TYLER GRAHAM

GRAHAM LAND & CATTLE CO.
3772 S US Highway 183 Gonzales, TX 78629
(830) 672-6504
www.grahamfeedyard.com

“I’ll say that feed—what you feed them, what you put in, you’re going to get out. So in my opinion, a corn-based diet—now there’s a thousand different diets, a thousand different rations, but corn is—well, that’s the main ingredient to get a flavorful, good, consistent eating experience.” – Tyler Graham

Born in 1983, Tyler Graham is a young hand in the Texas beef industry; he has, however been running around his family’s ranches since he was a wee tyke.  Tyler graduated from Texas A&M, but he gained much of his education through years spent both doing grunt jobs around the ranches and working closely with his grandfather, Dr. Charles W. Graham, the founder of Graham Land and Cattle Company and associated Graham Enterprises businesses.   The Graham company. has a feed yard in Gonzales County, which currently houses 30,000 head of cattle, with roughly 15,000 of those on pasture, and has its own feed mill.

Listen to this 2-minute audio clip of Tyler Graham talking about the breeds of cattle at the feed yard. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Subject: Tyler Graham
Date: November 16, 2007
Location: Graham Land & Cattle Co. – Gonzales, TX
Fieldwork Director: Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt
Fieldwork Team: Lisa Powell and Marvin Bendele

Produced in association with the American Studies Department at The University of Texas at Austin and the Central Texas Barbecue Association.

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Lisa Powell: So, could you tell us what your current line of employment is?

Tyler Graham: Currently I’m employed with—actually, Graham Enterprises, which is several different businesses. We’re going to be talking about Graham Land and Cattle today, which is our feed yard operation in Gonzales, Texas, but my job title is that I directly work for Dr. Graham who owns all the businesses. And I am spread out—a manager between several different businesses, but I would say assistant manager, assistant co-owner to all of Doc’s businesses.

Thank you. And so could you tell us how you came to this line of work?

I guess I would say that, first of all, you know, I’m Doc’s grandson, so that had a pretty good perk to getting the job. But, I am the only—my Dad doesn’t work for the company. I—there was one stipulation to coming back to work for the family, and that was that I needed to have a college education. I graduated from Texas A&M with a degree in Animal Science and a minor in economics. And I worked for the family all through high school, but, to take an upper management position, a college education was required. So, as soon as I graduated from A&M, I’ve been back here, and this is where I started and that’s where I’m at.

Could you go ahead and explain some more about the operations of Graham Land and Cattle?

Graham Land and Cattle is a feed yard facility. It’s a pretty basic facility. We feed cattle for harvest. We run about 15,000 head on pasture land, which is a, a pre-conditioning program that we can get into later. Then about another 15,000 on full feed that come into the yard at about 750 pounds to finish for harvest at about 1250 pounds. We are ninety-five percent a custom feed yard, meaning that our feed yard. Most of the cattle in our yard are owned by other people.

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Let’s talk a little bit more about that pre-conditioning program that you mentioned? Could you explain that to us?

The preconditioning program at our yard is basically bringing in lightweight cattle, ranging between 300 and 400 pounds and putting them in what we call a preconditioning program, meaning that they’re not fed in confinement. They’re fed in pasture-type situations. The cattle are supplemented with feed every day, but it’s a growing ration. We have several different rations at the feed yard that we feed. It’s not one—one feed. But the, the preconditioning program is for lightweight cattle, which is kind of a unusual—for the size that we have.  You won’t see it at many feed yards in the Panhandle, because the pasture-type situation in the Panhandle’s not conducive to that area. In Gonzales, we’re fortunate to have several thousand acres of land that we can pre-condition cattle on, so the basic point of pre-conditioning the cattle is we get them in at a lightweight, young age. We’ll pre-condition the cattle on pasture with supplemental feed from anywhere ranging from 300 to 400 pounds until they reach 750 pounds and they’re ready to transition into a full feed, confinement area to finish the cattle.

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So let’s just talk a little bit about some of those ingredients—other feed ingredients in addition to the whole corn?

In addition to the corn, I guess the main ingredient that I’d like to talk about that’s also sort of unique to our yard—it’s not , it’s not a hundred percent unique—but in our growing ration we use about sixty percent of a brewer’s grain, which is, you know, hops straight from Anheuser-Busch in Houston. It’s a brewer’s grain that they see as a by-product that we utilize as a very good feed ingredient. That’s used in our growing diet; when I’m talking about growing diet, I’m talking about mainly cattle that are in the pre-conditioning pasture growing program. We also use the brewer’s grain in a finishing capacity too, but it’s, it’s limited to fifteen percent of that diet. That diet’s probably sixty percent steamed flake corn. You can’t finish cattle without using corn; now that’s, that’s going to be, uh, any feed yard you go to, all across the country they’re going to use corn. So, corn is king, and it’s the number one influence on our business today. The price of corn goes up, our cost-to-gain goes up. It’s very relative. But the brewer’s grain diet would probably be our second leading ingredient in our diets, as far as what we’re feeding them every day. We also use rice bran, cotton seed hulls, molasses, a mineral pack that we buy, uh, that contains Vitamin E, Vitamin—all the essential vitamins and minerals—that’s supplemented into both diets along with several other by-products. We use some maize, or milo. And, like I said, our diets change to some extent during the year, depending on pricing.

