Tyler McCann - Rancher & Founder Rendezvous Beef Roundup

Tyler McCann and his wife Angela own & operate Hancock Ranch near Lander, Wyoming. A few years back, Tyler founded the Rendezvous City Beef Roundup, seeking to identify the best beef in WY and the west. This event's quickly gained momentum and is now a premier gathering for beef enthusiasts. This year's Roundup is scheduled for August 24th in Riverton. If you believe you have the finest beef in Wyoming or even the broader Western region, now is your chance to get in touch with Tyler and participate in this prestigious event. www.BeefRoundup.com • FB & IG: @Beefroundup • Email: RCBR307@gmail.com

Derek: Hey again Tyler. Before we talk Best Beef Roundup, let’s hear a little about your family’s ranch...

Tyler: OK. We run Black Angus, Red Angus, and Hereford. We have about 500 pairs and about 100 replacement heifers. The first calf heifers are the only ones we run through the barn, so we can keep an eye on them and get them tagged. We're very low maintenance with high tolerance.

D: Yeah. Well, you probably don't run into that many problems at the other location, correct? Or do you have enough people to pick up or fill in on anything that needs to be done?

Tyler: Yeah, my father-in-law lives out at the main ranch. He's 73, and he pours himself into the farm. He often comes out to visit us to see his granddaughters. We have about 260 head that winter out with an allotment of 35 sections or around 33,000 acres. We handle much of that, and my wife and I live on the farm.

We grow our own hay on about 220 acres. Then, the beef cattle take up about 100 acres. That’s where we graze our beef, where we'll finish. It keeps us busy.

D: Originally, your family ran Herefords; when did you start introducing Black and Red Angus?

Tyler: My wife's grandfather ran the ranch where we are now. Today, it’s about 1/8th the ranch that he ran for a man named Clarence Grieves, which he started managing in the fifties. It was indeed the American dream. When they started, all they had was a saddle, a bedroll, a sewing machine, and pots and pans.

Then, when Grieves passed away, his family kind of broke things up. It's down to about as small as it will get now. Our main summer range is about 56 square miles. There's a little bit of deeded land, primarily federal, but it's all just one open allotment. We've been running cattle with a few other ranches since the fifties. They bought the house and the farm

in the early eighties, and my wife and I have been here for about 12 years this fall.

D: Great. Does this make you 4th generation, then?

Tyler: My wife would be the 5th generation, and I'm a first-generation rancher.

D: Even better. I love it. That’s precisely why you think outside the box so much. Does your family hold sale events or private treaty any of your cattle?

Tyler: We do both. This year, we'll sell a load or two on video auction. We try to keep a little bit sold ahead so we know what to expect, and then we'll work that load off. You know, it's big range, so if you have one storm, it could move everything from one side of the range to the other, and you're going to be weeks getting them back. . People have no idea how big it is out here, the vastness. I didn’t understand it when I first went there. My wife did just because that's how she was raised.

D: Yeah, I’ve been to some tremendously huge ranches across the country where it takes hours to get to the other side of just one pasture.

Tyler: Exactly. When you go out to work on a windmill or a solar well and drive out there, and somebody forgets the right wrench, you're coming back tomorrow. It factors into your daily decisions. Anyway, we can put together one fancy load, that we can guarantee on the video auction. You could catch a storm coming from the right direction, pushing them all right to you. Right? But that time of year, you can catch a storm out of the southeast, pushing them in the wrong direction.

D: That’s quite the routine, weather or no weather. So, are you working the ranch with horses?

Tyler: Yeah, we’re all on horseback. We've got a lot of videos of herding and riding on our Instagram account for our beef business, ‘Wyoming Cowboy Cuts’. I enjoy sharing all the beautiful pictures and videos of trailing across the wide-open desert horseback, but the reality

is that most days are more mud, blood, and wind. So, yeah, you’ll see a lot of the girls on horseback. They've all been riding since they were basically born. We had a saddle that we cut the horn off for my wife to ride while pregnant.

D: Great move. That's hilarious and quite necessary.

