Belcampo Farms Demonstrates Regenerative Agriculture in Northern California

By Lorrie Baumann

At about 2,800 feet above sea level in the shadow of California’s Mount Shasta, Belcampo Farm had what Farm Director James Rickert calls “a heck of a winter,” last year, with more rain and snow than usual. That meant taking extra feed to the farm’s cattle after a blizzard dropped 18 inches of snow on their winter range in the Sacramento Valley and a delay in the appearance of spring on the 17,000 Shasta Valley acres roamed by the farm’s pigs, sheep, chickens, ducks and turkeys – and its cattle, moved up from the winter range after spring has finally crept north to green up the pastures at their summer home. “We’re taking advantage of California’s Mediterranean climate, so we follow the seasons,” Rickert said. “That’s something my great-grandfather did 100 years ago…. We move cattle in trucks now. It’s a lot easier.”

Rickert is a fifth-generation rancher who started his career after graduating from Cal Poly with his agriculture degree at his family’s Prather Ranch, just across the mountain from Belcampo Farms in Siskiyou County. “I loved it, but I realized that family businesses are not the easiest,” he said. He moved on from the family ranch after 12 years there but continued earning his living in and around California agriculture until he got the chance in 2017 to manage the regenerative agriculture practiced at Belcampo Farms, which supplies the meat for the company’s six restaurants and butcher shops in the Bay Area and Los Angeles as well as its newest location in the Hudson Yards development in midtown Manhattan, New York City.

One of the first things Rickert did after he was hired in late 2017 was to take a look at the farm’s pasture management and irrigation program. Cattle numbers were decreased slightly to reduce pressure on pastures that were expensive to irrigate, and some of that land was dried, saving some of the cost to pump water to them and reducing some of the risks of drought. “It focused the irrigation on the fields where it was going to be efficient,” Rickert said. “If your books are red, you can’t be green…. I want us to be very careful in a drought situation.”

His responsibilities also include overseeing the Meat Camp programs that are part of the company’s strategy for educating the public about its humane meat production, its regenerative agriculture practices, and in general, where their meat comes from. For the past four years or so, Belcampo Farms has accommodated up to 24 people at a time in June and September for three days of feasting on open fire-grilled meats, learning butchery and practicing their knife skills with Belcampo chefs, collecting eggs from the free-range laying hens, harvesting their own vegetables in the organic garden and fruit from the orchards and touring the farm to get a close look at the farm’s sustainable farming practices. “We look at this as a core part of our production here,” Rickert said. “Consumer education is key…. I want to connect people with agriculture. I want them to know where their food comes from…. Society used to embrace agriculture because more people were connected to it.”

The farm’s philosophy, posted on signs here and there around the property, is that Belcampo Farms delivers “great taste and quality in every cut, from every animal, every time,” through transparency and by working together to care for their animals with compassion, patience and the best food. The point of the meat camps is to give visitors a chance to see how that works on the ground. “We’ve found that getting people out to agriculture and having experiences like this – people leave changed,” Rickert said. “The type of consumer who shows up here really wants to learn and is just excited by this. That’s the kind of person we want. They tour the farm, learn about farrowing pigs, how the cattle are raised.”

The farm’s 180 sows are a mixture of Duroc, Chester White, Ossabaw and Berkshire breeds. They breed naturally and then birth their piglets in farrowing barns that provide them with room to move around, root through straw bedding to make their nest and nurse their babies in peace.

Two or three weeks after farrowing, the porcine families are moved to group lactation pens where eight sows and their piglets live together for a few weeks, with piglets nursing from whichever mom is convenient and willing. At eight weeks, the young swine are weaned and separated into market groups and turned out to pasture. “Pigs are really good at tearing up a field,” Rickert said. “Pigs we really look at not just as a commodity but as a land management tool.” Swine are harvested and processed at about nine months.

As the spring piglets are being born, newly hatched chicks, ducklings and turkeys arrive from a third party hatchery and go into warm brooder houses, where they live for about the next month. “As soon as they can thermo-regulate, they go out to pasture,” Rickert said.

The laying hens will already be out in the pastures, laying their eggs in mobile nest boxes mounted on trailers and pecking their way around a fenced paddock that’s moved along with their trailer every few days so they have fresh grass and bugs to peck at along with their laying ration. The eggs are used in Belcampo’s restaurants and wholesaled to grocers, and the byproduct manure stays where it falls to nourish the grass. “It just makes these fields explode with fertility,” Rickert said.

The farm also has 1,200 ewes and about 1,200 mother cows, born, bred and pastured on the three neighboring ranches that belong to Belcampo Farm before they’re herded quietly into trailers and trucked about 20 miles to the company’s U.S. Department of Agriculture-certified and Certified Humane processing plant in Yreka. The facility was designed by Temple Grandin to ensure that the animals suffer as little stress as possible during their one bad day. The meat is sold in Belcampo’s restaurants and butcher shops, and it’s tracked all the way from birth to the butchery to its end consumer through a fully traceable coding system. “We’re fully vertically integrated from farm to table,” Rickert said. “It’s not a factory that produces widgets.”