By Martha Cheng

Big Island is home to one of the largest cattle ranches in the United States and yet,walk into any supermarket on O`ahu and even some on the Big Island, and you’d be hard pressed to find local beef. Most cattle in Hawai`i (really, most cattle everywhere in the United States) is sold into the commodity market on the mainland, where it is fattened in feedlots, processed and then sent back to us.

So why not just keep the cattle here—raise, slaughter and sell the beef directly to the local market? Turns out it’s not so simple.

Cattle ranchers, accustomed to feeding their cattle grain, find it costs less to send their calves to the mainland to be fattened than it does to import grain. With a growing market in grass-fed beef, raising cattle on Hawai‘i’s pasture is becoming an option, but it takes longer to fatten a cow on grass, and it requires a shift in ranching practices for some ranchers. Also, after decades of sending calves to the mainland, the infrastructure for bringing local beef to market no longer exists. But as the mainland price for calves begins to fall, more and more ranchers are looking for ways to keep their cattle in Hawai‘i, which can mean more humane standards and commanding a price that actually supports ranchers’ work and families. Here are just a few of the ranchers on the frontier of bringing local beef to consumers.

Jack Spruance, formerly of Pu’u O Hoku Ranch, Moloka‘i

“I know I want to grow food. There’s no doubt in my mind what I want to do with my life—and I’ve known this since I was a kid—[I want] to grow food.” So says Jack Spruance, former ranch manager of Pu’u O Hoku Ranch onMoloka‘i. Over the course of 48 hours I watch him work the many faces of food production. He’s thoroughly knowledgeable of the ranch’s 20-acre organic and biodynamic farm, but animals are his passion. I find him at the Moloka‘i Livestock Co-op, Moloka‘i’s slaughterhouse. He spends a long day in town, overseeing and participating in the kill process and filling out a lot of paperwork, and then he returns to the ranch, to his animals. He greets the calves like a father returning home to his kids, and patiently milks a fussy cow, soothing her as she fidgets and kicks. He works alongside a vegetarian intern on the ranch, but for Spruance, there isn’t an incongruence in the activities of the morning (the slaughter of his cattle) with what he’s doing now. He loves animals, but “I have a responsibility,” he says. “Not just to my animals, but also to feed people.”

I ask him to let me watch him move the cattle to new pastures, envisioning a Wild West scene of a cowboy on horseback, cattle stampeding in front of him. Instead, I find myself in an ATV seated beside Spruance, driving into the paddock. Spruance calls out “cow, coooow, cow, cooooow” and then turns around and drives back out, the cattle plodding along behind us, following him as obediently as children following the Pied Piper. That’s it. Spruance says, “They’re really good cows and they know what they’re doing.… I was taught rough stock handling years ago. And I decided that was not the way. For one, you go financially broke doing it because you gotta have so many cowboys and cowgirls to do the job.…Now, we call them; they follow. It’s all in how you approach an animal.”

When Spruance talks of his grass-finishing program for his cattle, of marbling and tenderness, it feels like he’s talking about a steak on legs. But in designing his program and hewing as close to nature as possible, what ends up being tasty meat for us also translates into a more comfortable life for the cow. “Grass-finished” is a more precise term than “grass-fed” because, technically, all cattle eat grass early in their lives, even those eventually sent to feedlots. The majority of beef cattle are fattened up on grain in their last few months, but Spruance’s cattle are raised solely on grass from the beginning of their lives to their end.

Spruance’s grass-finishing program is based on a whole organism principle, where the animal’s genetics and entire life, from the womb to the very end, are taken into account. He identifies some crucial points: In the second trimester, “it’s important for a cow to have quality feed. That’s when the animal lays down the potential for fat cells.” Three months after the calf is born is another critical point when it needs a lot of nutrition. Spruance tries to calve in February so that when the calf is weaned in October or November, it’s the beginning of the wet season, and the grass is good. Inevitably, the cow will have to go through a dry season, but at 24 months, when it’s ready for slaughter, it will have eaten another cycle of rainy season grass.

“In a grass-finishing program,” Spruance says, “you gotta really think about that animal—you gotta be able to think about the whole process. Nature is always our model. If you just pay attention to it, it’s going to tell you.”