Can you kind of explain—do you mix the feed, first off, and when you get there, explain the way the corn comes in? Is it a whole kernel?  Can you explain that a little bit? And the other grains? And then tell us a little bit about the process of mixing and what you guys do, and how many people it takes, things like that.

As far as corn goes, we’re feeding anywhere between 625,000, 650,000 pounds of a total mix ration, that’s TMR, once we’ve mixed everything that goes into the feed truck, that’s called a TMR, total mix ration. But as far as corn goes, we will actually buy twenty-five [million] to thirty million pounds of corn at harvest in surrounding counties, and try and store that, because of pricing issues and stuff like that. Depending on what the market’s doing, depending on what the futures look like.  Like this year, for instance, we probably—we probably right now have about twenty-eight [million] to thirty million pounds of whole corn that’s directly from the field from—by eighteen-wheeler straight to our storage facility. Now, along with that, we have to buy corn every day. There will be five to six truckloads of corn from outside sources come through our feed yard every day. We have two sets of scales, where every truck is weighed. When they come in, they’ll dump that whole corn directly into the two hoppers at our feed yard. We have 20,000-bushel capacity at the feed mill, that’s kind of an in-and-out system. We’re going to feed fifteen hundred truckloads of corn this year. So, we don’t have the storage capacity, nor would we want to buy that because of pricing. Corn prices jump every day and so it’s something—like I said, we watch corn a lot. But you know, the whole corn, it comes in on a truck, we unload it at the yard, and, the rest of the product comes in the same way. I mean everything’s trucked in on an eighteen-wheeler. We don’t have any kind of rail cars, or anything that comes in on rail. It’s all trucked in on eighteen-wheelers and the brewer’s grain, that’d be our second largest inventory. That comes directly from the Anheuser-Busch plant. And that actually is bought through a broker that brokers the trucking, brokers the shipping, and we buy it directly from a broker out of Houston. We’re by far Anheuser in Houston’s biggest customer. We’ll take most of their brewer’s grain that they look at as a by-product. That is a little bit different; it doesn’t go straight into our feed mill. We have a storage facility, because our agreement with Anheuser is that, you know, we take it when they send it. It’s kind of a give-and-take deal: they give us a good price, we take it when they need to get rid of it. So, sometimes we’ll have up to three to six—three to six months of extra brewer’s grain. But it stores very well. It’s stored in the open air, outside environment. We do tarp it, and it is sprayed with some stuff to help it not mold, help it stay. But it’s stored in the open-air environment. We tarp it and everything like that. So it would be probably the only product that’s not shipped when it comes to our yard directly into the feed mill. As far as the other products go, they’re all there—there, like I said, small quantities compared to corn and brewer’s grain. At the feed mill, start every morning at about five o’clock at the feed yard. The process, it’s pretty technical. Our feed mill manager, like I said, he actually gets there at about four-thirty. He will drive and look at every bunk in the feed yard every morning and see; he has a laptop he goes around with. He’ll—and it’s called bunk reading—he drives around to, for example, pen one, and he looks at how much those cattle have left. And he charts that every day on that laptop. That translates into, when he gets back to the feed yard, whether these cattle need more feed that day, these cattle need less, etc., etc. Whether he thinks they’re doing, you know they have an adequate amount of feed. And so that translates into—directly into how much feed we’re going to make that day. And it’s not going to change, you know, we’re going to feed over 600,000 pounds a day. So it’s not like we’re going to feed, uh, half, half a million one day and 700,000 the next day. But we try and make it as accurate as possible for our customers. We don’t want to overfeed, because like I said, we’re a feed store. So, we’re selling pounds of feed to put pounds of weight on their cattle. He gets back to the feed mill, and another thing he has to do, skip back to when he first gets there, he starts our boilers. The boilers in the feed yard, that takes like an hour for those to warm up. The boilers are what actually produces the steam to steam flake the corn. And we’ll start flaking corn at about six o’clock in the morning, and we’ll flake corn all day for about ten hours, the flakers will be running. It’s basically a steam process. The corn is exposed to steam. It’s run through a hammer mill, and it’s crimped.  Some of the rations are mixed at the feed mill, but most of the products are loaded onto a feed truck one at a time, and then actually the feed truck has a mixing system inside of it. So actually, once all the product is put individually into the feed truck, it starts mixing it. Before they get to the individual pen, it’s mixed. So, there’s not really a mixing process at the feed mill itself. The trucks mix the product. All the trucks are digitalized, they have electronic readers on them, so the truck drivers certain charts every day of, you know pen one gets 3200 pounds of feed. Pen two, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We try and stay within five pounds of each pen. If you can do that, that’s pretty accurate. On a 15,000-pound load, if our truck drivers are all fifty-five to sixty-five, to seventy-five pounds, that’s accurate. That’s acceptable, in our mind.

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Could you elaborate a little more on the features of the Gonzales landscape? And you mentioned a couple of types of pasture that make it better suited than the Panhandle for the type of pre-conditioning program that you have?

