#18 Direct Marketing with Kevin Muno

Hello everyone, this is Jim Elizondo of Real Wealth Ranching.

Have you ever wondered about Direct Marketing? Have you seen how the prices of beef have gone up? And the price we receive for beef and other products doesn’t go up as fast and that is crunching ranchers and farmers into a bitter difficult position.

Today, we will interview Kevin Muno from San Diego, California. Kevin is doing direct marketing and the name of his company is Perennial Pastures. He aims to target consumers that care about the regeneration of soil and the environment. And it is what he is doing with his grazing practices, he is practicing total grazing.

On this podcast, Kevin will be sharing with us the 5 tips for direct marketing. Want to know what they are? Listen to this great podcast episode with Kevin as he shares his advocacy to regenerate the land by applying the Total Grazing and Adapted Genetics practice while running his direct marketing business. 

Here are the highlights of the episode:

(Kevin) While I was a baseball player, I got really into eating grass-fed and really high nutritional type of foods. And the more research I did on our food system, the more I became disappointed about where to locate grass-fed beef and how to obtain it.

The beauty of growing up in this industry and the beauty of learning nowadays is that the information is so accessible there are so many amazing producers and teachers such as yourself, Jaime, that are willing to share from their 30-40-50 years of experience…

There are a lot of folks that just want to be involved and give back to the land so I was able to go around to family and friends.

This has been 8-9-10 years worth of networking, talking to investors, and failing. 

I was able to work with investors to buy this company, buy the cattle and then invest in a little bit of the properties to put the correct infrastructure and to be able to execute on a total grazing strategy that I’ve learned from you, Jaime. 

Perennial Pastures is our grass-fed beef label. We’re in Six Farmers Market here in San Diego County and we have an online presence as well through a Shopify site which I think we’re going to get to a little bit later in the conversation.

(Jim) We all need to be very good at business to manage a ranch or farm. We need to plan, but you have some advantages. And you will now give 5 tips to our listeners if they want to do some direct marketing

(Kevin) I’m gonna give a big caveat here, by no means am I an expert in direct consumer marketing. We’re just starting, these are all tips that I would recommend to folks who are looking at getting into this. Just consider, these are things that I would have wanted to know If I was gonna start something. 

 1. Get a reputable e-commerce platform. 

I’ve done pretty extensive research on these platforms and all are pretty good. We settled on Shopify just because it really is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. And it is enabling small businesses to really scale by selling products online. They have a huge ecosystem of applications that you can utilize and plug into. And so from adaptability, from notoriety, from a reputation standpoint, Shopify just stood out.

There’s a whole network of service providers and people that are comfortable with the tool that can help you if you don’t want to build it yourself. They can come build the site for you.

(Jim) This first tip is so important because many producers, ranchers and farmers live far away from the markets. And we’re going to see more and more direct marketing from the farmer ranch to your doorstep

 2. Start genetic development right away.

This is directly from you and what I learned from you and Johan… this is one of the easiest things you can do right away. It’s just to get good bulge genetics and start putting pressure on your herd and selecting for animals that are gonna actually stay fat and perform well in a total grazing grass-fed beef situation.

And I think it is one of the things that you need to start right away because it takes time and not all the animals are going to be fit for grass-fed, grass finishing program right off the bat. So you got to start, you got to get going, and one of the easiest things is to just start selecting, start bringing in better bulls. 

There are good cows in every herd but there are not very many good bulls so our goal according to your guidelines and Johan’s is to create our first few crosses and then start selecting from inside the herds, the bulls from good cows and set them up against each other and breed according to nature.

Well, I’ve only got your recommendation and from Johann, too, so we’re very fortunate to be starting from the beginning of our business with the correct information to get us going in the right direction.

3. Craft product set early to adjust for meat quality.

Emphasize products like ground beef, bone broth, hot dogs, snack sticks (which is like a healthy Slim Jim that we produce) - value-added items like that to start, emphasize that and then end up processing an animal that’s fat, maybe it was a steer that you’re able to finish well. Look at cutting steaks from that but don’t try to go heavy on the steaks to start, focus on products that you know are gonna eat well. Because what you want to do when you’re building your meat program is maintain the quality as high.

We’ve never gotten any negative remarks on our ground beef or hot dogs or snack sticks or anything like that. We’ve never gotten one complaint. We have gotten some complaints early on here on tough steaks, maybe 5-10%, because we tried to maybe force an animal and cut them into steaks that probably shouldn’t have been cut into steaks. It wasn’t properly finished. So for me, as a young rancher, it was one of the biggest learning lessons for me early on.

4. Utilize multi-prong marketing strategy. (farmer markets, emails, social media, farm tours, etc)

It is important not to put all your eggs in one basket from a marketing perspective. A lot of people put emphasis on social media. I think social media is great but there are other consumers that you’re going to miss.

marketing is the effort of generating leads but if you’re generating leads and notoriety and people are knowing but they’re not buying, then you have a conversion problem. So you have to look at the whole funnel.

You have to be a good marketer and say that you can have a big funnel at the top. Then you got to have a good website and a strong pricing strategy and a good product set so that you can convert those leads into sales.

And then you got to have good quality beef so that you can get return customers.

it’s really important not to scamp on any of those strategies and be able to address the weak link in the whole chain and make sure that you’re building the funnel, you’re converting people, and that you’re getting them to come back.

The beautiful thing about starting this business is that people are ready for regenerative agriculture. I don’t know if this is the case throughout the country but you and your colleagues, Jaime, have laid the ground floor for folks such as myself.

There’s so much negativity out there in the world today and regenerative agriculture is something that gets us excited about because it’s jobs, it’s the environment, it’s food, it’s nutrient density, it’s health, it’s abundance, it’s all of these things.

5. Utilize a quality grading system to ensure steaks get released to the market. 

Jim: So now we see why direct marketing is so important for profits and market security. Lately, we haven’t seen good profits for ranchers and farmers because even though the price of beef has gone up for the end consumers, the price paid to the producer has not been fair. Would you like to comment on this a little?

Kevin: I think we all know as producers, the market is consolidated. There are 4 companies that control 80% of the packing and processing in this country. They essentially have a monopoly and we have to go around them whether or not you want to be a direct-to-consumer marketer or not there are opportunities to go around.

There are not a lot of ton of opportunities to direct market may be on the small scale but what those producers could do is to partner with other direct consumer marketers…

I’m gonna need to work with other producers to aggregate and aggregating from those other producers actually still give them a good price that’s probably better than what they’re gonna get at a sale barn.

(Jim) But they need to regenerate their land at the same time, right? 

(Kevin) They have to produce to the protocol, so if they’re producing to the total grazing standards and the regenerative standards then I’ll buy from them

One thought is we can offer some consulting to the producers and the supply chain and they can become quasi members or affiliates.

 But yeah, there’s got to be a standard and so if they’re producing to the standard and they’re using adaptive genetics and their beef is quality and I can go to their ranch and know that they’re improving the soil then it’s across the whole supply chain from a marketing perspective.

So at the end of the day, what you’re doing teaching people regardless if they do direct consumer marketing or not, I think there’s going to be more markets opening up for regenerative beef even if you don’t plan on direct marketing because they’ll be guys out there like myself that do want to direct market that is going to need some more supplies.

(Jim): well this is something that we can all benefit from as more people will enjoy a better and healthier product. I want to congratulate you because this is a scalable project that will improve the environment, provide a healthier product for people in a pleasant experience while you decrease your cost of production by having a higher credit stocking rate and is a win-win situation for everyone. Thank you very much, Kevin.

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