Tyler: The girls, Ariana, who’s 7, and Annabella, who’s 10, start out with Papa while riding. He ponies them around on their horse and catches the drag, and Angela and I make the big circles and kick them all in. But now, the girls are way handier than the dogs. You can send them clear out of sight. They can handle anything by themselves at their age. They got some new horses last fall and are still feeling them out. They go to school four days a week, so we try to plan a lot of our work for Friday and Saturday, and then we kind of pick our days on Sundays with church and all. But, yeah, they're very involved around the ranch and very passionate about it.

D: So, has there been anything that's happened on the ranch that you could share that's been a difficult challenge?

Tyler: Oh…it was last winter. The worst in 120 years. If anything, it was just the sheer duration of how miserable it was. It was terrible for all of us here in Wyoming and elsewhere. We used to think the winter of ‘78 and ‘79 were the worst, and my father-in-law was in that. He was a young man back when there were buildings where that storm hit. They put a bunch of calves in one building, and it snowed so hard and fast that it sealed the building up, and a bunch of those calves suffocated inside it. It was sad and brutal. But last winter, it just kept coming and coming, it never stopped. Plus, the wind was 30, 40 miles an hour, seven days a week during winter. We had to feed those cattle out there on the winter pasture, though normally they don't get a bale of hay all winter, they usually just get lick tubs.

That's 23,000 acres out there, but the 260 cows were just huddling on a spot the size of 2 football fields. Everybody asked us why we didn’t just move them. Well, that pasture is 17 miles from our home and about 20 miles from town. So, you couldn't drive them down the highway in either direction because there's nowhere to go. You either went 17 miles one way or 20 the other, and the road was filled with snow again every day. We even have a loading dock there, but there's no way you can get a 4wd tractor in there, much less a semi.

Fortunately, there was a spring there. Every day, we would take a trailer and a tractor and meet there. It was about a 45-mile drive for me and a 34-mile drive for my father-in-law on the tractor. We would have some combination of hay from his place or ours. There were days it would take us an hour to go the 1 mile in to feed ground, then about 15 to 20 minutes to feed, then another hour to come back out because our tracks were already covered in drifted snow.

That was every day for 90 days. It was just brutal.

D: Wow. Coming from you, that says a lot.

Tyler: We are very fortunate that we calve a lot later than most. So, we only caught up with it for the last two

weeks. We did have some death loss, but not nearly as many. There were some people here in Fremont County who had 50% death loss on their calves.

D: So, are your neighbors running large acreages of land like you guys, or are you the exception? I'm assuming everybody around here is the same.

Tyler: We're kind of average size. Many around here run about 300 to 750 pairs, so we're in the middle. A lot of them are in allotments by themselves. There are a few common allotments where you're out running with a few other neighbors. Ours is probably the biggest common allotment because five other producers are in with us.

D: Do you have any help on the ranch?

Tyler: It’s just our family, you know? My father-in-law, my wife, and I, and the girls. Yeah, we don't have any hired hands. Occasionally, friends come out and ride when the weather's nice and the wind's not blowing.

We have one bunkhouse, but it's just for company. The job is tiring, but it's just us working out here daily. Sure, there are days when you wish you had some extra help around. We have some great friends who help when it's nice out. But even that, you know, it can look like it will be spectacular on Friday or Saturday when they're off work, and that plan goes out the window. So, typically, it's just us, and we get it done.

D: Gotcha. You mentioned that you are a first-generation rancher. Would you like to share what you've done before this?

Tyler: Yeah, I was always in the horse business. I shod horses for a while and did all kinds of different things in the horse business. I worked with some very successful racehorses. So, that was a different lifestyle. Then I learned that the curve to becoming a rancher is steep.

D: Yeah. Exactly. It’s not easy or quick.

Tyler: But having that horse life set me up for success as a rancher.

D: Yeah. So then, how did you meet your lovely wife?

Tyler: Through horses. I was riding many horses, and I had a place in Colorado with some regular customers. Then one of the guys I broke some colts for had a friend he did a lot of work with, and they approached me and said, hey, our ranch manager's getting up there in age. Would you be interested in going up and helping him for a few weeks? They didn't have to ask me twice. When I was breaking some colts with him, his daughter was home from college to help with some of the bigger days, and the first thing I did was insult her. D: Oh, goodness. Well, at least there was nowhere to go from there but up. Right?

