Christmas is a time for dreams, and for dreamers. It’s a time of wonder.
I wonder . . .
There’s a proposal making the rounds to create a new National Monument in western North Dakota, encompassing 11 areas in the North Dakota Bad Lands, land owned by the federal government, but leased to ranchers for grazing their cattle.
What if those ranchers out there on the Dakota Prairie Grasslands, in the spots about to become the Maah Daah Hey National Monument, got together and created a brand of beef unique to this part of America?
What if they called it Maah Daah Hey Beef, or Badlands Beef, or Little Missouri Beef, or even Medora Beef? Or National Monument Beef?
What if the state of North Dakota got behind them and created a meat packing and distribution facility in western North Dakota, reminiscent of another state-owned facility serving our state’s farmers, the North Dakota State Mill and Elevator, which began operations just about exactly 100 years ago?
Y’know there might be as many as 100 ranchers running some cattle on the 140,000 acres in those 11 Bad Lands sites. There might be a couple thousand cows out there, getting fattened up on grass so lush and nutritional that in the 19th century, cowboys drove whole herds of cattle from Texas to feast on it, in places like the Long X Divide, one of the proposed Monument sites.
What if, instead of hauling those cows down to the sales barns at Schnell’s or Kist’s when it’s time to market them, they took them to Belfield, or Watford City, or Killdeer—heck, there might even be an abandoned site in Medora—and instead of selling them at the sale barn for a buck and a quarter a pound, they slaughtered them, cut ‘em up, and sold lean ground beef for six bucks, or sirloin roasts for ten bucks a pound?
I have to admit this idea didn’t originate with me. Badlands Conservation Alliance Executive Director Shannon Straight hinted at it in a letter to the editor in the state’s newspapers this past week, and I talked to some Bad Lands ranchers who said the idea of creating a brand for beef from a National Monument was exactly the next step to take, once President Biden signs the order creating the Monument.
I think the North Dakota State Mill is the prime example of how the state can help bring “added value” to North Dakota agriculture products. Just a couple weeks ago, our state’s Agriculture Commissioner, Doug Goehring, the state’s number one cheerleader for Value Added Agriculture, announced that the North Dakota Agriculture Diversification and Development Committee had awarded more than half a million dollars from the Agriculture Diversification and Development (ADD) Fund to four meat shops around the state, in such unsuspecting places as Upham, Mylo, St. Anthony and New Rockford, to add or expand meat processing facilities. Precedent.
There’s a legislative session coming up in a few weeks. What if the Legislature hauled out the enabling act for the North Dakota State Mill, rewrote it to enable a State Packing Plant, and used some of Doug Goehring’s Value Added money to build it?
What if?
National Monument Beef?
Why not?
The Prairie Blog 
I like Little Missouri Beef! Not hep on naming it for the trail or Medora or just badlands as SD also touts Badlands. But Little Missouri touches most of the ranchers out here, or else our properties drain into the Little Missouri.
Sounds like a great idea, but how do you get a rethug to grasp a new idea and a way to make ranching more profitable for many and not just those voted in office as that’s who those dudes want to enrich.
Good I like the idea very much!
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Sandi and Joe Frenzel’s ranch is “The Little Missouri Cattle Company.”
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Big fan of National Monuments, they are the gift that keeps on giving. We recently accepted land in the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument donated by American Prairie Reserve for a new state Park at Judith Landing on the former PN Ranch. Great cottonwood canopy there and so many valuable stories. I love National Monuments, someday our children and grandchildren will get to visit them and enjoy the landscape in its natural state.
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Gre
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Good ideas need good entrepreneurs to make them reality.
North Dakota isn’t kind to its entrepreneurs. You would have to be a fool to take on that mission.
I was just such a fool. In 1989, I took on a mass of problems that hundreds of people had said were insolvable. In less than sixty days I had created a working solution that has saved North Dakota taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. That answer is known as the North Dakota Insurance Reserve Fund. It’s a “state-owned” insurance company.
Don’t look for me in Rough Rider Hall of Fame.
My thanks was to be branded as dishonest and incompetent. I left the state a financial wreck. Due largely to Al Olson, who saw what was done to me as “dirty politics” I got back on my feet.
Three years later, I was in Hollywood accepting an award from Metropolitan as their national agent of the year and largest producer. My “incompetence” had created a sales mechanism that is now the standard for the entire industry.
Over the next few decades, I won many similar national awards from Hartford, Travelers, and other large national companies.
I also operated a large wholesale agency which required a high degree of fiduciary aptitude. I successfully and “honestly” handled hundreds of millions of dollars of premiums for insurance companies. I was a named underwriter for Lloyd’s of London.
I had to leave North Dakota to fine true financial success.
Imagine what I would have done for North Dakota had I not been chased out of the state.
Yes, creating a highly prized beef to match the highly sought after North Dakota durum is a gallant goal. Unfortunately, I’ve known a lot of North Dakota cattlemen and not one of them seemed to be a fool.
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