Amy Hay
speaker
108 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Amy Hay’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Not for your whole salary.
Um, it was his, well, it was his dream was to have a ranch and, um, I used to be a vegetarian very long time ago, but, um, more because I didn't agree with how animals destined for our plates were treated. But if my dad or brother shot a pheasant, I'd happily pluck it and eat it because it was like flying around one bad day.
It's on my plate as opposed to, you know, like factory farming, commercial farming. Bear in mind, I was like 20, 19, whatever. So when we kind of started discussing things, it was giving people... I mean, we're going back to 2005 when we were speaking about this. It was giving people that option of, you know, you want to eat meat, but you don't want to eat that meat.
You want to know where it comes from. So we built... this around that, that we wanted to give people a conscientious and ethical food choice. And now more and more people are like, there's that farm to fork movement is huge. Like there's, um, the statistics that are readily available are for the States, but out of the something like 2 million farms in the USA, only 7% sell direct to consumer.
Yet the farm to fork movement, the people who want to buy direct from the farm is huge and growing. There's actually not enough farms to supply that demand.
There is. So we, we had, so when we lived, we moved here. So the ranch I'm sat in now is five hours away from where we started in like near Vancouver and, So we had five or six acres and we literally went to the auction and bought four Hereford steers, finished them, sold them. So we advertised. So it was to kind of test the market and we kept one for ourselves. We advertised the rest.
to see if this was a viable option. And it was like, we almost got to the point where people would knock on the door going, I heard you had beef for sale. And we're like, we're all out. It was like this backdoor beef sales. Yeah, exactly. But it worked. So we did end up keeping on.
So on our six acres, we actually ended up with a herd of like 23 head of cattle, but we leased two 10 acre grazing around us. So we were able to raise them. you know, from May through to October and then bring them home and feed them haylage, et cetera.
No, we don't. So our, we do Wagyu. So Wagyu is our kind of main breeding stock. So we have our full blood Wagyu and then we also have our F1s and F2s. So our cross breed is Highlands and Galloways.
So there's not, I'm sure I'll get yelled at this. There's no such thing as miniature cattle. It's a dwarf gene. Like people just breed for it, but it's not a breed. Like, I don't know. Miniature cattle. No, no,
They do look cuddly.
Yeah, so our F1s is just our standard beef, but it has that buttery flavor of Wagyu. And even though we don't feed any grain, it's beautifully marbled. You can cut it with a fork. Galloways are slightly faster growing than highlands. Highlands, in Scotland, a highland cow is actually considered a premium breed.
They're very slow in growing, so you can't really process them until at least 36 months. So they're always going to be in OTM But that slow growth lays itself to this beautiful, thick marbling. Like it's not being pounded with grain for 18 months and then sent to harvest. It's grown slowly. So they have, they're more expensive than Angus.
Like if you want to order like a prime river, something Highland is like a premium beef. For our model, they're a little bit too slow growing, so we're moving away from highlands, but we chose them because they suit our environment. It's rugged, it's mountainous, it's extreme cold, extreme heat, that they do really well. They thrive, so it's less input for the same output, if that makes sense.
That's a distinct choice. We're a regenerative ranch. So we really follow regenerative agricultural practices and we host clinics here for regenerative ag. I will caveat with saying I am system or feed agnostic that we need a place for all farming. This is just our choice and it's not something that I would force on anyone else. But for us, it works really well.
So we don't feed any grain, but we do plant our pastures with a really diverse forage crop. So our fields are full of brassicas, so like radishes and turnips, alfalfas, clovers, different grasses, sunflowers, even peoats and barley that they forage on in the grass form. But we don't feed any additional grains.
It's a forage crop. Yeah. We just don't feed, we don't strip it off and feed them anything, but they've got a very diverse.
No, we put ours out on range and on range, they eat everything. Like they're eating leaves and shrubs and berries and bar. We've even caught them chewing on antlers for like the nutrients. Like they eat everything, but yeah. So we just try and emulate that when they're back at home as well.
It's an open-ended question, though. It's a hard question to answer. I get asked this a lot online, but it's like, well, what do you need to make a living? Do you need 50K a year? Do you need 100K a year? So it's really hard to answer. When we had the acreage at the coast, we were both working full-time. So it wasn't our sole income. It was supplemental.
But it got to the point where that enabled us to move and make it our sole income. So we don't work... Selling beef is all we do.
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