Tyler: Yeah. Exactly. Just test the water right away. We stayed in contact over the years, and about ten years later, she started hanging around and came with me to the racetrack. Then her grandfather got sick, so her family came to us and said, here's the deal, if you're thinking about doing this or taking it over, now is the time. So, we moved back, and we’ve been here for about almost 13 years now.

D: Well, you're entrenched after 13 years. No doubt. Are you glad you came out this way and do what you do?

Tyler: Yeah, there are always the hard days, like I mentioned earlier, but then I go and shoe two feet on one of our horses now, and I think, how in the world did I ever do this?

Then Tyler launched Wyoming Cowboy Cuts, their direct-to-consumer beef outlet. This venture ultimately inspired the creation of the Rendezvous Beef Roundup:

D: OK, let’s get to the Best Beef contest in Wyoming and the West. There are two different awards, which are handled somewhat differently. I know we talked about it before, but some people still need to know about this fantastic event.

Tyler: Our Beef business led us to the idea and how we started. When we began our direct-to-consumer beef business, we had a couple of these calves born in a freak spring snowstorm, and they froze their ears, nose, and tail off. We knew that if we took them to the sale barn, we'd have to pay the sale barn to take them from us. So, we picked up a ton of cob in 50-pound bags and dropped a can of feed for them every day. Then at 30 months, we scheduled an appointment at the butcher. When we tried the beef, it was fantastic.

Everybody who came to our house for dinner told us how much they loved the Beef. We looked at each other, you know, and said there's no secret. It's just that cob, and they were black steers with some Herefords. We decided that maybe there's something to this, so we did a couple more next year.

We kept building, and at that point, we were just selling them as wholes and halves. But everyone, even other ranchers, would always say this is the best

beef they’ve ever had. So why do we not have a way to prove that?

This is how the Beef Roundup started. If you look at cheese, wine, whiskey, and beer, they all have some sort of tasting event. So, I looked around and there wasn't anything about Beef with that kind of labeling or awards around here. So, I told my wife, why don't we start something like that?

I started out asking a few people, and one of them was the president of our community college, Dr. Brad Tindle, who's now a very good friend. I told him what I wanted to do because the college had the only kitchen big enough to handle that much steak. He looked at me and then kind of looked off in one direction, and I thought, oh, he's thinking of a polite way to tell me, ‘Hey, nice idea, but get out of my office’. But no, sure enough, he said, “I love it! Can we do it here?” So that was the big push to get this all going.

At the start, I just wanted to have it all about the best beef in Wyoming, and we failed the 1st year. Then we got a few other people involved, and in the 2nd year, we had eight producers. They all put in 7 pounds of New York strip apiece. This was during COVID-19 and after some of the meat shortages in the stores, so people were very engaged. When we would serve the first steaks; you could hear a pin drop in that room. We give them a little note card with some prompts about what they think about the flavor, smell, texture, and those kinds of things. Some people were even asking for a second card.

It really became successful in the second year because people were aware of the disconnect between consumers and producers. Having had that shortage in the store earlier in the year, they really wanted to know where their food came from since that was a big topic at the time. So, we put out a few posts on social media and had a few local articles written about what we did that year.

Then other producers from other states contacted me and said they tried and found that they couldn’t do this. We don't have enough forward-thinking people, etc. So, can we participate? I said absolutely.

That’s how we came up with our Open Division, and it is what we call the Best Beef in the West. We had beef from as far east as New Jersey and New York. It’s just amazing that we got Brahma beef from Texas! We also get a lot of Wagyu cross. We've had some Scottish Highlands. This year, I'm excited since one out of California is fed on carrots.

D: Carrots? Wow.

Tyler: We’ll be open for more entries as soon as that new website is up, around when this gets to print. But it's always fascinating to see who will enter, where they’re from, and with what kind of cow.

A couple of years ago, one of the past winners from Kersey, Colorado, was Kane Meats. They're fantastic. They have a Longhorn-Corriente cross and feed it on spent beer grains from a local brewery. So, it’s really interesting to see what people do out there. We have one here in Wyoming, Circle H Ranch. They've been 2nd in the Wyoming competition a couple of times, so they haven't moved on to the open division, but I think they're one of the unique beefs in that they're a purebred Wagyu that is grass-finished above 10,000 feet. That alone I mean, I don't care what breed you have, but grass finishing above 10,000 feet, that must be pretty unique.

