Agriculture, Specialty/Niche December 01, 2024
Both Sides Now
Big beef outfit branches off into Belties niche.
by Steve Werblow
The Hannas didn't really need any more cattle. After all, Hanna Brothers Ranch had plenty of Angus cow-calf pairs grazing the rich pastures of the Scott Valley in far northern California. But when Regina Hanna and her husband Judd brought home an orphan Belted Galloway calf named Sammi, a new business started to take shape: Crown H Cattle Company, a direct-marketed beef operation built around the charismatic Beltie breed and the charismatic Regina Hanna.
"As my little herd grew, I had to figure out a way to pay for them," Hanna explains. "I had to hustle. So that's how I got into the direct-to-consumer beef business."
Today, Crown H sells about 15 head a year. About 75% is ordered online and shipped on dry ice. Hanna sells the rest through word of mouth, pop-up sales while doing deliveries to friends, and through an online farmers' market called Siskiyou Farm Co.
Building buzz. Hanna promotes specific cuts to generate buzz for her Beltie beef.
"As folks have learned about the hanger steak, they know you can only get one and it's delicious," Hanna says. "So people start to say, 'oh, if there's an opportunity to have a hanger steak, I better get one because it's not going to come around again.'
"I also show people, 'hey, if you were going to get these kinds of roast, not only could you have a roast, you can use them for shredded tacos, you can cut the roast into stew meat, or we make really good Indian curries out of it,'" she adds. "Or I tell them about picanha, which I ate a lot when I used to spend summers in Brazil visiting my mother's family."
In fact, the ability to talk with customers about cuts that can work for them keeps Hanna from pursuing restaurant sales.
"Restaurants always like to buy the same cuts—they don't like the variety," she adds.
Consumer-friendly. Most Crown H customers buy by the cut, and many of them say they like the rich taste and great nutrition statistics. For instance, Hanna says finished Beltie beef is 46% lower in calories, 68% lower in total fat, 69% lower in saturated fat, and 57% lower in cholesterol than other popular beef breeds. That's because Belties evolved with thick coats that allow them to put on less fat, even as they graze beside Hanna Brothers' Angus cattle and finish on a barley mix.
Passing drivers can spot the distinctive, white belly bands of Crown H Belties among the Hanna Brothers' Angus. But though they only make up a small percentage of the cattle on the field, the Belties have created a substantial platform for Regina Hanna to tell the ecological and nutrition stories of beef.
"This has been a neat opportunity to get the word out in the Bay Area and other places about what a small ranch really looks like and the folks who sell it," she says. "In fact, one of my biggest supporters is a dear college friend of mine, and she's actually a vegetarian. But she let me do a pop-up in her yard in Palo Alto because she believes people should have a choice in what they want to eat, and she's seen how we do things and she knows we're a natural beef process and we're humane and we're pretty good stewards of our environment."
Hanna's become a skilled social media marketer in addition to being able to talk up great beef. Hanna emails customers regularly with news from the farm, and Judd writes a blog on crownhcattlecompany.com, and pictures of the farm, the cows, and Regina, Judd and their kids Dylan and Grady abound on Instagram and Facebook.
"I wasn't always a 'show-everything-on-social-media' person, but as I progressed, I became a little more familiar with at least the importance of understanding why I sell this beef and how I raise it and how it all comes to fruition," Hanna says. "And a lot of my friends help and say, 'Hey, Regina, don't forget to tell them about these things.'"
State Capitol. Hanna has been invited to tell her story—the story of family ranches, big and small—to lawmakers in Sacramento, California.
"We've got a lot of work to do, especially in the summertime," Hanna acknowledges. "There's this big emphasis on, 'there's no time to get out and let folks know what we're doing.' So I think, to no-one's fault, that we've done ourselves a disservice."
Running a small beef herd beside a big outfit, Hanna can share the story of both sides. ‡
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