Bridget Coon part 1 | #029

Bridget Coon:So even though they’re going to a larger processing facility, they’re going to be marketed under a brand that you might be familiar with seeing in the grocery store, that’s coming from ranches, family ranches like ours. Announcer:This is the Real Food Real People Podcast. Dillon Honcoop:From growing up on a farm in Western Washington to working next door to the White House, then back to Seattle and now farming in Eastern Washington, our guest this week has done so many things and has so much cool professional background, but she also has a really cool personal story. Bridget Coon, she and her husband and their family raise beef on a ranch in Benge, Washington. And as she says on her website, you’re probably going to have to Google where exactly that is. Dillon Honcoop:She shares how she got to know her husband, how she ended up in this career in politics and how that eventually led her back to her farming roots. And we also get into some of the sticky issues too, about food and about beef and the controversy. You’re really going to love this one. She’s a lot of fun to hear from and hear her stories. I’m Dillon Honcoop and this is the Real Food Real People podcast documenting my journeys across Washington State to get to know the real farmers and ranchers. And this week we talk with Bridget Coon on her ranch in Benge, Washington. Bridget Coon:We raise beef out here. It’s this really dry rocky scab land, and so about the only thing you can grow on it is beef. And we also raise hay for premium and export market, and then of course, those two commodities work together on our farm and ranch where we can feed hay throughout the winter. Dillon Honcoop:So some of your hay is for your cows. Bridget Coon:Yes. Dillon Honcoop:And the rest you sell to- Bridget Coon:Primarily, so we have basically two enterprises or two parts of our family farm with the hay and ranch with the cattle. Dillon Honcoop:So how does that work? How do you determine like which land you do hay on and which you do cattle on? Bridget Coon:So like I said, most of this is we’re in the channeled scab lands here. It was carved out a million years ago in the Missoula floods, and it’s just a lot of rock. You can’t grow anything. You can’t till it. You can’t farm it. So cows are about the only thing that can come from it that turns into food. Dillon Honcoop:There’s still quite a bit of grass and stuff though, around the rock, right? Bridget Coon:Yes. So it’s just what we’d call range land, and cattle are really good at taking what’s growing out here and we just do our part to manage the land, determine how many head of cattle can graze a pasture and keep the pasture healthy for us to be able to do this year, decade, generation after generation. That’s kind of our … that’s our job, I mean- Dillon Honcoop:How do you tell, like how do you know how many cows to put on a field, cattle I guess I should say. Bridget Coon:Cattle, yes. Dillon Honcoop:I grew up around dairy so all the cows- Bridget Coon:All your cows are cows. Dillon Honcoop:All the cattle were cows, yeah. But you have boys and girls. Bridget Coon:Yes, we do. So we mostly have, we are what’s considered a cow calf operation or a cow calf ranch. And so what we do is we have a herd of mother cows, and then we have a little squad of bulls and the cows are bred each year to produce a calf each year.