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BIRDS OF A DIFFERENT FEATHER
PHOTO COURTESY OF AMERICAN OSTRICH FARMS
Ostrich hits the menu in Idaho
By Dana DuGan
Alex McCoy grew up in Ketchum, but he set out across the county a decade ago with a trailer to collect ostrich chicks. He was on a mission to create an ostrich farm, a concept that had its incubation while he was working in South Africa. American Ostrich Farms, the company he eventually founded, is an Idaho food success story.
Why ostriches, one might ask. It turns out the funny, long-necked and -legged birds are an untapped market that could ameliorate the environmental and health problems inherent with feedlot cattle.
“I wanted to be challenged,” McCoy said about his post-University of Pennsylvania years. “But I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had studied a bunch of things. Eventually I went into investment banking.”
After returning to Wharton (at Penn) for his business degree, he met his wife, Lauren. “She had big-time finance equity, harder core than I was,” McCoy laughed. When the financial crisis occurred, they were safely enrolled in a three-year program at Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Sitting out the crisis in school was not a bad way to manage—plus it led to work for Citigroup in global management.
It was while living in South Africa and training for the Ironman African Championship that McCoy discovered an open secret.
“In Johannesburg, I ordered the biggest piece of red meat on the menu—ostrich,” McCoy recalled. “It tasted great, and an hour later, I wasn’t lethargic like after a big beef steak. I went for a run and did 16 miles super-fast. So, I started eating ostrich.”
Interestingly, the landowning Dutch Afrikaners don’t eat ostrich. They raise it for feathers and skin and pay employees in meat. Tourists also eat it as a novelty, McCoy said.
“The biggest problem is the name ‘ostrich.’ But as a venture capitalist, you see that ideas are solutions to old problems. I thought I could be on to something,” he said.
Sustainably raised ostrich is unusually lean and healthy with three times more iron than beef—and a whopping 25 percent protein—so it is easy to imagine that it might catch on, but when McCoy returned to the States, he hit a wall.
“No one had ostrich,” he said. “I couldn’t order it even online.”
So he hit the road and bought breeding stock from family farms. He came back with about a dozen birds and began building the genetics from the ground up.
“I wasn’t a farmer or a rancher,” McCoy said, shaking his head; he really has a business-trained mind with the heart of an entrepreneur. “My father and father-in-law both taught me all these skills. My one employee and I built all the fences and the paddocks. It’s been a long process. I wrote the book on ostrich raising.”
Ostriches lay between 40 to 60 eggs on average per year between April and August, which McCoy aims to turn into live birds. “There are genetic issues, such as how many live chicks a hen produces. We look at her offspring and the male and see who is healthy. It’s selective breeding,” McCoy explained. “We’re still working on it, but they lay for decades.”
But how do you sell what was never sold, nurtured, or marketed?
“No chefs are educated about it,” McCoy said. “I came from the consumer, the business end, it’s healthier and sustainable.”
Of course, none of this matters if nobody else is doing it. So, out of necessity, the McCoys built an abattoir, moved back to the Wood River Valley, and birthed three daughters.
“There’s a lot of complexity,” he said about the former, though the latter is also true. “I knew I needed to own the whole value chain. This is the right way. We treat the animals right.”
Now, McCoy has 25 employees and commutes to the farm in Kuna a few times a week where he raises a couple thousand birds, which include males separated in oversized paddocks with their own harems.
McCoy, who also sells a line of cosmetic products made from ostrich oil, is dedicated to spreading the word about ostriches. He spoke at the Sun Valley Forum a few years ago about how raising meat sustainably is one of the solutions to the climate crisis. As a result, he received a loan to continue his work with a processing facility in Kuna from the Sun Valley Institute for Resilience’s Idaho Impact Fund for Sustainable Meats.
McCoy enthuses about ostriches. His face lights up: “They have expressive body language. They speak with their feathers.”
As should we all.