Our open division is only judged by celebrity judges. We’re bringing in some more this year, too. We will try to auction off one of those seats this year. So, if you want to sit down with the judges, we have some legitimate celebrities this year. If you want to sit with them and try some of the best steaks in the world, you can purchase that seat.

D: What a great idea! I bet that will be a popular option with many people.

Tyler: Yep, and it all goes to a scholarship. We're raising money for it, and it goes to meat sciences and then agriculture classes after that. We have a spectacular meat sciences program where they have a USDA-approved facility on-site, as well as a complete hands-on

Tyler persuaded the Mayor of Riverton to officially change the city's name for just the day of the Rendezvous Roundup. A local radio station held a contest and the winning name was "Moo-rocco, WY"

butchering program. So, we're ultimately raising money for that. Anything that helps young people in Ag, we are all for supporting that.

D: How many steaks does a producer have to deliver to you as their entry?

Tyler: The open division provides two rib eyes, 2 New York strips, two sirloin, and 2 lbs. of ground beef. The judges will only judge one of the New York strip cuts. At the end of the first round, if the steak is in the top four, we bring back the rib eyes. The rest of those steaks are used during the day for demonstrations and to feed our volunteers.

D: Do you have judges returning from past years?

Tyler: Yes, Dr. Anthony Chaffee, the Plant Free MD. He's coming back from Australia. He is also going to lead a panel of doctors. Dr. Sean O'Mara and a few others are joining Dr. Chaffee.

There will also be some new social media influencers. MeetDad1 from Instagram is coming. He has 3 million followers on all his different platforms. It’s crazy. Then there’s the former bass player from the heavy metal band Danzig.

Also, like last year, we’ll have some guys who won a dream trip for the Navy Special Operations Foundation out of Virginia. They won one of their fundraisers, and the culmination of the events was that they got to be judges at the beef roundup last year. Those guys just had a ball.

D: OK, switch it up again for a minute here. Is there anything you want to tell the boys in DC?

Tyler: We're witnessing packer consolidation, significantly influenced by lobbying. While packers are crucial for

handling tasks challenging to manage locally or regionally, their market control can disadvantage producers. Current issues like RFID and mRNA vaccines are drawing increasing attention from producers and consumers, underscoring the need for a stronger advocacy presence in Washington, D.C.

Regarding meat origin at retail, the value derived from international trade doesn't fully justify the lack of clear labeling. Unlike produce or seafood, where origin information is readily available, meat often lacks transparent labeling, despite claims that it would be too costly to provide. This stance is mainly unfounded, given today's technology and infrastructure capabilities.

D: How about last year's Open Division winner, Sawmill Creek Farms?

Tyler: I reached out to them because their social media presence was incredibly engaging. They've built a compelling narrative around their farm stand, offering everything from individual cuts to larger boxes, wholes, and halves. It's clear they're a significant asset to their community, and the level of engagement they're receiving is both exciting and well-deserved.

Another noteworthy mention is Mountain View Meats, consistently in the top 4 every year and clinching the title once. Their beef, arguably among the best nationwide, if not globally, hails from Fort Collins, Colorado. Seeing Sawmill Creek's success was particularly inspiring. We sent them a unique poster for their retail space, and they proudly display the prestigious Best Beef belt buckle, a symbol of excellence second only to what's awarded at the NFR.

Following their win, their sales soared by 35%. The dream of showcasing that "award-winning product" badge has translated into significant advertising value, complemented by their stellar marketing efforts. I'm eager to see how this dynamic evolves this year, especially if a new winner emerges. The title of Best Beef carries substantial weight, and our growing sample size is beginning to underscore the prestige that comes with such recognition.

D: OK, the last question and it's my favorite one. What's your favorite tool on the ranch?

Tyler: My absolute must have is my SOG pliers (like a leatherman but better). I use them several times a day. If I can’t fix it with my pliers and duct tape, it needs an expert!

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