Navajo ranchers are raising premium beef

But Yazzie’s family lived on land disputed by the Navajo and Hopi tribes, a conflict instigated by federal policies from the 1800s. With the 1974 Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act, the federal government sought to resolve the disagreement in a way it often did when dealing with Indigenous peoples, by relocating them. Over decades, about 3,700 Navajo families left Hopi land and vice versa.

Yazzie’s grandparents moved in the late 1980s. Yazzie’s immediate family followed in the late 1990s. Their new home was in the New Lands, a newly-created satellite of trust land, about 350,000 acres on the reservation’s southern border in northeastern Arizona. They occupied a house on a one-acre plot, in a cluster of other homes built by the Office of Navajo-Hopi Indian Relocation (ONHIR), a federal agency. “Giving up all of their open land space, it traumatized everybody,” Yazzie said. “They still shed tears for where they used to live.”

ONHIR also provided each family with a permit to graze their animals on fenced range units. One permit covered about 20 cows. Much of the reservation, where cattle tended to roam freely and grazing quotas weren’t strictly enforced, was overgrazed. The idea on the New Lands was to manage the land more sustainably.

But many relocatees weren’t sold. Some, including Yazzie’s grandparents, remembered stock reductions during the Great Depression, when government agents shot sheep in front of their owners, purportedly to reduce overgrazing. Following the culling, the feds implemented the reservation’s first permitting system. The program, designed without local input, cemented distrust for such protocols.

In 2009, ONHIR created the Padres Mesa Demonstration Ranch and hired Bill Inman to run it. The Ranch, pitched as an economic development initiative, would teach relocatees to professionalize their operations and care for the land. Inman organized branding days, taught people to administer vaccines and hired a handful of Navajo cowboys. He produced thick reports on forage health. The ranch also leased out good breeding bulls to refine herd genetics.

Livestock quality improved. But there was a problem: Producers were still selling to middlemen at rock-bottom prices.

Yazzie was working as an agriculture teacher at the time, often using the Ranch’s facilities for lessons. One day, while branding at the Ranch with her students, she ran into a man she didn’t know. The man pointed to the animals grazing nearby; he said he wanted to buy and market the cattle as Navajo Beef, to consumers increasingly interested in where their food came from and how it was raised. “I was mean to him,” Yazzie recalled recently, laughing.

The herd the man had been eyeing belonged to the Ranch – in other words, to the federal government – not to Navajo producers. “So, you can’t even call it Navajo Beef,” she told him. She argued the label would appropriate the tribe’s identity without benefitting its members. “Kids there were like, ‘Ms. Yazzie, no more, just leave it, just leave it.’ And I was like, ‘No, you stand up for what you believe in, this is wrong,’ ” Yazzie remembered.

The man’s name, she later learned, was Al Silva, CEO of a large, Texas-based food distributor called Labatt Food Service. That evening he invited Yazzie to join Labatt, to start the label her way, with Navajo producers. Since 2012, Yazzie has been recruiting producers whose animals meet Labatt’s quality specifications.

To show what an eligible cow looks like, Yazzie joined Anderson White, one of Padres Mesa’s Navajo cowboys, on some errands. They drove by a neighbor’s pasture where cows of all colors grazed on stubby fodder. “That’s where we came from,” Yazzie said, as White turned into a relatively lush ranch field. He stopped at a scenic watering hole, where a group of almost all-black cows mosied. “They look like great mothers,” Yazzie swooned. She explained that she looks for livestock like this: vaccinated, with square bodies, shiny coats, clear eyes, majority English breed, like Black angus, of sufficient weight. For ranchers short of the mark she designs individual plans and works with Inman to make sure they progress.

Labatt buys the meat directly. They pay $0.04/lb over the market price, plus a $35 bonus for animals that reach premium grades. On a good year, producers can now make $900-$1000 per animal. The meat is sold under the Navajo Beef label.

White’s personal herd has been part of the program since the beginning. “Carrying on the tradition but with better payment, pretty much,” he said.

In 2012, Navajo casinos became the first Navajo Beef customers. They pay a 25% premium for the meat; other distributors “wouldn’t be Navajo beef and people, I think the team doesn’t feel right about that,” said Erik Mrdak, Executive Director of Food & Beverage for Navajo Gaming. The story that accompanies the steaks is worth the extra cost “because ultimately it builds our business, and it builds the nation,” said Navajo Gaming CEO Brian Parrish.

“We all love it,” said Benita Litson, who is Navajo and Director of the Land Grant Office at Diné College. Litson points to the tribe’s food sovereignty ambitions. “We want to make sure we have access to our traditional locally grown foods, right? That’s kind of our overarching goal.” She’s trying to copy the Labatt model with a small group of sheep producers. Eventually, she wants Navajo businesses to butcher and distribute the meat, too.

Meanwhile, once-devalued Navajo beef has become sought after; the Navajo producers who had such a hard time selling their cattle can’t keep up with demand. It’s still a small, niche market, but Yazzie has started to recruit producers from other tribes—Jicarilla Apache, Pueblo, Hopi—and broadened the label from Navajo Beef to Native American Beef.

While many ranchers still want more than the allowable 20 cows, Yazzie said most now recognize the land’s limits. In Yazzie’s own family, an uncle now has the permit her grandmother once held. He’s bred new genetics into the animals and they’re part of Labatt’s program, too.

“In a way, the livestock was pretty much probably the thing that kind of brought a sense of pride back to [the relocatees].” Yazzie said today many producers feel thankful for what they’ve developed on the New Lands. 

Despite its growth, Labatt’s Native American Beef label is not profitable or self-sufficient; Labatt and the ranchers rely on ONHIR to run Padres Mesa and fix fences, water tanks and windmills.

When the office was created, in 1981, its work was supposed to take five years. Now, nearly four decades in, ONHIR is slated to close. There’s no timeline in place or a plan for who, if anyone, will take over Padres Mesa, which remains a universally liked ONHIR initiative. The Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Navajo Nation taking over have been floated as possibilities. 

“We don’t know, is the bottom line,” said Larry Ruzow, ONHIR’s legal director. “We know that we’ll be gone, so it won’t be us.”

Silva and Yazzie don’t have a plan for sustaining the label without Inman’s and Padres Mesa’s necessary help. 

Late one afternoon, Silva arrived at the Ranch, wearing a shirt with Native American Beef embroidered on the collar and a carful of ribeyes. He compared the label to baking bread, which needs just the right conditions and ingredients. Without yeast, “it won’t rise like it’s risen,” he said. “And so we worked diligently to try and communicate that message. If the federal government is not here it goes back to before they were here: nothing.”

Meanwhile, an hour and a half down the road, at the Twin Arrows Casino’s Zenith Steakhouse, a server told patrons stories about the families that raised the Native American Beef steaks they were about to order. The meat arrived on enormous oval plates, unadorned, its flavor as striking as the land that fed it.