Welcome back to another exciting episode of the Farm4Profit Podcast, where we dig deep into the heart of modern farming and ranching. Today, we've got a real treat for you as we introduce a guest who's as passionate about ranching as he is about cooking up a storm in the kitchen.Our guest today is none other than River Klass, the charismatic host of "Ranch America," a show that takes you on a journey through the rugged landscapes and fascinating lives of ranchers across the country. Raised on a family ranch in Calaveras County, California, River has lived the authentic cowboy life, balancing his love for the land with his culinary talents.River isn't just a rancher—he’s a chef, an entrepreneur, and a storyteller. He's spent his life not only working the land but also sharing the stories of those who dedicate their lives to it. From raising cattle with his wife Marci and their team at Calaveras Cowgirl Beef to running two popular restaurants in Murphys, CA, River knows what it takes to make ranching and farming a way of life, not just a job.In today’s episode, we’ll hear some incredible stories—like how drones are replacing horses on the ranch, the tale of a $1.4 million bull, and the unforgettable experience of a Highland cow ranch visit. And of course, we'll dive into some lively discussions, touching on everything from protecting animals throughout their lives to the best cuts of meat, the importance of innovation in farming, and even what happens when wine meets cows.So, whether you're tuning in from the cab of your tractor or listening while tending to your herd, get ready for an episode packed with laughter, inspiration, and a whole lot of ranching wisdom. Let’s welcome River Klass to the Farm4Profit Podcast! Don’t forget to like the podcast on all platforms and leave a review where ever you listen!Websitewww.Farm4Profit.comShareable episode linkhttps://intro-to-farm4profit.simplecast.comEmail [email protected] to YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSR8c1BrCjNDDI_Acku5XqwFollow us on TikTokhttps://www.tiktok.com/@farm4profitConnect with us on Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/Farm4ProfitLLC/
You know what's fascinating to me is I'll go out all week with these guys and we'll, you know, up at 3.30, you know, get them horses all saddled up, get them fed, get a little something breakfast in and get out and work all day roping, chasing cattle, fixing fences, driving a truck. And then come Friday, these guys put their horses in the truck, drive three, four miles to town, pay...
to go into the rodeo and compete at riding, breaking horses, and roping. What they were doing all week as a job. They're paying to compete on the weekends. And I'm always the first one there. I love it.
david so tanner what i really gotta know is the juice worth the squeeze and tanner all right it's about time to wrap this baby up they're my favorite like farm for fun it's time to put aside the stress of the work boots sit down grab your favorite adult beverage and listen to the boys from farm for profit yay it says applause one two three here we go
There we go. Beckett, we could be on to something. Yeah. I mean, we need more people in here and maybe not to have a virtual guest. You know, it would sound cooler. But, yeah, this is another Farm for Fun episode here coming out right during Farm Progress Showtime. So maybe you're catching this on your drive home from Farm Progress. Yeah. Because this would be the Thursday of that, right?
That's right. And, yeah, thanks for being here. Hopefully we had a good time at Farm Progress Show. I think we did. I think we did. I think we did. We've got to talk about that in the future. It's kind of weird. But hopefully our after party on Wednesday went really well. Right. And there wasn't any fights or anything like that.
100%.
Probably not getting out of that.
Right. Right? We wouldn't be smart enough to not do that to ourselves. Yeah.
It is. But if you had fun at the party or the Farm Progress show or said hi to us, please tag us in some pictures on social media. Reach out to us. Let us know that we said hello. And if we didn't, razz us anyway.
And if you missed us there, couldn't make it, come see us at Husker Harvest in a couple weeks. We're going to be out there. I don't think we have an after party set up yet, but last time we did. I don't know. Maybe Kale will open us up. Maybe Laura's Bar. Just down the road would be good. So we could do something there, do some hanging out.
I like it. I'm excited for this guest because it's a little bit off the beaten path. It's not the type of guest that we typically have had. But ultimately, when we have episodes along this path, they've always performed really well. So this will be a unique one. Are you feeling like you're up to doing an interview? I feel it's a long time since I've queued you up.
It's been a long time. I haven't done one forever. And an intro. Let's see if I can get the music figured out. We're going to see if AI did me good. I tried something new. Today on the Farm for Fun episode, it is packed with stories of ranching, culinary adventures, and outdoor life. We're diving into the rich heritage of Calaveras County, California. What? You saying something over there? Yeah.
Where our guest runs an 800-head cattle operation alongside his wife, Marcy. You might know him as the host of Ranch America on the Outdoor Channel, where he showcases the true grit of American farming. And ranching from bison roundups to the world of highland cows. He's got a second season coming this September. That's like a couple days away from now when this comes out.
And you're about to get an exclusive sneak peek. Hold on tight as we welcome a cowboy, chef, and all-around ranching legend, River Klass. Yeah. All right. Welcome.
I need another pop back. Thank you. Thank you.
Hey, Doug.
Very nice to be here. I'm very, very proud to be speaking in the Midwest there, Iowa.
So you're coming from California, though, right?
Right. And there's a tiny little correction that you threw in one more zero than my herd. I wrench at least about 2,500 acres, but there's only 80. We can only get about 80, 85 head on that couple thousand acres.
See? I tried something. I said I tried something. I had chat GPT write that intro.
And I wish I could. I wish I had that 800. But I know my friends are listening to this, and one of those cowboys is going to see me, and he's like, there you are bragging again, River, bragging again.
I said it before we started recording. You got the hats for 800 cattle in the background.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Six hats. All hat, but definitely cattle too.
I apologize for that. No. Yeah, like I said, I've never – I think I've dabbled with the chat once in a while, and I'm like, I want to try something new and see if it could do it better. And I prompted it like three or four times, and I didn't catch that. And every time it added more cattle? Is that what it was? Maybe that's... I should go back and look at the edits.
It went from eight to 80 to 800 real quick.
Well, at least you didn't say eight. That would have been terrible to have that many hats and then only have eight heads.
1.2 hats. I don't know. I've got one hat and zero heads, so...
Yeah, we've actually got David, our co-host that isn't here, he's actually in the Dominican Republic right now swinging on the swing with his wife. I don't know, he just posted a picture of it. He got us into some cowboy hats when we were down in Houston for the Commodity Classic, and it's a felt one. We both need to get straw ones now for the summertime. Yes.
