It started with a phone call in March of 2020. My brother Jason, who runs a live music venue in Bozeman, Montana, called me getting slightly panicked about the real possibility of being shut down and his business grinding to a halt. He wanted to do something that couldn't be shut down. He proposed starting a Montana beef business, something we'd actually talked about for years. Oddly enough, at that exact same time, my brother Matt was finishing a group of animals. So we decided to jump in and start marketing our own beef directly to people.

Deciding to do it was the easy part. Then came finding a processor and an outlet for the animals. Going direct to consumer sounds simple in theory — you cut out the middleman and keep more of the value. In reality, you just replace those middlemen, either with other people or by doing the work yourself. We've done most of it ourselves, and partnered with great people for the rest. The difference is the money stays local in Montana, circulating right here in our valley, from Columbus, Montana to Bozeman and back, instead of getting shipped off to some large company headquartered somewhere else entirely.

We also had to decide on a name for the business. We went back and forth on something generic — a nondescript ranch or brand name. But we landed on our own family name, Wickens, so people would know exactly where their beef came from. There's nothing to hide behind. If something goes wrong, you know exactly who to blame. If you love it, we get to say thank you and hope you come back. It was about transparency, about giving people that real connection — the kind you only get from a local, family-owned ranch.

We've managed our place holistically for over ten years now, using regenerative practices that tie together the health of the soil, the water cycle, the mineral cycle, the energy flow, and biodiversity, all the way up to healthy animals, feeding the people connected to that land. But we were missing a piece. We'd raise these animals for half or three quarters of their lives, sell them, and lose any connection to the person actually sitting down to eat that meal. We're raising food for people, and the more we remember that, the better our practices become. Closing that loop, from soil to family dinner, has been one of the real gifts of this whole journey into the direct-to-consumer beef business.

I actually went back and read something I journaled in August of 2020, laying out why we were doing this. Here is what was going through my head at the time. Beef is not a commodity. Animals are not widgets. The industrialized food system is destroying small town America, eroding the soil, causing environmental harm. Americans are getting sicker and fatter on cheap, processed food. People need to be shown a better way to produce food while restoring the land — the same regenerative, holistic approach we practice on our own Montana ranch. Margins are too thin for farmers and ranchers, pushing them toward shortcuts that degrade the land. Lots of smaller producers beat a handful of large ones. A centralized food system is fragile, susceptible to corruption and manipulation, if something happens to the few plants or companies controlling most of the meat supply. Many of those companies are foreign owned, with no real allegiance to American farmers, ranchers, or consumers.

Technology now lets us speak directly with consumers, and the pandemic raised people's awareness of where their food actually comes from. We could bring wealth back into the state instead of shipping it out on a truck every fall — keeping it circulating with other local Montana ranchers and producers. Montanans are independent, free-thinking people. We figured they'd want to know the people raising their food.