Patrick Montgomery Produces Award-Winning Wagyu Beef While Uplifting Other Veterans in Ag

In this episode of 15 Minutes With a Farmer, Patrick Montgomery shares his journey from Army Ranger to first-generation Wagyu beef producer and entrepreneur. He discusses the challenges of starting his direct-to-consumer business, how his military experience translates to ranching, and the role of Valor Provisions in supporting local farmers.

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Meet Patrick Montgomery

Montgomery joined the Army after 9/11, serving as a Ranger in Afghanistan. After returning to civilian life, he earned a degree in animal science from the University of Missouri and became a first-generation rancher, raising Wagyu beef near Weston, Missouri, just north of Kansas City.

Through his business, Kansas City Cattle Company, Montgomery markets his beef directly to consumers. KC Cattle Company’s hot dogs were named best beef hot dog by Food & Wine magazine in 2020, which sent online sales through the roof.

Last year, he created Valor Provisions to support American producers, specifically veterans. Consumer members of the co-op can shop for meat from multiple producers on one website.

Episode Highlights

• Montgomery planned on becoming a veterinarian after leaving the Army, then decided to go into business for himself as a first-generation rancher. He received valuable advice from his father-in-law.
• At the time, Wagyu beef and direct-to-consumer beef marketing were less popular than they are today, so there was a learning curve. Montgomery built his herd to around 200 pairs and fine-tuned the marketing process.
• When KC Cattle Company’s Wagyu hot dogs were named best beef hot dog by Food & Wine magazine in 2020, online sales took off. When the pandemic hit and protein was difficult to find in grocery stores, the online store found more success.
• Montgomery created Valor Provisions as a way to support and uplift other producers, specifically veterans. He said, “The biggest thing I missed since the military was the purpose and the camaraderie, and Valor Provisions really kind of replaced that.”
• He stressed the importance of looking out for each other and paying attention to mental health, which is a major issue in both the military and agriculture communities.

Links and Resources

Transcript

Please note: This transcript has not been edited.

Lisa Foust Prater: Patrick, thank you so much for joining me today on 15 minutes with a farmer.

Patrick Montgomery: Thanks for having me on, Lisa.

Lisa Foust Prater: So I’ve been reading about your company and all of the great things that you’re doing. But before we get started with that, tell me about your journey from being an Army Ranger to becoming a rancher.

Patrick Montgomery: You know, well, I joined the military because of 9-11, right? That had a tremendous impact on my career choice. And, you know, I thought I wanted to be a Navy SEAL, had a brother-in-law that was in regiment, talked me out of doing that. Instead, I became a Ranger. Still to this day, coolest job I ever did. And as I was exiting, it was really important to me that I found something that I thoroughly enjoyed as much as I did being a ranger, maybe without the danger. That that part was important to my wife. And, um, yeah, I’d settled on becoming a veterinarian, went back to school at Mizzou, did my degree in animal science and, uh, you know, through, through that time in that ag school at Mizzou, I, know, you think about things that you don’t necessarily think about when you’re 18 going to school, when you go back a little older and, I thought a lot more about like, does this salary pencil? And weird questions like that to provide for your family. My interests definitely lie on the large animal side. And that salary after graduating with your DVM versus what you pay for your DVM just didn’t really pencil out. And I didn’t really want to do neuters and spays the rest of my life. So I was doing a minor in entrepreneurship at the time. And I settled on starting this company instead.

And the whole premise was bridging the gap between agriculture and then consumer. You know, the whole ranch to plate thing wasn’t nearly as popular back then. And I really wanted to make sure there’s a palatable difference, which is how we landed on raising and selling Wagyu beef.

Lisa Foust Prater: Right. So tell me how you got started with the actual ranching. Like, did you have to go out and find property and how did you find your herd? Tell me about that process.