Yeah, definitely summer, straw, and then, yeah, winter with felt. Yeah, and you know what? Cheap ain't good and good ain't cheap.
Exactly. And it ain't cool to be cheap either. So what brand do you go with?
It's really the shape. So my felts all come, I like a guy called, it's Rand out of Billings, Montana. Once you get to a certain level of the felt, it's really the shaper. That's where you really, you find someone who knows how to shape for your head. That's going to make, he can make a hundred dollar hat look like a thousand dollar beaver. So it's the shaper that really can make a hat.
$1,000 beaver. Uh-huh. I watched – no comment. I watched a TikTok. I sent it to Dave, actually, of a – I'm going to call him a hat. What did he call a person that makes a hat?
Shaper.
A shaper? Because I was going to almost call him an artisan or an artist, hat artist or whatever.
The guy that makes the – if they make the felt, that's one company. But then the people, they bring those blanks in, and then they do the shaping. And that's the artisan.
Yeah, this TikTok I watched, they took the felt. I mean, it was kind of shaped like a hat, but they cut the edges. They did that for this lady. They rolled the edges. They shaped everything and tailored it to her. I mean, what a cool experience.
Oh, yeah. No, it's absolutely. Yeah, like this one here, this is probably the one I use the most. So just so you can see, it's for California. That's California flat hat.
Uh-huh. Yeah.
So, yeah, and what they do is – so this part will come, and it will be five, six inches. So we'll cut it to whatever length you want here, and then they'll shape all of this into anything you want. But, yeah, and what's amazing is once it gets on, I can ride my horse at a full gallop, and I think that will not come off my head.
That's amazing. And, yeah, the education that just David gave us. Yeah. was what every little bend and curve means. You know, you're a roper, you're a rancher, you know, like it's crazy.
They all, it all means something. Absolutely.
You wear your hat this way. You're single. You wear your hat this way. You're married.
Like it was like, Oh, and you go and you sit down at a, at a bar and someone, you know, some little gal's got a drink or two in her and she wants to try on your hat. If you're married or got a girlfriend, nobody touches a man's hat. Oh, wow.
Wow. I like that. We're learning the education. Man, I think that hat shaper that I saw on TikTok was out of Denver. Oh, yeah.
There's some great ones.
I think that's where Commodity Classic is this winter. Yep. So we should definitely do that.
That would be cool. Which one is the auctioneer of you all?
Dave, the one that's not here. Yeah.
Sorry. Because that's one of those things I want to do on the show. A friend of mine was down in Turlock last year when they did the World Championship in Turlock. I guess it's in Iowa this year, right?
Oh, it could be coming up.
I don't mean next year. No, it's 2025. The World Champion Auctioneers. And I'm going to try to get that on the Rant show because it's just such a – I love – auctioneering is the cruelest.
dave would love to participate he was just out in pittsburgh wasn't it pennsylvania yeah and there's several world champion uh auctioneers because there's there's uh different classes and you know so there's because he said there was the uh just the livestock guys got together and he was doing like i can't remember what he was doing but yeah that's the one that i was that was the was the livestock where they it was the world livestock auction championship auctioneer championship so
yep and dave dave can do that too yeah he would love to connect with you have you ever thought about auctioneering yourself or do you no no you know what i do do that's a lot of fun is i like to announce at the at rodeos i uh i i do them for my kind of rodeo which is ranch roping i have a couple of friends that that raise buck and bulls and so when they have a
When they're going to do the fertility or the yearlings, I love sitting there and just talking about them bulls and how they buck and how they spin. Me to sit for a couple hours and just talk and make fun of people, if there's going to be a raffle or something like that, I'll know everybody in the stands. I'll start razzing them to get them to get some money out of their pockets.
That I like to do.
That's good. Our listeners know that when I first met my wife, I told her I wanted to be a rodeo clown. And I got the shirt on for you. Yeah, I could do it today. I just need a little face paint. Get it all up and put together.
That is some of the toughest people I've ever met at a rodeo, the rodeo clown.
See, I'd be perfect. I'm just that tough. You'd get thrown around like a rag doll. I was just thinking about, you know, he said he keeps his hat on at full gallop. And I was, we were at amusement park and they kept telling you to take your hat off when you went on the roller coaster. I'm like, you realize that I've got my hats to where they don't fall off either.
Yeah.
I can get on a side-by-side we can take off. I ain't got to change anything around. But, no, they'd still make you put it in a stupid cubby.
Yeah. See, I used to be like that, and I've gotten to the point where I don't like it really tight on my head, so it will. They made me turn my hat around backwards on the big slide at State Fair last year. Oh, really? Yeah. You better turn that around.
That's why I can notice my forehead here is all bright white because everything is usually down to my eyebrows. Yeah. My wife cuts my hair, so she's a hairdresser in Sacramento, so she said. Put that hat off for this. You're in the house right now. Let that hair grow. That's pretty good.
So I've got to pull up on our screen in the studio where Calaveras County is. So it looks like you are east of San Francisco, south of Sacramento.
Not necessarily south. I would say southeast. We're sort of the county between Tahoe and Yosemite. Right in the Sierra Foothills. It is, without question, one of the most amazing counties in California. I think we have 52. I moved here 35 years ago. We had one stoplight. I've been here 35 years. We're up to a record of three. Okay. So there's no highways. There's no freeways.
We do have one Starbucks, so that's getting a little rough. Oh, yeah. But it's a real tiny, quiet little county that is very famous. Nine miles down the road is Angels Camp. That's where Mark Twain wrote about the Calaveras jumping frogs. Oh, yeah. And we still do every single year. And it's unbelievable. These people are fanatical about getting their frogs. And you have to get the frogs wild.
You have to keep them well fed and calm. You jump them, and then they have to go back to exactly where you hunted them down. It's religion for people up here. And there's about $23,000 in the pot right now for the longest jump.
Yeah.
I did not know.
It's just one jump. It's actually it's one, two, three jumps. And that's so that's why they're 21, 22 feet. It's it's a real deal.
And now a quick word from one of our sponsors, Brandt Agricultural Products.
Reach farther and work smarter with Brandt XT grain carts.
unloading grain has never been easier with unmatched auger visibility four direction spout control and complete grain tank clean out so you can unload fast and fill the truck evenly worry-free lead the field and keep your combines moving with the xt grain carts from brand visit brandt.ca for more information so it's not a frog that's like just
from your area, you guys have this competition?
