Cody and Jennifer Hoseth are the owners of “Lone Crow Ranch” in Washington state. The first-generation ranchers have about 1,000 head of cattle, two meat markets, a butcher shop, and a couple of 24-hour vending machines where they sell their farm-fresh beef and pork. It’s a long way from where they started, with zero cattle, land, money, or experience.
Cody says he decided he wanted to be a rancher when he was 17. “I just wanted to buy cows and my mom told me I couldn’t, so I knocked on a rancher’s door and told him I wanted to get into the cattle business. He said he’d never had anyone knock on his door like that before,” Cody recalled.
That rancher warned that it was a terrible idea but nonetheless took Cody under his wing and helped him learn the cattle business. Cody earned extra money working at a feed store, delivering hay, and picking up odd jobs on other ranches. After selling his car, he had enough to buy his first five steers.
Cody was able to get a USDA Beginning Farmer Loan and started slowly growing his herd and selling to beef conglomerates. He started dating his now-wife Jennifer in early 2019 and just months later, Covid-19 hit.
Despite it being early in their relationship, Jen worked alongside Cody to shift the business model, “because obviously we couldn’t sell cattle for anything,” said Jen. “The ranch just wouldn’t have survived if we didn’t start selling our meat.”
Cody started having underweight cattle butchered and selling cuts at farmers markets and anywhere else that would let them set up a stand in the parking lot. Word spread and they soon couldn’t keep up with demand.
That “accidental” success led the couple to reassess the whole business. “We decided we weren’t going to sell cattle to corporate beef companies anymore. Ranchers don’t get paid well and during Covid they weren’t getting paid anything,” Jen told the TriCities Business News.
They set up an online ordering system where customers can select their meats and all their preferred cuts. Lone Crow sells their beef in quarter, halves, and whole. They also coordinate everything with the butcher, including payments and updates on the various processing stages. The wait time is usually no longer than three months. The exception is grass-finished beef, which is only processed in spring and fall so wait times can run six to seven months .
The Hogseth’s in 2020 opened their first storefront, which was little more than a prefab shed at their ranch. The couple ran electricity and insulated the little shop themselves. When they wanted to extend the store hours, they simply didn’t have enough staff.
Jennifer came up with the idea of 24-hour vending machines, which she saw people buying ready-made meals out of at her gym all the time. They placed one vending machine selling single cuts of meat outside the store and another inside a restaurant a couple hours away. They do a steady business out of the machines every day. In fact, the Hogseths say the vending machines completely sold out on Christmas Eve last year.
The Hogseths have since added another store front, and co-own a USDA-certified butcher shop. When they ran into trouble finding experienced help, so they hired people who were eager to learn and taught them the ropes. They are now planning to open their own USDA slaughter facility, which will fill another hole in the region. Cody says that this is where the bottleneck lies in the industry for smaller operations.
“It took me almost a year to get my conditional use permit, the reason being that there’s not straightforward zoning to build a slaughterhouse … There’s no guarantee you’ll get (the permit) either.” Cody says that while there is a lot of demand for farmers to become USDA-certified, it’s such an arduous process, such a massive barrier to entry, it discourages ranchers to do it. It costs $1 million bare minimum to build a USDA kill facility with lagoons, etc.”
The Hogseths are also utilizing everything they’ve learned along the way to consult for other small ranches. In their spare time (right!), they are raising two young sons, ages 3 and 1. Learn more about Lone Crow Ranch and all that the Hogseth’s have built in just a few short years HERE.