Patrick Montgomery: Yeah, on the herd side, at that point, there was not nearly the amount of wagyu that you see today. So that part was difficult, but there, we still did the American Wagyu Association has been around for a while. And I started going to auctions first, just to try to learn the breed. And then I had a former ranger buddy who was probably about five years ahead of me on starting his herd down in Austin, Texas. And so he was really a mentor, did an internship with them before, you know, while I was doing my undergrad.

As far as the property goes, my father-in-law had a family farm that he had to sell during the recession. I think that always bothered him quite a bit that he had to sell the property that he was raised on. After he sold his business here in Kansas City, he kept talking about how he wanted to buy property. I was like, well, I’m trying to start this company. I’ll put cows on it if you’ll buy it and I’ll lease it from you. That’s how that all came about.

Lisa Foust Prater: That’s perfect. And it gives him a nice chance to have another connection back to the farm.

Patrick Montgomery: 100%. So now he gets to see his grandkids run around here and chasing calves and doing all the cool stuff he did when he was a kid.

Lisa Foust Prater: That’s so good. And I would imagine he’s a good mentor for you. You know, when you’re raising livestock, if it’s not something you grew up around, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of questions and a lot of things that come up that you don’t expect. Of course, you had the, you know, the background at Mizzou too, but it’s great to have sort of boots on the ground of someone who you trust who can give you good advice about raising cattle.

Patrick Montgomery:  Yeah, his expertise. mean, he did a fantastic job building a business and living the American dream. So his expertise was definitely more so on the business side, which was invaluable. I definitely went to the school of hard knocks on animal husbandry. And, you know, I was well prepared as as prepared as I could be, but that’s never prepared enough in real life scenarios. So, you know, the old the old saying of don’t let perfection get in the way of good.

Lisa Foust Prater: Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s so true. I didn’t grow up raising cattle, but my husband did. And when we started raising them together, I just, you know, there was, there were so many things that I just had to learn kind of, you know, really kind of the hard way. But we had a neighbor who was a good mentor and my father-in-law was a great cattleman. So, you know, just having, having people around you who can help is, is huge, is huge.

Patrick Montgomery: Yep.

Lisa Foust Prater: So tell me about the operation today and what that looks like with your cattle.

Patrick Montgomery: Well, we’ve got about 200 pairs on the property. I do a lot of purebred, some full blood, a few F1s. We’re working on transitioning most of that to either the F1 or the full blood side. But, you know, the whole thing is maintaining ownership or at least control from the second that calf hits the ground until it hits a customer’s plate. You know, that’s quality control and food when it comes to protein is not easy. So that’s really important. 

We’ve just launched Valor Provisions Co-op in November of last year where we’re curating other small farmers and trying to give them a viable alternative to their options out there for selling protein currently and removing as much of our margin as possible so we can pass that on to the end customer. It’s like, I see the American farm is diminishing at a rapid, almost exponential rate, especially in the last couple of years. And it’s really tough to make the economics of raisin beef cattle or really a lot of protein makes sense in today’s world. And ballot provisions is our attempt to fix that. And if not fix that, I at least bring knowledge to the end consumer about how their food works today and educating them so they can support their local farmer.

Lisa Foust Prater: Right. Yeah, that’s so great. I mean, so many people just don’t know where their food comes from. When you’re raising beef cattle, especially if you don’t have a huge operation, it’s really tough. And, you know, most of those folks are working other jobs, and this is sort of a hobby. And sometimes the numbers make no sense at all. And yet you just keep doing it.

But it is, I mean, it is a great life. It’s a great way to raise your kids. You learn a lot of lessons that way for your family. But the Wagyu is interesting. So I’ve talked with a couple of other producers who raise Wagyu beef and have had it myself. And it’s so, it’s fantastic. I mean, I’m a beef person, obviously, but the Wagyu, it’s really kind of a special thing. And when you talk to those producers about working, you know, in their communities and getting the beef in front of people who know where it came from. Like people love it. It’s awesome. 

So I read that from KC Cattle Company, your Wagyu beef hot dogs were chosen best beef hot dog by Food and Wine magazine. That’s crazy.