Yeah, it could be anywhere in California, and you get them from, you know, you got your special pond, it's like mushroomers, you know, they got their special spot, they got their special pond, they'll collect up 10, 15, 20, they'll try to see which one has the biggest hop, then they come to the county fair in May, and it's three days of jumping, and you try to get to the end, you know, we've had eight-year-old girls win the whole thing, we've had six
65-year-old men win the whole thing. It is a remarkable competition.
How do you tell them apart? Do they have little frog jerseys or something?
I was going to say, can we sponsor a frog? Can we have a farm for profit?
Jumping frogs. It was a real thing. A little tiny angels camp nine miles down the road. Back when ranchers and farmers could take afternoons off and they didn't have to have three and four jobs, a couple of beers and nothing to do and someone started betting on how far a frog would jump and
Mark Twain, then Samuel Clemens, was in town, and he saw it, couldn't believe there were some drunk guys betting on this, and he wrote this very first published thing about our town.
That's amazing. I'm reading it here that there are actual frog jockeys that train the frogs.
They're not riding the frogs. They stand behind them, and they do this, like,
jump on you know like behind you like make a make a noise make a pump to get them to make their three jumps yeah so it's a good frog jockey knows how to get the frog to continue moving forward in a straight line because the final distance is measured after that third jump so if they jump three times in a really big circle you get a score of zero feet that's it exactly and then right up the hill at the top of the other side of the eastern side of the county county we've got big trees and
So here's a place where you can stand 20 feet from a tree that was around before Jesus Christ.
Right. Were those the Redwoods?
To stand next to a tree that was 300 years old when Julius Caesar was just born. It puts weird things into perspective when you stand next to something like that.
Is that the Redwoods?
Yeah, they're the big trees of Calaveras County.
Okay. Wow. Because when we were down at the World Ag Expo, we went up and saw General Sherman. Yeah. And my lord. It is. Anyone should do that. Everyone should. It's amazing.
It just gives you a little bit. I mean, you were hopefully around for 80, 90, maybe 100 years. And that's a couple of seconds for these behemoth trees. They're 2,000 years. How many winters? How many storms? How many crazy events in life? They've just stood there and are still alive.
It's amazing to me. They don't even know how old they can get because they die from toppling trees. Or storms or a fire or something like that, right?
Fire. Well, fire's not so bad. They need fire, but it can be – it's usually something – beetles or – what happened to us is up there is us. We did it. There's a really good story. One of the biggest trees, they still have the stump. It was used as a bowling alley. That's how long – it's like 30 feet in diameter. Wow. The guys cut it down. So they cut through it.
And now the cool thing is to watch something that's 30 feet in diameter. I don't know how many hundreds and hundreds of feet. Everybody wants to watch it hit the ground.
Yeah.
Well, you can't push it over when it's 30 feet in diameter. So you have to wait for the wind. So they're sitting around. Nothing's happening. They ran out of hooch. They walked down to the The Camp Connell, about four or five miles, so I had to walk down. It's going to take a couple hours to get down and get back. Grabbed some hoops, came back up. Tree was laying down. No one ever heard it fall.
Oh, so that's the whole old wives tale, right? Yeah. If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound? Yeah. Nobody knows. Not when you're drunk and going for more booze. Silent tree. So you hinted at it. Corey did it in the intro. You hinted at it saying you want to include auctioneers in it. Tell us about this TV show.
Well, yeah, I think it comes out with a real straightforward premise. I'm in the market. I'm in my restaurants. I'm in my market. I see people ordering ribeye, looking at the ground beef at the market, and there's a disconnect. They don't understand what it took to get that red meat from the ranch to that market. And you've had some great guests in here, some, you know, backgrounders.
We call them backgrounders, feeders. You know, I'm a cow-calf. I'm actually, the whole way I go cow-calf. And then if I, with some of my steers, I come and they go right into the restaurant. Some I take to market. But I have a closed herd because they work really well and they make a great grass-finished beef for my thing.
I just knew that people had no idea what it takes to get this beef to market, what it takes to take a live animal that's not confinement. Chickens are confinement. Hogs, as you guys know, you guys have some hogs on your properties. Hogs are confinement. You can't confine cattle, not with what they're running in Wyoming and in Montana and Texas and all over California.
So you've got these guys and gals. Some of the best cowboys in the world I know are cowgirls. that are working for at least 20 months, 24 months to get them to market. I go 30, 36 months. You know, I've always said I love this animal. I protect this animal. I serve this animal until it's time for them to serve me. I just was telling some people in my restaurant about how
I'm not a big hunter, love fishing. But when I put them steers that I've known, I know their grandmothers, their great grandmothers, great, great grandmothers. When I put them in my trailer and take them to market or take them to slaughter, just like anyone who hunts. But I don't take it for granted. I'm grateful. I know what's going.
And I wanted to make a show that showed just how you're getting that beef into that big box store. or that local market, or that farmer's market, that there's ranchers, that there's farriers, that there's auctioneers, there's livestock markets, there's saddle makers, there's hat makers.
It takes every one of these people to get those calves healthy enough that they can go and get slaughtered, get processed, and get one of the most nutrient-dense meats for us to eat and enjoy and satisfy us. I do go to a lot of ranches and I meet a lot of ranchers. The average ranch in America, 1,200 acres, 50 head.
Number one protein in America is beef and 88% of the ranches are only 50 head, average 50 head. It's not a full-time job anymore. You guys talk about that all the time. Everyone's got to have, we call them town jobs. They're welders, farriers.
I tell everybody every time, man, if every morning I could get up, go load my best horse, put him in that trailer, run out to the ranch and just check fence all day, doctor a couple of cows, get some pink eye, maybe a hoof, put that horse back in the trailer, crack a beer and come home, that'd be the happiest job I could ever do. I would be living in a tent My wife would leave me.
It's just not feasible anymore.
Now, wait a minute. You're a rancher and a TV star, and you said you have restaurants.
Yeah.
So what are you? What is River?
I started... I'm a first-gen rancher, so let's be clear about that. I say this all the time. I'm a wannabe cowboy, but then again, I don't know anybody that doesn't want to be a cowboy. I took and started a restaurant when I was 29 in the littlest town I could find so that I could get out of that kitchen, get home, ride, help some friends on their ranches, just be a cowboy. I loved it.