Yeah, we’re suited better in Gonzales because we have improved pastures, which are all pastures that’s been taken care of, weed spray, no brush. They’re real clean pastures, adequate forage. The difference being in the Panhandle, you know, it’s flat and dry, they don’t get the rainfall that we get. We’re fortunate to be on—we border the Guadalupe River on a lot of our pasture land, and  the rainfall in Gonzales is a lot different. Probably twenty to thirty inches a year, I’m just guessing—maybe more than a lot of parts of the Panhandle. The Panhandle on the other hand—if you were talking to some guys up there, they’d probably tell you that their confinement feeding is easier, which I would agree with them, because of the dryness. When you’re feeding cattle in a dry lot situation, you want it to be dry. So, sometimes in the confinement feeding, that would be the, I guess,  the in that they would have one-up on us, I guess—the confinement feeding, because of the dry climate up there, the cool climate. They do benefit from that. But as far as the pasture land goes, they would never even attempt to do what we we’re doing because they don’t have the land resources.    

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So, could you talk a bit more about the variety of breeds that you have?

Now, in our yard, being in south Texas, cattle are—cattle are adapted to different climates. That’s why when you go up to Nebraska, Kansas, north—far north in the Panhandle, you’re going to see a lot more cattle known as Bos Taurus breeds, which are, you know, Hereford, Angus, the American breeds,  because they adapt better to colder weather, they do better in those climates. When you get down to south Texas—central, south Texas, and our part of the world where it’s hot—it’s a lot more hot, it’s a lot more humid, those cattle—we do feed some of them, but they usually just don’t convert as well. They usually don’t adapt to this climate as well. And so you will see a huge percentage of our cattle have some—what we call ear to them, which basically means they’re Brahman-influenced—they have some percentage of Brahman in them. You won’t see a lot of purebred cattle in feed yards.  We do feed some pure-bred, you know, Santa Gertrudis, and that’s not the only pure bred—but we will feed some pure-bred Brahman cattle but  we’re feeding more of a what—on the other side of Bos Taurus, Bos Indicus breeds that are going to have some ear to them. We feed a lot of the Mexican cattle that most of them typically are Brahman-influenced because of where they came from. It’s hot in Mexico also. The cattle that are in our feed yard—climate is the main factor that goes into what we feed.

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Well, you did mention how corn is king, in the cattle-feeding industry, and so, do you see your company possibly looking for any sort of alternatives, or changing in percentages of corn fed as corn prices do increase?

I will say, first of all, no. Corn’s going to be fed to cattle until people stop eating beef.  And it’s just going to—it’s a sad thing—or, I don’t know, it’s good for some people, but—it’ll just be shifted down the price chain. When our price goes up, your price to feed goes up, which the packer is hopefully going up with what they’re paying us, and all the way to when you’re buying a steak at a restaurant. It’s going to go up. But, one avenue that we are entertaining—I’d say it’s pretty much a done deal—it’s still going to use corn, but we are entertaining building ethanol plant at our yard. And hopefully we’ll start construction on that in the next year. Now, that will be using—corn will be going to—the ethanol plant will be using the distiller’s grain. It’s the processed corn, after it’s been at the ethanol plant, but we’ll still be buying corn, so, first question, no. We’re going to feed corn, and until some—somebody figures out a better way to feed cattle, that’s what we’re going to feed.

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Going back to a little bit about your background, you said you worked in high school and when you were younger in the company. What kind of things did you do then?  As you mentioned, it enabled you to go into management position, but how did your experience as an Animal Science major kind of change your perspective on the business?

Well, I’ve been running around these ranches since I was little bitty, but, you know, all through high school and pretty much through college working back and forth. I basically got started at the grunt level, you know, doing all the not-so-fun jobs at all the different businesses. I worked here at the horse farm, at the feedlot a lot, the sale barn, and I’m glad I started at those positions because until you’ve done that stuff yourself, you have a hard time telling someone else how to do it. And so I’m glad that I didn’t start sitting here behind the desk, in this management position. But basically, like I said earlier, that was—Doc said, you know, if you’re happy with your job now, you know—this is when I was getting out of high school—he said, you can sure have it for the rest of your life, he said. But you’re not going to see that office, and you’re not going to see a pay raise anytime soon. Day labor is day labor, you know. And so, I guess I went from a day laborer, learning the lower positions of all the businesses first—transitioning into college. I started getting a little bit more responsibility through college.  I worked all through college, back and forth, all the time through all the businesses. Got an Animal Science degree in—specifically in Livestock Production, not—there’s, you can do the Science Production or you can do—I mean, you can do the science option or the production option. Mine’s the production specific degree, which—education, it definitely helped a lot. But I will say that I learned a lot more hands on everyday, being, doing it, seeing it, talking to people, than I specifically did at school. I guess I’ll just say that the education and the degree just kind of clarified my position in where, where I got to start at after school. But, I’ve been around all the businesses since I was born. And I’ve been interested in it forever. I’ve always wanted to come back and work in the businesses, because—not because it’s a good job, but because it’s what I’ve been interested in. So, it just happens to be a really good job also.

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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

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