Patrick Montgomery: We went from being a very small e-comm company, shipping 20 orders a week to having 12,000 roll in in 12 hours. And then we rolled straight into the pandemic where two of the big four shut down and all of a your folks on the East Coast and West Coast couldn’t find protein in the grocery stores. So they went online and found us. So it’s been a pretty wild ride.

Lisa Foust Prater: Yeah. Boy, I tell you, that is a thing. During the pandemic and when things were closed, people really started questioning where their food came from and the safety and the health of it, and also wanting to feel secure and having their freezer stocked. So when you go into the grocery store and there are empty shelves, that is a terrible feeling. And it’s a panic-inducing situation. So yeah, as awful as the pandemic was, I know for certain producers and businesses, it really kind of gave them a jumpstart into their online meat sales.

Patrick Montgomery: Yeah. And I know ourselves and a lot of others that jumped into it during the pandemic. They’ve really taken it on the chin the last two years for a whole plethora of reasons, the biggest being, we’re working on exporting a lot of our protein production to other countries. And our big saying is food security is national security. It’s like, you can have the biggest guns in the world, but if you’re not feeding your populace, things get pretty nasty, pretty quick. so bringing insights and information to the consumer about like, hey, this is the stuff that farmers and ranchers are dealing with. And they’re paying X per acre in an area where you can’t justify running a beef cattle on an acre that you paid $12,000 for. So it’s been super interesting. Valor provisions has definitely been a saving grace. And if I’m being honest, the biggest thing I missed since the military was the purpose and the camaraderie. And valor provisions is really kind of replaced that. I always thought my fight was with the enemies foreign to our country and it turns out it’s just like, man, it’s just trying to pick the hard right over the easy wrong and try to help out people that deserve it.

Lisa Foust Prater: Right. So tell me about Valor Provisions and how that all works.

Patrick Montgomery:  On the consumer side, it’s a, we wanted to really make sure it was something different than your standard subscription, right? Because I don’t know about, I know myself and my wife were, were very sick of signing up for subscriptions, forgetting about them for four months. You know, you never use it, whatever. Um, and then if it’s an annual subscription, it’s like, okay, you know, you’re going to forget about it. They bury it under 12 layers to cancel. And, um, you know, for us, we really wanted to focus on taking care of the end consumer and the farmer and rancher. And so it’s a one-time lifetime fee. And kind of the way that works is it’s a hundred bucks, right? So you pay a hundred dollars and the average discount on our product is about 45%. And then the vendors, the benefit for them is, one, they don’t have to deal with the end consumer, which is a full-time job in itself. And then two, you tell us the price point, like here’s our gross margin that is about half of what a standard econ business is and it sells protein. And that’s the price we charge the consumer. So we’re not looking to compete with Costco or Walmart or some of your big warehouse stores, but we are trying to compete with your high end grocery store on price point for protein. And it’s really resonating with the customer, right? We launched with three vendors for proof of concept and now we’re out looking for some new vendors, pasture raised chicken, grass-finished beef, bison, are like the ones that people are looking for.

Lisa Foust Prater: That’s excellent. Yeah, you know, and just having a for those for those other producers, having sort of that community with each other is really important because there are so many there are so many just logistics to that business of of, you know, shipping, marketing, there’s there’s so much involved with direct selling your meat. And it’s just a really complicated business. 

Patrick Montgomery:  And all of it’s very expensive.

Lisa Foust Prater: So I would imagine that, you know, for some of those folks, maybe, you know, they definitely would appreciate having sort of your insight and knowledge into how that how that all works, because it is it is just there are so many things to consider with that kind of business.

Patrick Montgomery: You’re being nice there. I call them tuition payments and I’ve made all of them. 

Lisa Foust Prater: Hahaha! So when you first started and you were starting to sell your own beef commercially and online, tell me about that and how you learned how to do that and what kind of obstacles you overcame, things that went wrong, things that surprised you. It’s an interesting business to start.