I loved doing it. I thought the You know, I'd always worked in restaurants growing up, and so I knew how to do it. I thought that would pay the bills, and I'd have fun after that. The restaurants did well. Well, the first restaurant did well. The second one I opened up 19 feet away. One's kind of real fancy. That's a whole story, man. I don't know what I was thinking.
Most people, they, they open up their little hamburger stand and they do well. And they're like, Oh, I'm going to open a really fancy restaurant. No, not me. I opened a really fancy restaurant, work my took us off. And the minute I can find a place, uh, I open up the burgers, pizzas, and tacos. And there's, there's nine, they're 19 feet apart.
So I, I'm not a, when they say you're a restaurateur, there's only 19 feet between the restaurants. So it isn't, it ain't that big of a deal. And, um, And I love it. I love our little town. I love everybody that comes through. We get a lot of tourism. We've got Alison Krauss and Robert Plant coming Wednesday to the local amphitheater that's 1.5 miles from downtown.
We've had Brad Paisley, Hank Williams Jr., Shell Crow. We've had them all out here. It's a cool little town. So that's where I was starting and I was having some great fun with it. One day, 15 or so, 20 years ago, a couple of cows ended up on the property and Two became six and eight and 12, and there it was. Then it was 800.
Yeah, it was 800.
Yeah, then it went to 800. Your lips to God's ears. That's where it really started. That's where the TV show came because someone was in town that started hearing me, you know, after maybe a beer or six, hearing me just rant about how silly this is, that beef is so intense, so hard to raise. There's so much USDA inspection required.
to be able to sell them in the markets, to be able to sell them at my restaurants.
And I just, if nothing else, if people watch this show and they see the guy that builds bells so that we can find the cows when we got leased property up in BLM, if they can just, when they stand there in front of the market and they're looking at ribeyes or tri-tips or something, and they just take a small moment and go, somebody, somewhere, work their ass off to grow that beef and get it here.
It really did. You know, we've talked with quite a few people that say they started their social media channel for this reason. They wanted to educate the consumer. And this will be the first time I think that we're ever talking to someone who has their own TV show that started the TV show to educate the consumer. Maybe Rob Sharkey to an extent. But ultimately...
I think it's fascinating to learn the why behind why you started that and appreciate that. Do you think it really matters? Do you think it's making a difference?
I can only tell when I get the connection to people. And let me be real clear, I'm on the Outdoor Channel. So this is a lot of Midwest, a lot of guys that are over 60. They're working on streaming. Man, I can't tell you how many of my local cowboy friends are You know, in their 20s and 30s, and they're like, all I got is YouTube when I get to cow camp. How can I watch it?
I'm like, here's a thumb drive, brother. You can watch it that way. When I'm in the airports or I'm in a farmer's market and someone comes up to me and I get to engage with them, and especially the second time.
The second time I get to see them, and they take the taste of the meat, and they appreciate that they know the guy that grew it, what the guy did to grow it, how much physical connection I have to have with my animals. It's not me, and I will never disparage between grass-fed or corn. We all work really hard to raise them animals. It's all delicious.
If someone watches this and they take a small pause, maybe at the plate, bow ahead a second, I think that's everything. I think it's important. I think that we can't take it for granted. 1% of America is growing all the food for all Americans. You guys know that. That's what you guys do. All of the people that you bring on your show grow.
People, they think, oh, look at these guys and their brand new Fords and Chevys. They must be making a bunch of money. I'm like, well, when I got three of my most expensive horses in the back of my trailer and I'm 400 miles on a gravel road, the last thing I can do is have a 1977 Chevy break down. Right.
Yeah, you need the reliability. Yeah.
Yeah. And I kind of did it backwards. I just got laughed right out of a restaurant the other night with some friends who went to my Instagram and found out that I had a whopping 158 followers. Wow. So I haven't quite taken that that stride to make. And even though we're in our second season, we started our third. We're already filming our third season. So we're already going to go on that.
I haven't taken the time to. What was that? Oh, yeah. Instagram River Class at Ranch America. See, I'm trying to figure. Yeah. Yeah, so that's how you can follow me at River Class at underscore Ranch America.
Well, you still have more Instagram followers than I do.
I don't know what the code is to crack Instagram when you don't have a nice set or, you know, like that. That's right up. You know, that's the easy route. Yeah.
You know. Good. Definitely so. Everyone I talk to that wants to promote you, their first question is, well, how many followers do you have? I'm like, I got three trucks.
Let's talk about the story, man.
It's the story. He needs the Tom Brady jawline, the really white smile, the drink on the eyes.
I want to know because I don't get much time to consume media, even though I'm in media, I don't get much time to even get on YouTube or, uh, watch Netflix or the outdoor channel, even though I love hunting and farming and all that kind of stuff. Is this all filmed on, on your ranch or do you go around?
Oh man, you guys are good at this. Yeah. This is actually really fun because on my show, I'm you, I'm the host.
Yeah.
And so this is really fun for me to go to, to see beyond this side. No, what we do is we get the first season was tough because we had to call people. And I don't know if you all had many interactions with cowboys. I'm sure farmers are probably the same way. Man, getting them to talk. It's like you got to squeeze them to get something out of them. Yes and no is about the biggest answer.
So now that the show's been out for one season, we're going and we got into that. People have been coming out from, man, the guys in North Dakota, Billings, Montana, Whitefish, Montana. They've contacted us and said, hey, we've got a really cool operation up here. We've got ag tourism. We're running 400 head of cattle, but I've got four kids.
They can't take over this ranch with four kids and make a living. So we're going to put in a brewery. We're going to put in a bed and breakfast. We're trying everything. Come up and see us. And so I travel all over. We've been to Texas. We've been to Wyoming, all of the states. And we meet with ranchers. I go out and I'm not just talking to them. I mean, I obviously like to talk.
The show's not really interesting if you're just, if you're just, you know, two of us are just talking. My favorite stuff is they pull up a nice blue roan out of a trailer. We get on one of them horses and we go out and we do some work. We go and we brand. We go out and we go check fence. We go doctor a hoof. You know, I like, I like, I can talk, we can talk, you know, at a full trot to get out.
