Ranch offers big cuts, small-town values

By FINN HARTNETT

Staff writer

Mud Creek Cattle Co., a family-run cattle ranch that sells beef directly to customers, is difficult to spot from the highway. Just west of 200th St. and Remington Rd., there’s no storefront or signage out front — just a gravel driveway leading to a barn, and beyond that, plains of grass and cattle.

You won’t find the company listed on Google Maps or in the Yellow Pages. Owner Randy Savage says he keeps it simple by selling his cuts exclusively through Facebook and word-of-mouth.

“My daughter’s working on a website,” he adds after a moment.

To an extent, Mud Creek’s secrecy is intentional. Savage values his privacy, and, as his is a small farm, he doesn’t want to start taking orders he’s not ready to fulfill. He also seems to enjoy the isolation his ranch provides him and his family.

On a bright fall afternoon, he trundles slowly uphill on an ATV, passing a few of what he calls “canning cows.”

The canning cows have already produced calves and, at their mature age, won’t produce the kind of high-quality meat Savage likes to sell.

He’ll soon send them to a packing plant, where they’ll be turned into canned meat.

“We’ll give them a nice send off,” he says. “All the hay you can eat.”

Mud Creek Cattle Co.’s main business is prime cuts of meat from young steers.

“Everything’s Black Angus,” Savage says proudly.

Savage has tried different breeds of cattle, but he’s happy he’s settled on Black Angus.

“The Angus breed has done such a great job of marketing,” he says. “They provide you with a ton of resources, information, feedback on your cattle.”

Feedback is important for farms trying to produce the best possible beef. A good amount of Savage’s time goes to trying to improve his cattle’s genes.

“You’ve got to have good bulls and keep trying to make your cows a little better,” he says. “We’ve taken a few trailer loads down to Garden City to find out how the animals were grading on the rail. At the moment, we’re looking at about 40% prime and 60% light choice. So we’re tasting the right genetics.”

The ATV, sputtering exhaust, passes by a cow and her two calves, alone in a plain. One stands upright, while one lies on its side, disguised by tall grass.

Savage smiles. “When they’re newborn like that — there’s an old Western movie where the Indian’s walking through the battle, and he’s laughing the whole time, saying, ‘I’m invisible.’ That’s what those little calves will tell you,” he says.

The life of a cattle rancher is not 9-to-5. Savage gets up around 8 a.m. and must work weekends to feed his herd and make sure its doing okay.

“You go when you need to go, and you stay at it until you’re done,” he says.

His family is similarly busy on the ranch.

“My daughter and I do the bulk of it. My son’s more on the equipment side,” Savage says.

In addition to Mud Creek (which he technically is still purchasing from his in-laws) Savage also owns a farm in Florence, the town where he grew up.

His father took care of sheep, cattle, and hogs as well as farming wheat. But instead of continuing that variety with Mud Creek, Savage decided to hone in on one particular aspect of agriculture — cattle — and devote his time to perfecting that craft, like a Japanese shokunin.

This also allows him to simplify things, operating without dozens of employees and fancy farm equipment. “Equipment’s just so darn expensive. You’ve gotta be huge to own all your equipment. I mean, huge. Several thousand acres,” he says. “I don’t mind baling my own hay.”

Savage and his family’s dedication has resulted in a solid business for Mud Creek Cattle Co. He sells about 30 steers’ worth of meat a year, delivering the products right to customers’ doors.

Savage hopes that next year, he’ll be able to sell 50 steers’ worth, and increase his breeding stock — “mama cows”, he calls them — to around 150.

When he was young, Savage thought of leaving Kansas. Though he says he’s “no world traveler,” he has visited the deserts of Arizona and the beaches of Florida in years gone by.

But Savage soon realized that Kansas was the only place he wanted to be. He got sick of the sun being blocked by buildings and mountains. Now, he relishes the ripe autumn smells in the plains, the peace.

“I don’t want to go anywhere else,” he says. “Here we get the seasons, and there’s not so many people. I would never make it in a city.”

His only problem with Mud Creek’s location is that it isn’t deep enough into the Flint Hills. Ideally, he wouldn’t hear the highway at all, only “the blowing of the grass.”

Savage “finishes out” the steers for slaughter when they approach 16 to 24 months old. Beef slaughtered before 19 months makes for better cuts, but Savage doesn’t have the staff to keep up with that level of efficiency.

While his Angus steers grow up eating grass, the finishing process switches the animals to a diet exclusively of corn. This makes for better marbling on the cuts of meat.

Mud Creek, during this time of the year, gets around 25 pounds of ground corn delivered each day.

“I like my beef exceptionally marbled, and I do it easier on corn,” Savage says.

Asked whether he ever gets attached to his steers, Savage mentions a particular cow, 101, which he says has a big personality. “She’ll come up and you can scratch her back,” he says.

However, he also acknowledges the nature of the work he does.

“Are we attached? No,” he says. “I mean, there’ll be a day that we just have to send her down the road. It’s a business.”

He adds that Mud Creek’s goal is to give cows, steers, and heifers the best lives they can have.

“God put them here to provide, he put us [here] to take care of them, and frankly, a cow that’s abused or underfed, or not taken care of when she’s sick—she’s not going to produce for me,” he says. “You’d have to be a really big jerk to not take care of them and treat them right.”