River Klass
speaker
170 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard Aug 2024
River Klass’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And now the cool thing is to watch something that's 30 feet in diameter. I don't know how many hundreds and hundreds of feet. Everybody wants to watch it hit the ground.
Yeah.
Well, you can't push it over when it's 30 feet in diameter. So you have to wait for the wind. So they're sitting around. Nothing's happening. They ran out of hooch. They walked down to the The Camp Connell, about four or five miles, so I had to walk down. It's going to take a couple hours to get down and get back. Grabbed some hoops, came back up. Tree was laying down. No one ever heard it fall.
Well, yeah, I think it comes out with a real straightforward premise. I'm in the market. I'm in my restaurants. I'm in my market. I see people ordering ribeye, looking at the ground beef at the market, and there's a disconnect. They don't understand what it took to get that red meat from the ranch to that market. And you've had some great guests in here, some, you know, backgrounders.
We call them backgrounders, feeders. You know, I'm a cow-calf. I'm actually, the whole way I go cow-calf. And then if I, with some of my steers, I come and they go right into the restaurant. Some I take to market. But I have a closed herd because they work really well and they make a great grass-finished beef for my thing.
I just knew that people had no idea what it takes to get this beef to market, what it takes to take a live animal that's not confinement. Chickens are confinement. Hogs, as you guys know, you guys have some hogs on your properties. Hogs are confinement. You can't confine cattle, not with what they're running in Wyoming and in Montana and Texas and all over California.
So you've got these guys and gals. Some of the best cowboys in the world I know are cowgirls. that are working for at least 20 months, 24 months to get them to market. I go 30, 36 months. You know, I've always said I love this animal. I protect this animal. I serve this animal until it's time for them to serve me. I just was telling some people in my restaurant about how
I'm not a big hunter, love fishing. But when I put them steers that I've known, I know their grandmothers, their great grandmothers, great, great grandmothers. When I put them in my trailer and take them to market or take them to slaughter, just like anyone who hunts. But I don't take it for granted. I'm grateful. I know what's going.
And I wanted to make a show that showed just how you're getting that beef into that big box store. or that local market, or that farmer's market, that there's ranchers, that there's farriers, that there's auctioneers, there's livestock markets, there's saddle makers, there's hat makers.
It takes every one of these people to get those calves healthy enough that they can go and get slaughtered, get processed, and get one of the most nutrient-dense meats for us to eat and enjoy and satisfy us. I do go to a lot of ranches and I meet a lot of ranchers. The average ranch in America, 1,200 acres, 50 head.
Number one protein in America is beef and 88% of the ranches are only 50 head, average 50 head. It's not a full-time job anymore. You guys talk about that all the time. Everyone's got to have, we call them town jobs. They're welders, farriers.
I tell everybody every time, man, if every morning I could get up, go load my best horse, put him in that trailer, run out to the ranch and just check fence all day, doctor a couple of cows, get some pink eye, maybe a hoof, put that horse back in the trailer, crack a beer and come home, that'd be the happiest job I could ever do. I would be living in a tent My wife would leave me.
It's just not feasible anymore.
Yeah.
I started... I'm a first-gen rancher, so let's be clear about that. I say this all the time. I'm a wannabe cowboy, but then again, I don't know anybody that doesn't want to be a cowboy. I took and started a restaurant when I was 29 in the littlest town I could find so that I could get out of that kitchen, get home, ride, help some friends on their ranches, just be a cowboy. I loved it.
I loved doing it. I thought the You know, I'd always worked in restaurants growing up, and so I knew how to do it. I thought that would pay the bills, and I'd have fun after that. The restaurants did well. Well, the first restaurant did well. The second one I opened up 19 feet away. One's kind of real fancy. That's a whole story, man. I don't know what I was thinking.
Most people, they, they open up their little hamburger stand and they do well. And they're like, Oh, I'm going to open a really fancy restaurant. No, not me. I opened a really fancy restaurant, work my took us off. And the minute I can find a place, uh, I open up the burgers, pizzas, and tacos. And there's, there's nine, they're 19 feet apart.
So I, I'm not a, when they say you're a restaurateur, there's only 19 feet between the restaurants. So it isn't, it ain't that big of a deal. And, um, And I love it. I love our little town. I love everybody that comes through. We get a lot of tourism. We've got Alison Krauss and Robert Plant coming Wednesday to the local amphitheater that's 1.5 miles from downtown.
We've had Brad Paisley, Hank Williams Jr., Shell Crow. We've had them all out here. It's a cool little town. So that's where I was starting and I was having some great fun with it. One day, 15 or so, 20 years ago, a couple of cows ended up on the property and Two became six and eight and 12, and there it was. Then it was 800.
Yeah, then it went to 800. Your lips to God's ears. That's where it really started. That's where the TV show came because someone was in town that started hearing me, you know, after maybe a beer or six, hearing me just rant about how silly this is, that beef is so intense, so hard to raise. There's so much USDA inspection required.
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