I mean, man, Tyler out in Riverton at, what was it? Wyoming Cowboy Cuts. That's someone to look into. Boy, he's a good man. He is working hard at bringing beef to the market. And he even takes, I'm terrible at science, he even has a way of feeding a couple of his steers red wine to put a wine flavor into the beef.
Wow.
Yeah.
I think if I was a steer and I had the opportunity to be wine drunk all the time. Heck yeah.
Yeah, he grains them out on some of the best crack grain and gets some red wine in there. And he says, he won't tell me the secret of how he does it, but he says the flavor is amazing and I tasted it. But for me, he was funny too. He's like, oh, let's go out. We got to go pick up four or five of my bulls that are out on the small pasture. I'm like, okay, no problem.
We travel out, pull over, and he's like, okay, we're here. We're going to go get them. They're on the other side. This is our little small acre, 17,000 acres. That was a small. But we go out, and we'll just trot out and ride, and the drone will kind of try to follow us, and we're all mic'd up, and we'll talk for an hour just at a full trot. And just, man, it's my favorite thing in the world.
I'd rather be working and And giving vaccines and pulling ear tags than just sitting in a chair talking to them because I like to be busy.
So who's running your ranch and your restaurants when you're gone doing that?
Well, I think that when you have restaurants and you're not there, you have a lot of partners. As in, I don't believe everything works. that is consumed in my restaurant gets paid for, but most things are getting paid for.
As long as you have more at the end of the month than when you started.
The restaurants, my first one, Grounds, I started when I was 29. I'm 61, so that's 32 years ago. It's an institution. I have incredible, incredible staff. They are more committed to it than to me. And, um, firewood is 20, the one right next to it. That's 22 years old. Uh, don't know. 24 years old started in 2000. And it's just, it's, I have an incredible staff. They are, I pay, I pay really well.
Luckily because of the restaurants, because of the TV shows, because of ranching, I, I long ago. And that I, I, I am really good at living below my means really good. So I just I like I like making sure that my staff gets paid better than anywhere else. They don't have to go anywhere.
And if I can make a little over a long time, that's a way better way to go than to be constantly retraining someone so that I can squeeze them like an orange.
So I wrote down a couple of things while you were chatting and we recognize, too, you talk about going into the third season and people are starting to reach out to you. Our podcast really grew and our channels really grew when we started listening to the suggestions that our listeners were giving us.
The guests that they were introducing us to, the opportunities that they were providing, either they wanted to be on or knew somebody that would be a great show. So it's cool to see that I bet you it grows even more and more when you get suggestions from those that have watched or want to be on.
100%. Wayne Muth out of North Dakota. We all watched, not everybody, but a lot of people, not my cowboy friends, but a lot of my friends watched Yellowstone. Longmire was one of my favorites. That's Colorado. A lot of people think of Texas cattle, California cattle, but North Dakota? Let me tell you guys, if you've never been to North Dakota, there's a reason why they call it North Dakota nice.
That is some of the most beautiful,
beef country i've ever seen and some of the nicest people and i had never found out about the place had a listener during covid watching the show go oh this this son of a gun's got to come out and meet my friends and i've been out there three times now and chef angus 1.5 million dollar bulls coming right out of mandan north dakota here's my favorite part you know they're like oh we're gonna go see this guy that he makes branding irons he's there in mandan
And I was like, oh, okay, let's go meet a guy that makes branding irons. Like, I mean, branding iron, that's all your local welders. We pull up and it's L&H, L&H branding irons. I'm like, L&H? So I called my wife, hey, hon, take a picture of our electric branding iron, send it to me. I have an L&H branding iron I bought 25 years ago. Right there in Mandan, there I am going to do an interview.
with the man whose grandfather patented the electric branding iron in St. Anthony, North Dakota. And I would have never found any of these people or any of these things had it not been a viewer.
That's cool. That's so cool.
I tell you, these doors just keep swinging open because people get into the show and they're like, you've got to come see this. I've got something cool you've got to see here.
I was pulling up these websites. So first, the Cowboy Cuts guy obviously must be really popular because everything was out of stock on his website.
Well, okay, so that is a big misnomer. And people always are like, oh, River, come on, man. I'm trying to get a freaking ribeye from you. Well, they're not Dutch hounds. You know, there's only so much ribeye on every steer, and you can't just – You know, we get, you know, 1,000 pounds off, 750 pounds off a steer. It isn't all ribeye. There's a lot of ground meat. There's a lot of tri-tip.
There's a lot of chuck, a lot of ground, you know. But, you know, the fillet is only, what, so long. There's only two of them.
Anyone can sell the fillet and the ribeyes. To be successful at selling direct-to-consumer ordered restaurants, you've got to get rid of the ground.
That's what I'm gifted at. I've got a smash burger at Firewood. Here's my favorite part about this. Again, I'm terrible at my self-promotion. I think I have a little piece of paper that sits by the cash register that says, don't forget to try River's smash burger. The smash burger that I have at Ground, I get to run all my ground beef. I'll go into that.
I take my steers and I grind the whole animal. Wow. From tail to cheek, whole thing. So the ribeyes, the fillets, the tri-tips, the brisket, whole animal.
And I'm telling you, I don't know if I would do it if I was selling it, but because I've got the economy of scales, the flavor of the burger having all of that, the real high-end meats and then the chucks, oh, I'm telling you, it's one of the most addictive hamburgers I've ever had.
Sounds like a shirt. Tail to tongue. Tail-to-tongue, that's what we need.
Tail-to-tongue.
River smash bird.
Tail-to-tongue.
I didn't want to put the tongue in there because we sell the tongues a lot. No, it's tail-to-cheeks. Tail-to-cheeks.
Or cheek-to-cheek.
How about cheek-to-cheek? There you go. There you go. Cheek-to-cheek. Yeah, I'm writing it down.
Cheek-to-cheek. Do it. We always had, I always grew just FFA 4-H cattle growing up, showed a pen of three, pen of five down at the county fair, and we always had, one of my friend's moms grew up on tongue and liver. And all that. She would take it out of everything because no one ever wanted it. Yep. She would take it. Yep. Loved it.
