Blue Creek feedlot offers grain fed beef
Most of us who tune into U.S. television news are familiar with the introduction of Mad Cow Disease into the United States and the subsequent ban on that country’s beef by most countries of the world. But Belize also has a story about beef and, unlike that up north, the news is good. Stewart Krohn reports.
Stewart Krohn, Reporting
Belizean lobster? It’s found in the world’s finest restaurants. Belizean shrimp? Taking the market by storm. Belizean beef? Not bad as burgers, but for a good steak Cayo will never approach Kansas City…or will it?
Enter David Dyck, well-known entrepreneur of Blue Creek in the Orange Walk District. If Dyck has his way, Belizean T-bone, porterhouse, and filet mignon will one day be as prized as our succulent seafood… And he’s bet over a million dollars on it.
David Dyck, Feedlot Owner
“We been feeding for three months right now and we notice it very much that the people start to ask for this kind of meat.”
This kind of meat comes from cattle that are fed not grass in a pasture, but grains in a feedlot. The use of feedlots is standard procedure in the industrialised world, but in Belize Dyck’s operations is the first of its kind.
David Dyck
“This beef is much softer, it’s tender and they get the marbling it in there, get more fat, because we feed it up very quick… It’s much better meat than the grass fed meat.”
What makes it better is the quality of the food. Instead of grass, the cattle are fed a mixture of corn, soybean, sorghum, and rice bran. That blend is then mixed with silage at a ratio of eighteen to eighty-two and then topped off with a healthy measure of molasses from the sugar factory.
Paul Dyck, Feedlot Manager
“Cattle are very picky, especially when you have them in the feed lot. You think they’ll eat anything, but they are very, very picky animals. Like if you add a little bit more corn, maybe five pounds of corn to a hundred pounds of silage they’ll notice it right away. They would only eat half as much that day.”
Feedlot manage Paul Dyck is in charge of figuring out exactly what meals the steers prefer.
Paul Dyck
“Like right now, nobody in Belize has a feedlot that we know of and you can’t really go ask somebody what to do and what to feed them or how to feed them and stuff. So it’s very important for us to keep a record of everything to see which works, what grain works better and which grass, which silage.”
The three hundred or so head now in the lot are fed twice a day. Some hungry steers can eat as much as fifty pounds a day…and they show it in weight gains of up to seven pounds a day. The cattle are fed like this for anywhere from two to three months, before they are slaughtered and the carcasses sold to local butchers.
But those butchers, according to Dyck, have been reluctant to pay the extra ten cents or so a pound for the higher quality product. Which leads us to wonder why he started the feedlot in the first place.
David Dyck
“One reason is we have to go along with the world. Like Canada and the United States, they have good feedlots and we need that here too. But we couldn’t afford that before, we didn’t have the money to put that up, it takes a lot of money and time to put it up. But now we reach the time, we have it all set up, all we looking for is the market right now.”
And that market, thanks to recent events in North American, should not be too hard to find. Since Christmas, beef from the United States has been banned, and while the market for U.S.D.A. choice cuts has been confined to the resort trade, Dyck says he is ready to fill the vacuum.
David Dyck
“Mad Cow Disease just came up recently, we didn’t know that when we start this, but I don’t know, I feel that it might help us here that the people don’t import that meat, that extra cut meat, so we can produce it here in Belize.”
Reporting from Blue Creek, Stewart Krohn for News 5.
Beef from the Blue Creek feedlot is also sold directly to consumers under the Rio Azul brand.