Patrick Montgomery: Yeah. You know, we have a saying from the 75th range regiment that they’re smart Rangers and they’re strong Rangers and know, time periods in my life, I’ve probably been one or the other, but never both. And I was definitely a strong Ranger, you know, starting this business, not a smart Ranger. And, you know, we just figured it out by doing it right. Like we have a bathroom that has an individual heater. That was our testing lab for packaging. Like how long do these things stay frozen? How long do they stay, you know, within USDA regulated temperature ranges to have safe beef. We crank up the heater in the bathroom, we’d put a package in there for two days and we’d pull it out and see what the temperature was, right? And, you know, it’s, I always kind of draw back to the military, specifically the special operations had a tremendous impact on my life. And I just think, you you think about Afghanistan, the initial invasion of Afghanistan, there was like 25 people that invaded an entire country, you know, two SF (special forces) teams. And, you know, the way that you do that is you’re really good at adapting and thinking on your feet. And that’s, that’s, that’s been my premise since starting the company. It’s like, you know, we’ll try things and we’ll pivot really quickly if it’s not working.

Lisa Foust Prater: Yeah, that’s a lesson that you can take with you no matter what you’re doing post-military, just being able to pivot and kind of think quickly on your feet for sure. What other sort of lessons or things from your time in the service are you carrying with you or did you find helpful in this new journey in ag?

Patrick Montgomery: I’d say perspectives, the probably second biggest to the one I just listed. I was unfortunate enough that I did lose quite a few friends that first year I was in the military, my first deployment through 2013 or so. I’ve watched, myself included, it takes you on this journey that’s pretty dark and can really lead to your own demise.

And I tell veterans this regularly and I like to do it on interviews in case there’s one listening to this that’s going through that. But, you know, if you change that perspective in your mind where like, you know, that the cloud and the darkness is right there over the top of you and you kind of think about the friend or the bad experience you had that is no longer here. And you think about if they were here and they’re sitting next to you, it’s like what they want you to be doing, whatever you’re doing that is not bringing you happiness.

And if you think through that from the frontal lobe of your brain, what you come up with is the answer is absolutely not. And so, and then instead of being sad and depressed because of that, you can kind of flip that into you’re living your life and the people that can’t, that are no longer here. And it can turn you into a absolute indomitable force if you can figure out how to do that.

So one of my favorite authors, what he says is, you don’t truly know thyself unless you walk through the pits of hell. Because that’s where you get introspection and figure out what you’re made of and the grit that makes up your character.

Lisa Foust Prater: I love that. And you know, it’s interesting. It’s an interesting parallel when you look at mental health and the military, and then also with farmers and ranchers. I’m sure your father-in-law went through some things too, with just, you know, when you lose a farm, it’s like, it’s a real grief. It’s like losing a person. Yeah. It’s your identity, you know?

Patrick Montgomery: They even beat out military for the suicide rate. I mean, it’s not easy.

Lisa Foust Prater: And that is a really, really tough thing to deal with. just the uncertainty, there are so many factors involved in your success when you’re a farmer. And I suppose when you’re in the military too. Yeah, completely out of your control. You can’t control the weather, you can’t control the markets, you can’t control what other people do. It’s really, really hard. So I’m wondering just, you know, for your own self, having dealt with those kinds of losses in the military and then the stresses of, you know, ranching. How do you take care of yourself?

Patrick Montgomery: I’m real big on, I don’t even remember who it was, but I listened to a book when I was first starting the company and they talk about, they compared it to grain silos, which was ironic because it had nothing to do with farming, but they talk about how when you’re starting a business, if the only grain silo you have is the business, that’s the only thing that brings you happiness, that inevitably at some point in your life that grain silo is gonna be empty.