Around here we get, because of all of the different nationalities, our valley with all the growers down there, Portuguese and the Armenians and the Mexicans, everyone, all these amazing people that all live and work in our valley. All that awful goes really fast. They make a lot. Those guys that run that stuff through. Tongue, I absolutely love Tongue. Tongue makes a great taco.
I'd love to try that. Nice. I didn't even think about that in a taco.
Well, so here's something that people need to think about is we think of beef as, you know, the ribeyes and the fillets as being the best ones. Anything that gets the most blood, so you got your cheeks, your tail, your shanks, the more blood the muscle gets, the more flavor it has. The problem is you ain't going to get it medium rare. Right. Yeah, those are all slow-cooked, long-cooked.
So tongue, cheeks, shanks, oh, these are my favorite. That's my favorite, favorite thing. And, you know, people are like, oh, but I don't like to roast in the summer. I'm like, that's why we make tacos, buddy. Throw them in the crock pot, let it go all day, come home at night, taco.
Yeah, that sounds good. So are those your favorite cuts, or is there one that you haven't mentioned yet?
My most favorite of all cuts, the one I keep, it used to actually call the butcher cut, is the hanger steak. It's unbelievable. And it's really funny. That's another thing I want to show in this show, and I really made this come up. We've gone to several custom butcher shops because that's going away.
That's another art form that is a guy that can really butcher, can really break down an animal into I mean, if you take it to someone who does a schlock, you know, you're going to lose a lot of weight. And that's meat going out his door, out on the floor, going away and not into your pocket. But you get an artist, man, they are going to cut that animal so well.
Now I'm hungry.
I know. I think it's the same thing.
I mean, and I think there's a lot – I mean, like, you know, that's where, like, flat iron and flank steaks, those were – no one used to cut those because the butchers used to take those home. Yeah. You know? you know, the top sirloin and, and, you know, the chin, the big roasts were what, you know, Mr. And Mrs. We're buying to bring home.
That's awesome.
Um, how did you get started with a TV show? And was this your first TV show?
Uh, yeah. Oh God. Yeah. I was, uh, I was in L.A. I did spend about a year or two down in L.A. when I first got California way and I was like oh this is a terrible place to live and And I knew that there was no way that I was going to be an actor. That was not going to be in my way.
But you had aspirations of that? You weren't there thinking that?
I don't think anyone – I'm not shy about being famous. I don't have any problem wanting to be that. But I didn't want to be an actor. I just wanted to go right to the movie star, and that wasn't going to happen. And I just couldn't I just didn't like L.A. at all. So that that didn't work out at all.
I I really when I got to Los Angeles and no sorry to everybody that sees this and talks or listens in L.A. I'm sure you got one or two people.
Maybe probably one or two.
That's a that's a tough town down there. And when I when I found this little town of Murphy's in Calaveras County with its one little road, it had three wineries at the time were about 20 now.
um i i was like this is heaven there was no good place to eat a hotel great place lovely place mark twain usually ulysses s grant uh susan b anthony they'd all stayed there i was like this is home i'm staying right here and i was like well the only thing i know i can do is i get with for you know for a very few dollars i can throw a grill down and espresso machine and i can put a keg of beer up and i can start just you know slinging food and
It was it was easy. I've never been a nine to five or I just like your show. One of the shows I just made was on June 10th or the one of them, you know, guys like us, you know, that nine to five things never really worked. I get up and I'm going to either go this way or I'm going to go this way or this one. The problem is going to happen here and I'm going to go there and then I'll go over here.
So that all worked out, and the TV show was a complete fluke. A producer out of Sacramento, there's one producer in Sacramento and his partner is in Huntsville, Alabama. They have Dead Meat, which is a TV show where he goes and kills the most bizarre animals like iguanas in Florida and parrots in South America, and then they cook it. it's pretty, it's not for the faint.
And he then made another show. They made another show called fishmonger that did really well. That said how tough it is to fish these days on both coasts. You know, fishermen have a, they really get their butts kicked trying to get fish to market.
Right.
And he was like, and the producers were thinking, gotta be something about this. And he happened to be up here on vacation and he heard me ranting and raving about it. And he's like, this is our guy. And we did a screen test. That was probably my favorite thing. We did a little screen test where I just rode around, went up and did some roping in my arena, went out and fed my cattle.
And then he interviewed me a little bit and he, they put it all together. It looked pretty good. A little sizzle reel. And he said, okay, we're going to, we're going to put this into the outdoor channel. You know, it's going to take a couple of months. They're going to take a look at it and find out if there's a place for it. So settle down. Don't worry about it. You know, no news is good news.
And this was a Thursday afternoon. And he said, so let's go take a bit. And sure as enough, Friday morning, the next morning, he called up and said, I've never seen it. But they just took us on for eight shows. We're ready to go. They sent us the money. We're ready to go. And the neat thing was they said, the Outdoor Channel, we cook enough. We want action.
We want this guy riding, talking, branding. We want to see exactly how this happens. Just like that calf comes out of a first-year heifer. It's got scours. He's got an $85,000 new Ford, and he's sticking that calf in the back. It's shitting and belching and throwing up all over the place. That's fine. That's what it'll do. That's what a rancher will do.
That's awesome.
Wow. So it's funded by the Outdoor Channel, or did you have to source the sponsors yourself?
That's actually my favorite part and probably the reason why I'm a little bit jaded is Outdoor Channel, there's very few, and I know it's less than probably five, shows that they actually own and produce, and we're one of them. I am sponsored by Carhartt and Camp Chef. And there's a couple of some spice companies. But we are not... They are not sending... They're sending us...
barbecues for me to use if I'm barbecuing. They've sent me Carhartt shirts to wear when I'm being riding. But I don't have to say a word about it. We get a budget. The budget's here. We go out and we shoot the shows. And it really takes a lot of pressure. We don't have to spend all day going, boy, look at my gun and look at my scope and look at my shirt.
We can really, really get to the rancher, talk about the guy and the gals that raise the horses, build the saddles, work the rodeos, you know, the pickup men at the rodeo, the guys in every livestock market that's in every county in America. So it's fun for me.
That sounds fun. It sounds fun for anybody.
It is. I mean, I'm telling you people, my wife used to travel for a living and she's like, oh my God, I can't believe you want to get on a plane. And I'm like, are you kidding me? I get up four in the morning, because the airport's a couple, three hours away. I'm like, I'm up, I'm at the airport. oh, it gets delayed or it gets canceled. I'm like, I'm in an airport.
