Quick Bites: Cows Come Home

Don’t laugh. But third-generation cattle farmer Richard Taylor is—believe it or not—allergic to cows.

Standing amid his 400-plus acres in the Friendship community of Honea Path, watching cows of every shape, size, and color dot an expansive landscape, the irony is not lost on Taylor, an Upstate native. He has single-handedly birthed more than 4,500 cows (and counting) in his lifetime. “I know, I know,” he laughs. “My family pokes fun at me, too.”

But as the owner of Bar T Ranch—home of the Nature’s Beef line of meat products, sold by more than a dozen Upstate retailers and featured at a few local restaurants, including downtown Greenville’s High Cotton—he tries not to hold that against his bovine brood.

Because, all jokes aside, cattle ranching is serious business for Taylor, a 1980 Clemson University graduate who majored in agronomy (the science of using plants for food, fuel, feed, and fiber) and minored in animal science. Taylor began making his beef available at a handful of Upstate retail outlets about seven years ago. “People started telling me, ‘We’d like to know where our beef comes from.’”

“In a time when a lot of our food is imported from countries that have virtually no regulations, we are putting our families and our lives in a dangerous situation,” Taylor offers. “Most people just read the label that tells you where it was packaged, not where it was actually raised or grown.” Gazing out at his herd from the heart of his sprawling property, he can name when each and every cow was born.

He’s constantly rotating the cows from pasture to pasture so that they’re grazing but not trampling the grass. And that grass is something special. Taylor’s cows graze on a veritable feast: Bermuda, fescue, orchard, rye, and a variety of native grasses.

Agricultural byproducts, including wheat mids and soybean hulls, are used to supplement their diets, but no cow manure or chicken litter is mixed in. And of course, no steroids, hormones, antibiotics or any animal byproducts come into contact with his cows.

The difference is easy to taste. “All our beef is so much different than the grocery stores’,” Taylor explains. How good is it? “I actually had one lady tell me she discarded all her old beef since she started using what is produced on our ranch.” —Heidi Coryell Williams