Most people find us looking for Wagyu, then notice half the store is something called Beefmaster and reasonably ask what it is.
Beefmaster is an American beef breed developed in South Texas. On our ranch it is raised on the same program as our Wagyu, by the same people, on the same grass and the same finishing ration. It is the beef our regulars buy every week.
A Texas breed, built in Texas
Beefmaster started on the Lasater Ranch in South Texas in 1908, when Ed C. Lasater began putting Brahman bulls on his commercial Hereford and Shorthorn cows. He was not inventing a breed. He was trying to raise cattle that could actually work in South Texas heat, humidity and insect pressure, where the English breeds struggled.
After his death in 1930 his son Tom Lasater carried the program on and made it deliberate. The cattle were named Beefmaster, and the USDA recognized Beefmaster as a breed in 1954.
The Lasater Ranch estimates modern Beefmaster at slightly less than one half Brahman, with slightly more than one quarter each Hereford and Shorthorn. The Brahman brings heat tolerance and hardiness. The Hereford and Shorthorn bring the beef traits of the English breeds.
The Six Essentials
What makes Beefmaster unusual is not the cross. It is how Tom Lasater selected.
He culled on six things and nothing else:
- Weight
- Conformation
- Milking ability
- Fertility
- Hardiness
- Disposition
Notice what is missing. No selection for color. No selection for horns. None of the cosmetic breed-standard traits that most registries spent the twentieth century arguing about. If a trait did not affect whether a cow raised a good calf and stayed in the herd, it was not a criterion.
That last essential, disposition, matters more than it sounds, and we will come back to it.
How it eats
Beefmaster is a bold, juicy, beefy steak. If you have had a very good Angus ribeye, you know the profile: straightforward beef flavor, plenty of juice, tender off a hot pan.
It is not Wagyu, and we will not pretend otherwise. Wagyu carries far finer and more abundant intramuscular fat, and when that fat renders it produces the richness and the melting texture Wagyu is known for. Beefmaster does not do that, because it was never bred to.
What Beefmaster does is eat like the best version of an everyday steak, which is exactly what most people want most nights. We sell a lot of it and we hear about it.
We raise it on the Wagyu program
This is the part that separates our Beefmaster from most Beefmaster.
Our cattle are raised on grass and finished on a grain ration designed for this ranch by a nutritionist who spent more than five years in Japan studying Japanese cattle husbandry: how they feed, how they handle cattle, and how the two combine to produce the beef Japan is known for.
That ration contains no corn and no soy. It was formulated for our cattle, our grass and our climate, and we use it on the Beefmaster as well as the Wagyu. There are no added growth hormones and no routine antibiotics.
Our Beefmaster are finished here as well, hand fed on this ranch by us. No animal in our program goes to a feedlot. Running the Beefmaster on the same program we built for Wagyu lifts it well beyond where a commodity Beefmaster would land.
Disposition, and why we take it seriously
Back to Tom Lasater's sixth essential.
Our cattle are exceptionally calm. That is partly the breed and partly deliberate: how they are handled from the start, how they are moved, how little noise and pressure they experience. Visitors notice it.
This is not sentiment. Calm cattle produce better beef, and the mechanism is well documented. Beef needs muscle glycogen to acidify properly after harvest. Cattle stressed before processing burn through those reserves, and when glycogen runs low the meat cannot drop to its normal pH. The result is dark, firm, dry beef that eats worse and keeps worse. Unstressed cattle carry glycogen at roughly 0.8 to 1.0 percent; below about 0.6 percent, the pH decline is compromised.
So a calm animal is not just pleasant to be around. It is a precondition for good beef. Japanese producers have understood this for a long time, and it is a large part of what our nutritionist brought back.
What to buy first
Start with the ground beef. It is the single most-bought thing we sell, and it is where most of our regulars started.
After that, the jerky, the sausage, and the brisket. Then a ribeye when you want a steak on a Tuesday and the Wagyu is for Saturday.
We raise both because both belong on the table.