There's magazines and restaurants everywhere. I got nothing. I can read a book and I don't get this kind of time to do nothing. And then I get to meet the most fascinating people. And I'm telling you, I am not one of the, I'm not fifth, sixth generation. I'm first gen, first gen. So from one to 10, 10 being your sixth generation rancher and Zero being all hat, no cow. I'm about a two or three.
So I got the cow. I've roped. I got a couple of buckles. I got a bunch of horses. But I am still learning every minute of every day. And just the other day, I was in South Dakota. And we were doctoring on some cattle, and they had pink eye. And now here, we pink eye. We have a medicine we put in. We put a patch over our old Levi's.
We cut our old Levi's out, and we blew a little patch over the eyes. These guys were showing me how they take their LA-200, which is an antibiotic, and they can stick it right into the muscle right above there, and I'd never seen it. No one had ever taught. I'm usually by myself. I'd have to be out cowboying with someone and see them do it. I'm sitting right there. I am learning. Every time.
In California, we do head and heel. So we get all the calves in with their mamas. Everything's nice and calm. We want to keep beef on the cattle. We want them to stay calm. We don't want any of the adrenals going. Stay easy. So we walk in quiet. We throw loops on the calves, head them up.
kind of give them a little tug out, heel them, drag them to the fire, brand them, castrate, tag them, then right back to their mother. Now, I'm over here in the Dakotas. They drag and heel. Man, we did 350 calves in a couple hours. Five or six cowboys in there. They're just grabbing the heels, and they'll pull them out. There's a whole line of guys. That minute that calf gets out there,
They're on it. They've stretched it. Someone's got the vaccine. Someone's got the castration. They got a crayon to mark so you can see if the calf's done. You'll never have to guess. And I was like, this is brilliant. They're back to their mothers even faster. I love that kind of sharing of information and thought.
Now, when I was in there doing the branding and I kept grabbing one heel instead of two, And I pulled my calf up, and I said, you know, I only got one heel. Is that okay? And he said, well, it's okay. It's not good, but it's okay.
That's what Corey tells me all the time. He says, you're okay. Not good, but you're okay.
You're good. That's the cool part about this.
For me, it's unbelievable.
I mean, that's what's so cool about media in general, social media, whatever, this, you know, your show. You're learning from people across the country that you would have never had a chance to before.
No possible way I would ever get to Riverton, Wyoming. This place is, you have to go a long ways to get nowhere from that place. And Tyler is one of the nicest guys I ever met. And I learned more about beef from him and his two daughters than I've ever done. It's incredible.
Man, that's so cool.
I was going to say, it sounds like a dream.
So you've got a new season coming out. Obviously, the first season is out. What can we look forward to this season?
And then on September 27th, the second season airs. It's going to be fun. We do a couple things. Anthony Thomas, who's a NFR... bareback rider, which that's just who are anybody to bareback rides. That's just, that's just insane. Insane.
I couldn't even practice on his, on, on his little wooden dummy to try to hold my feet up in the, in the, in the markout position and then get my glove in and then try to get that glove out. And I'm only on a, on a, on a saw horse. I don't know how these guys do it, but we got, he's got a cattle company and he's selling beef and to go around with him, Jace Angus, uh, uh, saddle bronc rider.
We're going to be, um, uh, Benny Paulson, who's an NFR bull rider, he's doing regenerative ranching. We're all over, and we really get to meet some people. And the main thing is a lot about what you guys have been doing on your show. We're showing that these people, to survive, they've got to think out of the box. They've got to think.
Like I said earlier, there was a woman in the first season, one of the gals, she said, the death of any ag business is when, when a person says, well, that's how we've always done it because that's the way we always done it. That don't work no more. And we have got to innovate and we are making all the food that we need to, that we are, that we're consuming in America.
And like that one fellow said that you had on the show, I can't remember it. I wrote his name down, but I don't know where it is. You know, being able to show that this beef is coming from here in America, not from somewhere else, where the ground beef is, so you don't have 30 countries when you go to one of the big box stores.
There's a lot of stuff we can do on both sides, from the packers, you know, and I can always, you know, like anyone, I can get down on the packers like everybody can. That's a whole episode right there. But the guys and gals that are working their butts off, either growing it, or raising it so that we can eat it. These people, they've got to be innovating and they need to be shown.
Their story has to get out there so that when you go to your market, you just say, hey, thank God for them. The reason why I have leases is It's not because I have the money. I don't have the money for it. Why is there land coming up for lease? It's because families that are five and six generations, their kids are like, hello, that's way too much work.
I'm going to go to the city, work from nine to five, make a whole bunch of money. No one's calling me on a Saturday night because my calf's out on the highway. No one's calling me because my heifer needs to have a calf pulled out of it. Yeah, I understand. But like you say and like a lot of your guests say, it's a virus. It's in, and I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't have it any other way.
So you said you're filming season three right now?
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Give us an exclusive. So we're talking about season two right now. That's what we're promoting.
But what's going to be cool about season three? I have to say – One that I know that we're working on right now is a sea punch ranch out of Lovelock, Nevada. 1.5 million acres. Whoa. And the guys and cowboys that work that, it's just amazing. Their horsemanship, their... The way they handle and treat the animals, the love that they have for the animal, and they don't own.
They are just working cowboys. It's the truest Yellowstone you're going to see. It's real bunkhouses. There's not going to be any girls in the bunkhouses. Well, there's one lady. She cooks.
I bet she's damn good at it, too.
She's not a barrel racer. She's not a barrel racer. She's not a barrel racer.
We've heard about them. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
You know what's fascinating to me is I'll go out all week with these guys and we'll, you know, up at 3.30, you know, get them horses all saddled up, get them fed, get a little something breakfast in, and get out and work all day roping, chasing cattle, fixing fences, driving a truck. And then come Friday, these guys put their horses in the truck, drive three, four miles to town, pay
That's awesome.
Yeah, and then if you come out here for the world champion... auctioneer stuff, you'll have to get with David.
Yeah, and that's something, another thing, people, you know, people think, you know, I mean, even on, what was it, Letter Kenny, that Canadian show, they make fun, you know, people always make fun of these auctioneers, because it's a funny thing that these auctioneers, what they say, it is, It's not something normal people see on a day-to-day basis. Me, I see it every Wednesday.