You know, all of your happiness is based on that one. And he’s like, you need three or four, right? That you don’t budge on that are your priorities in life. And, for me, it was absolutely the business, but more importantly, it was, it was my family and my faith and fitness was behind that one. Right. I eat really healthy and I work out and I don’t budge on that because what’s the point of working this hard if I’m, if I’m dead by the time I’m 50, because I start, it’s ironic too. I started this company to not sit behind a desk and now I sit behind a desk. A majority of the days my ranch manager calls me John Travolta, the Urban Cowboy, but you know, you got to do what you got to do to feed the family, so.

Lisa Foust Prater: Absolutely. I mean, that kind of business, mean, obviously, yeah, you have, it’s good that you have a ranch manager that you trust because the business part of that just is so all enveloping that like you literally cannot be the only person involved. You cannot be out there doing the daily, you know, taking care of the cattle and also running this business. It’s just, it’s a lot.

Patrick Montgomery: Yeah. I was pretty naive when I started the company. Thank goodness I was or else I probably wouldn’t have done it. But, um, yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s two full-time jobs running up all the, what goes on with a meat company and the e-commerce company, which is really two separate jobs right there. And then on top of that, you know, you got 420 acres and 200 head to take care of it. It’s like, man, something’s got to give, and it has to be the thing that, that isn’t paying the bills. 

Lisa Foust Prater: For sure. So what would your advice be to another farmer who’s looking to get into this sort of business model?

Patrick Montgomery: You know, I have been fortunate. I didn’t realize this, but yeah, my knowledge is semi dangerous on the cattle side and very dangerous on the meat side. Right. and, and most folks it’s, it’s one or the other, right? You have your processors that are super knowledgeable on the meat side, but they can tell you what an EPD is on the cattle side. And then you have the cattle guys that don’t know whole lot about NAMS codes, right? But they, they could tell you anything you need to know about husbandry of an animal.

You know, the biggest thing there is, it is a big learning curve to jump from one or the other. That vertical integration is very tough. And, if you are going to try to do that, where you need to spend the majority of your time is how are people going to find you? And that’s marketing and marketing is, is the way that you can absolutely light a whole lot of dollars on fire that, that do nothing for your business. So.

Lisa Foust Prater: Yeah, yeah, that it is a really tricky thing. You know, and that’s where, like you had mentioned, you know, a partnership like with Valor, that that is definitely helpful if people can find a way to, know, to get themselves out there. Yeah, the marketing is tough. It really is. It’s it’s a huge challenge.

Patrick Montgomery:  I had a gentleman at a processor tell me, at this point we were trying to raise money to take the business to the next step. And I had been trying to break this down in a much more complicated way for your private equity and venture capital types out of places like New York that haven’t necessarily been around a whole lot of beef cattle. And I was batting zero. And this guy broke it down so simple. I was like, I’m stealing that. He talks about how you have a really nice lifestyle business if you’re harvesting less than 100 animals a year, right? You’re selling at farmers markets, it’s probably you and your wife, maybe your kids, and maybe a part-time employee or something like that. But the second you get above that 100 head a year, that growth from 100 to 500 or 1,000 is really expensive and really, really tough. And a lot of the times it doesn’t make sense until you reach 1,000.

Lisa Foust Prater: Yeah, yeah, and I mean, and with the wagyu, like that’s not, those aren’t cheap genetics either, so.

Patrick Montgomery:  It’s come down quite a bit, the market on the cattle side has kind of fallen apart really in the last year. But I think it’s around the stage, it’s in what form or fashion.

Lisa Foust Prater: Right, right. Well, it’s really interesting to see what you’re doing and follow how it’s all going. I love to see it. It’s always great having a new fresh face in agriculture, someone who is new to the industry, I love seeing their input and just the takes that you have on the business. We need that. We need to freshen it up.

Patrick Montgomery: Yes, yes we do. It’s incredibly important to me that the industry is thriving here in a couple of years.

Lisa Foust Prater: Absolutely, absolutely. Well, Patrick, it’s been so great to talk to you today and I want to thank you for your service and just tell you that I’ll share links on our show notes so that folks can find KC Cattle Company and Valor Provisions and just keep up the great work.

Patrick Montgomery: Thanks for having me on, Lisa.