BLACKDUCK — Rachel Gray of northern Beltrami County was born and raised on the cattle ranch she is now leading as a fourth-generation rancher.
With her son and young grandchildren, they’re on six generations of caring for cattle and the land on which they raise them at Little Timber Farms.
Gray, 52, said the cattle industry in the region has seen a lot of changes over the generations, and with a constantly changing tariff situation, may see even more.
“Ag is evolutionary, you know, we are constantly evolving. When I was a kid ... we were a dairy farm and we were very progressive. We had a milking parlor. We had really a great milking system, and my dad was really progressive when he was doing that,” Gray said.
Gray said her dad, Murl Nord, was among the first in northern Beltrami County to transition from dairy to beef cattle. Now, most cattle in the county are raised for beef, marking a shift away from the dairy that once dominated the landscape.
“Not many people were rotationally grazing, and so he was kind of at the forefront of that in Northern Minnesota,” Gray said.
Gray says one of the biggest changes happening lately in agriculture is with technology, highlighting how she adapted to a very wet spring last year.
“We said, ‘What are we going to do? We have this field that we really need to replant. How do we do this economically without waiting?’ And the answer is, ‘drones,’” Gray explained. “We could put our seed into a drone. The drone then seeded 35 acres. ... No getting stuck in the mud. ... Also, no diesel expense that day."
Gray explained the Little Timber Farms largely serves as a go-between in the cattle raising industry, averaging about 500 head each year. Her family’s operation will only deal in heifers for about one year, as breeding animals before they’re sold to other cattle producers in the country.
Gray recently won a national award, being recognized among her peers in the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association for outstanding environmental stewardship. Her land is within the Red Lake watershed, where waters flow north before they eventually end up in Canada’s Hudson Bay.
Gray, who also once worked as a schoolteacher in Blackduck, said she and other agricultural producers aim to be good stewards of the land and community, describing the business as a “three-legged stool of sustainability.”
“That means to me, I need to be involved in my community. I need to be helping other people see what I'm doing or maybe helping at school or helping those kinds of things,” Gray said. “I have a responsibility to be economically sustainable, so this is a business I need to try my hardest to make some money and make this work.”
Rotational grazing, limiting cattle access to natural water sources and monitoring soil health are just some of the ways Little Timber Farms operates with environmental sustainability as a focus.
“I need to make sure that we're passing on something to my son and my grandkids that's going to last, that it's going to make them healthy, healthy cattle,” Gray said. "No one goes into this thinking, ‘Boy, I just hope I do this for 40 years and then sell it all.’ That's not what farmers think.”
She said she spends a good portion of her day tracking markets, with the looming global trade war causing some concern.
“I can't say for sure how this is going to affect the beef. I'm worried about the crop prices and crop farmers right now, it seems to have affected their markets even more, with China shutting down all of its soybean purchases,” Gray said. “My fear is that our trade partners are going to look to other countries. ... And once we lose those deals, once we lose that trading partner, are we going to get them back?”
Gray explained in the cattle industry, specialty cuts like beef tongue or cheek meat are exported to a global market. She also says the global leather industry imports American cattle hide, with those goods often exported back to the States.
“They're shipped overseas, being made into very nice leathers, and then coming back as product.”
Gray said in the cattle industry, everything gets used but the “moo.” Hooves and horns are key ingredients for xanthan gum, a common food thickener and stabilizer that is also part of the global agricultural marketplace.
“The trade issue is very complicated. It's very in-depth. It's a big deal to us and our markets are changing by the minute,” Gray said.
Despite the uncertainty in the global market, Gray expresses her steadfast determination to keep this business and lifestyle for future generations. She said there is a place in agriculture for everyone, especially in Beltrami County, and shared she has sold cows to homesteading upstarts in Northern Minnesota.
“We're also starting to see a lot of young people really getting interested within it, and I know that there are definitely some first-generation beef producers, and to me that's really exciting.”