That's great.
Wow.
I'm looking forward to it. I want to get together with you when you come out to Iowa.
Yeah. I absolutely want to do that.
No, this has been an absolute pleasure. And as you've listened to some of our shows, you know that we always have a question at the end that we try to provide our audience with a little extra insight. And right now we're trying to help those listeners of ours that feel like they maybe don't balance work and personal life the best way.
So the question we've been asking is, how do you juggle work and family?
Ah, that's a really good one.
The best part about it, right, is there's no wrong answer.
Yeah, absolutely. No, I'm trying to be – it's making me think about it so that I can come up with what's coming from here. And I have to say that every day, the day starts great, even if the first phone call – is something's broken right before that phone call. The day is just great.
And I don't, I know that no matter how rich a person is or how handsome person is or how healthy the person is, I really value what a person does when things go wrong. How do they handle that? What, what, you know, what do they do with that challenge?
If they're going to, if it's what I've had to learn, it's what makes me, my wife, my kids, what we get along with is if I guarantee you something's going to go wrong every single day. If you know that, that that's going to happen and you roll with it, it's a challenge. Let's see if we can fix it. And you don't make other people's life miserable and you just get things done. Life was a lot easier.
I know every time I'm driving down the road, I got a bunch of trucks, but I drive this beat-up old 90 Chevy. My wife does not like to drive. Seats all beat up. Has a hole in the exhaust pipe. And I don't drive over 35 miles an hour. People see this truck coming, they know they're going to use a different road because they're not going to go slow.
If someone comes up real fast on my butt, I just pull right over. And I think that guy... His mom, he just got a call. His mom's in the hospital and he's got to get there. And I'm like, you know what? If I pull over and he's gone and he gets there, great. If he's a pain in the butt and he's just being that kind of person, he's out of my life. Either way, I've won.
He's on his way to his mom or he's out of my life.
I don't know the last time that I've driven 35 mile an hour just going somewhere.
our roads are a little twisty up here we don't have those i've been i've been on those like some of those roads in in like in north dakota especially those ones you got those roads where it's flat and then it goes drops down one of those yeah the ditches and it's a gravel it's a dead flat gravel road and it's dead straight um i i can't believe the speeds that some of you guys all drive those those those on gravel yep yeah
I prefer gravel. More grip. More grip.
Well, well.
No, kind of. More play. There you go. It depends on if it's icy or not.
We were going down the road, and the old guy that was driving me, he goes down into the little divot and then goes out onto the pasture. And when we came off and we went down that side, man, I puckered. I mean, it was steep. And he reached over and just tapped me on the shoulder and goes – Don't worry, son. She'll slide before she'll roll.
Oh, yeah.
That's good. I like that.
Yeah, I think if, you know, life is, life's, I'm so grateful for existence and struggle is part of existence. So, as Jace Angus, probably one of the coolest guys I know, NFR, Saddle Blanc rider, Embrace the suck because it's going to be there. And the great thing about good things is the same thing about bad times. They're both over. They're both going to get over.
Yes, they are. Well, that's good. That's a good way to end. And I hope this isn't the last time that we chat because I had a lot of fun.
I had a lot too, gentlemen. Yeah.
It won't be. He's going to make me go watch TV, and I haven't watched TV for a long time. So how do we watch it? Nope. How do the listeners watch it?
Okay, so definitely River Class underscore Ranch America. The easiest way, especially if you all don't have your DirecTV and you want to stream, there's a thing called FriendlyTV, F-R-N-D-L-Y.com, FriendlyTV.com. And that has all the outdoor channel stations on it. It's $4 a month or something like that. And it has everything. You can DVR it.
And it has all those Westerns and countries and things like that. But we're really hoping is that in the next... few months, um, that the out, there's going to become, there's going to be a new, a new thing called, uh, my outdoor, which will be the outdoor channels streaming process so that they can start to bring all of their episodes and be streaming on my outdoor.
That's what my hope is because I got a lot of guys that are just, uh, they got their, uh, they've got their, their out cow camp with their star link out, set out, and they've got a little, uh, Either a little iPhone or they've got a little laptop, and that's the only way they ever know the world even exists. They sure like to make fun of me when I get to town.
Yeah, that old cowboy camp didn't have Starlink back in the day. No.
No, it didn't. They got them now.
That's good. Well, thanks again.
I definitely, I would, I would love to see you guys again. I especially like the idea that we can't make ranch over here and farm over there, man. We all got, I think that it's, we're always in my, every plate I got, it's got, it's going to have some asparagus. It's going to have some corn. It's going to have something on it and it's going to have beef on the side of it.
And I, and I put butter on freaking everything. So we're all in it together. And I think that we all work really, really hard. And I think the world, I think the Americans need to know when you're going to your nice stores that, Just know how hard a man and a woman have done to get that to your table. Yeah.
I love that message. I love what you said. You said you have grass-fed finished beef, and you said it doesn't matter. The people that do grain-finished, whatever, it takes all kinds. I love that because I hate seeing on the Facebook, someone will put like,
this color of meat this color ground beef and this color ground beef and this one was finished with this and this one was finished with that it's like hey guys we just need to sell beef i want the wine finished we just need the beef to go yeah and you know exactly we need to finish and you know what what i tell people because people do the same thing in the restaurant they come in like oh river um what's your best wine well i'm like well i can't reach in and touch you know taste your tongue if i give you a glass of wine and you hate it
then that's a bad bottle of wine. But if I give you a $2 glass of wine and you love it, then that's my best wine. If you love it, that's what's the best wine. So I say, you know, the same thing with beef. Go out to your farmer's market. Go into the stores. Go find someone. If it's grass-fed, grain-finished, taste it. I mean, it's $6, $8 a pound. Grab that, make a couple burgers.
You don't like the flavor? Get to the next guy. Until you find someone, then eat that beef, and you will make a rancher happy, and you'll be happy within your tummy.
Rivers, words of wisdom. Don't touch a man's hat and don't taste the tongue. I don't try to taste a man's tongue. There you go. If you're married.
I hope everybody there watches Ranch America and we get bigger and bigger and bigger. Both of us. All of us get bigger and bigger.
Yeah, we will. I love it. Corey, what do you tell the audience?
Crack a cold one. You deserve it.