farmers markets and other outlets, Eveland said.

“Another positive aspect is how the community relates to us and feels about us,” he said. “If you have a spectacular meal, you’re much more likely to buy produce from us.”

On the practical side, the restaurant uses vegetables that are “cosmetically challenged” or have a limited shelf life, though it’s not limited to such crops, Eveland said.

“Our directive to the kitchen is to highlight the produce we grow,” he said. “They have free rein to walk into our packing shed and use whatever they want.”

Hunters’ favorite

With its remote location in tiny Ukiah, The Thicket can’t rely entirely on locals for its business. The restaurant has been a destination for hunters “for generations,” said Christian, its owner.

It’s also built a fan base among motorcycle enthusiasts without becoming unmanageably rowdy, he said. “Most of the bikers are accountants during the day, then get on a Harley on the weekend.”

Window and door frames at the restaurant’s bar are inscribed with the names of longtime customers, he said.

“We have a great following,” added Wrenn, his wife.

Christian bought the eatery three years ago after taking over the family’s nearby cattle ranch and reducing his commute with a new job as a fisheries biologist for the U.S. Forest Service.

Last year, The Thicket’s burgers won the “President’s Choice” award in the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association statewide hamburger competition.

Christian hopes the award helps raise awareness that the restaurant is now serving beef raised down the road, with the cattle feeding entirely on local pastures.

Beef ‘terroir’

In his view, that contributes to a unique flavor in the meat, similarly what’s known as “terroir” in wines.

“It’s got to make a difference to how it tastes,” he said.

Roughly half the cattle from the family ranch are sold at auction, but Christian wants to steadily increase the portion sold through the restaurant and other direct marketing channels.

“I’d like to get to the point I don’t take any to sale,” he said.

The beef consumed at Sonny’s Tavern represents a relatively “marginal” amount of the Coon family’s cattle herd, but it’s still a useful sales channel for the ranch.

The eatery provides an outlet for cattle that are born out of synch with the others, or put on weight more slowly or return late from grazing, said Bridget Coon. “Instead of sending those through regular commodity channels, they end up in the restaurant business.”

The family wants to gradually increase the portion of cattle dedicated to the restaurant, but it’ll likely always be “an addition” to the ranch’s main cow-calf and hay-growing operations, she said.

“I have a lot of other parts of the equation to solve,” Coon said.

Cooperative restaurants

While grower-owned restaurants are often run by families, the 60,000-member North Dakota Farmers Union has taken the concept to the next level.

The cooperative, which traces its roots back nearly 100 years, began exploring the restaurant business about two decades ago as a step beyond traditional value-added crop processing.

“The farmers were in essence trying to integrate themselves further up in the food chain,” said Mark Watne, NDFU’s president.

It’s currently running seven eateries and a distillery under the Founding Farmers brand, primarily in the vicinity of Washington, D.C., with a ninth location on the way.

After its initial “fine dining” concept faltered, the chain found success with a more casual approach that focuses on family dining and high-quality ingredients from American family farmers, Watne said.

“That turned out to be a huge hit,” he said. “We wanted kids, old people, young people — the whole audience.”

The restaurant chain is jointly owned by the cooperative and more than 200 individual farmer investors, many of whom are also ingredient suppliers for the company.

“If you’re an owner and a deliverer, you get both sides of it,” Watne said.

Producing the variety of crops and meats needed to operate a restaurant chain wasn’t possible within the boundaries of North Dakota, so the cooperative contracts with growers from other parts of the U.S.

“It’s not only the owners, it’s other individuals who meet the family farm mold,” Watne said.

Even so, North Dakota farmers supply the chain with pork, flour, sugar and honey, which are delivered by the cooperative’s own trucks. The cooperative’s goal is to fully integrate the distribution operations involved.

“Eventually, we want to own the whole system,” Watne said. “That takes time, though.”

The practical challenges of delivering ingredients from numerous farmers to several restaurants are steep, and in some cases, the economics don’t add up.

“It’s not impossible stuff, but it’s logistics challenges built-in,” Watne said.

For example, the volumes of dry beans produced by North Dakota farmers are actually too big to make restaurant deliveries feasible, given the relatively small amount of the crop the eateries consume.

“With certain items, you just don’t sell enough of it. It doesn’t make the farm extra dollars, necessarily,” Watne said.

Whether a single family ranch or an entire cooperative of farmers are involved, the profits from selling straight to consumers must be weighed against the heightened complexities, according to farmer-restaurateurs.

“It’s less efficient to figure out how to move that animal piece by piece,” Coon said. “There’s real math involved in trying to figure out if it pencils out to direct-market these animals.”