[Spruance is no longer with Pu’u O Hoku Ranch due to differences in vision with the owner of the ranch, but he is in the process of starting up his own biodynamic farm and livestock operations that will include beef cattle and some dairy animals. With these animals, he writes, “I will continue [start over] my work on genetics for grass-finished animals, pasture improvement, and invasive species control utilizing multi-grazing species.”]

Michelle Galimba, Kuahiwi Ranch, Big Island

Michelle Galimba went from a graduate degree in comparative literature from UC Berkeley to roping wild cattle from an abandoned ranch in Volcano, an experience she likens to a scene in Star Wars, racing through Endor’s forest moon on speeder bikes. Because of “the geography of it, the lack of fences, you couldn’t just drive them in,” she says. “So we were out there roping them.Which is a lot of fun. It was just a blast. I love riding horses.”

Galimba cites the reason for returning to her family’s ranch, Kuahiwi Ranch on Big Island, as simply “I just liked being here.” In academia, she felt “this is really not doing anything. I feel like we’re spinning our wheels. From peasant stock, it seemed more real to me to come back and do this stuff.” These days, “this stuff ” is not so much roping wild cattle as it is working with domesticated cattle and trying to figure out how to keep beef for the local market rather than shipping calves to mainland feedlots.

In the past few years, Kuahiwi Ranch has kept back 25 to 40 percent of approximately 2,000 head of cattle to be raised for the local market. According to Galimba, “It’s not a problem raising them. We have enough pasture. We kind of worked out what we do.” The problem then is what happens after the cow has been brought to market weight—bringing it to the slaughterhouse, processing, distribution. Galimba says, “There are a lot of half-solutions out there. [I’m] just working to connect all the dots.… Just from after you’re done raising the cow, there are 14 critical points where you can totally mess up bringing a live cow to the supermarket shelf. On 14 points they all gotta be jammin’. There’s no room for error with fresh meat. It’s very complicated.”

Cattle at Kuahiwi Ranch spend their whole lives on pasture, but in the last 90 days, the cattle have access to grain. Galimba explains their rationale for finishing the beef on grain: “Straight grass-fed beef is really hard to get consistent. It’s also kind of risky that you’re going to have enough grass to feed them. [Finishing on grain], I pretty much know that it will be tasty and tender.” Because the cattle are still on pasture, even when fed grain, Galimba finds they don’t have any problems with bloat or other symptoms often found in crowded feedlot operations that fatten cattle with grain.

Kay and Ryan Lum, North Shore Cattle Company, O‘ahu

Because of its population relative to the other Hawaiian islands, the demand for beef—and the potential market for local beef—is greatest in O‘ahu. North Shore Cattle Company, started by the late Calvin “Doc” Lum, former state veterinarian, is the only ranch providing locally raised beef on O‘ahu. NSCC started because “Cal believed that we should keep the cattle here in Hawai‘i and feed our own economy,” says Kay Lum, Doc’s widow.

Though phrases like “farm-to-table” have become diluted as greenmarketing buzzwords, Doc had a very real farmer-chef relationship with chef AlanWong, the first chef to serve NSCC steaks in his restaurant. The two shared the difficulties of introducing local beef to Honolulu diners, for in the beginning, seven out of 10 plates would come back because the steaks were too tough.While Doc experimented with dry-aging to achieve a more tender product, Wong had to deal with returned plates.Wong says, “I stayed with Doc’s beef because I believed in him. He educated me about the qualities and properties of grass-fed beef, and the benefits, not only for humans who consume it, but for the animals and the land and environment.…Doc and I both knew it was going to be a long process to make people aware of 100 percent grassfed beef, both its good points and the quality of the texture of the meat. If we made it available in a high-end restaurant and people became more exposed to and aware of it, the word would get out as to what 100 percent grass-fed beef represented.”

These days, demand outstrips supply for NSCC, but it’s only 11 years later that it’s starting to turn a profit, indicative of the uphill battle fought to provide Hawai‘i with local beef. The Lum family is looking for additional avenues of income, which include agri-tourism and purchasing a mobile slaughterhouse so they can process their own cattle and rent the mobile unit to other livestock farmers. Because slaughter options are few on O‘ahu (exactly one at this writing), the existence of a mobile slaughterhouse on O‘ahu has the potential to create new opportunities for small ranchers interested in selling meat directly to consumers. The cumulative efforts of these ranchers and many more are all in the hopes that 100 percent Hawai‘i-grown beef can become viable.