The Real Farm to Table Part 2: Why Supporting Local Food Matters

Windmill Mountain Ranch, Sedona, Arizona

Welcome back to our summer series, where we’re spending time with the people who raise our beef, grow our produce, care for the land, and keep Arizona’s ranching and agriculture traditions alive.

In this issue, we head to Windmill Mountain Ranch, where raising cattle isn’t just a way to make a living. It’s a way of life, a connection to the land, the animals, and the kind of work that built this country.

Behind every steak sizzling on the grill and every hamburger landing on our plates, there’s a rancher carrying the weight of a country that’s forgetting how food really gets to the table.

Across Arizona and the country, the people who raise and process real beef—ranchers and local butchers—are losing ground. Big packers have moved in, setting the price regardless of quality. Whether you raise the best beef in the state or cattle barely fit for market, it all gets tossed into the same system. They weigh it, pay it, and move on. It is an assembly line—built for speed, not care. And to keep that machine running, the rules keep tightening, squeezing out the independent ranchers and hometown butchers who once kept this country fed.

And out on the land, the real pressures never let up. Water gets tighter. Costs climb. And through it all, the ranchers who are still standing don’t do it because it’s easy. They do it because it’s in their blood.

Thanks for riding with us and standing with the ranchers who are still out here fighting for the land, cattle, and a better future.

A Conversation with Becki Ross & her son Wyatt, Windmill Mountain Ranch

At Windmill Mountain Ranch, raising cattle isn’t just a business. It’s a family tradition carried on by Dustin and Becki Ross and their two sons, Wyatt and Nate. Together, they raise beef the old-fashioned way—on open land, under wide skies, with hard work, care, and pride. Every steer, every pasture, and every decision reflects a family deeply rooted in the land they love and the life they’ve chosen to preserve.

Today, Windmill Mountain Ranch helps feed around 4,000 families, raising beef the way it was meant to be: on open land, under wide skies, with the kind of care you can taste. The ranch spans 85 acres in Sedona, 117 acres on the mountain, and roughly 125,000 acres of grazing permits from the U.S. Forest Service.

Alongside their beef cattle, the family also runs a working dairy—part of a tradition that dates back to the late 1940s. “We’ve been raising cattle the same way for decades,” Becki says. “The only thing that’s changed is how we sell it.”

The family history is stitched deeply into the land itself. Dustin’s great-uncle and grandfather started the original Windmill Ranch, which once included Newman Park and the areas around Munds Park. After they passed away, the family made estate decisions that eventually split the ranch into two separate operations.

Before the split, Becki and Dustin ran cattle along Fox Ranch Road, spending falls in Newman Park.

“These are sentimental areas for us,” Becki says. “Every pasture, every trail, holds a memory.”

Today, part of the original Windmill Ranch was sold to the Wright family—a name many in Munds Park will recognize. If you’ve ever seen cows wandering through the Park, chances are they’re Wright cattle.

Though part of the original Windmill Ranch was sold off, Becki, Dustin, and their family stayed put—keeping their cattle, their land, and their way of doing things.

A Different Approach

Most cow-calf ranches sell their calves after weaning because they don’t have the space or setup to feed them out to finished weight. These operations are built for raising calves, not for full-scale feeding, so the cattle are moved to larger facilities that can handle the next phase.

Windmill Mountain Ranch takes a different approach. They move their weaned cattle to their feeding operation in Gila Bend, where the animals are raised to finished weight. From there, they’re hauled to a local processing plant in Buckeye just 50 minutes up the road. The beef is then sold directly to consumers, restaurants, and local grocers.

It’s an all-house operation. The cattle are raised, fed, and finished under their watchful care.

“We’re working hard to sell locally in Arizona,” Wyatt says. “We’re mainly in Phoenix right now, but we would love to expand to Northern Arizona grocery stores and restaurants.”

Still, despite all their effort, the reality is their herd is bigger than what they can sell through direct ranch-to-table sales. That means some cattle still have to go the commercial route—sold to giant packers like JBS that dominate the industry.

Factory Beef: Faster, Cheaper, & Nothing Like It Should Be

The beef that moves through major commercial packers is homogenized, a factory product designed for shelf life and visual appeal, not for flavor or quality. Many large plants use carbon monoxide gas during packaging to keep beef looking bright red in stores. It’s legal here in the U.S., even though the European Union bans the practice for being deceptive. The gas locks in color, making the meat look fresher than it really is, even when it’s past its prime.

Ground beef often contains meat from hundreds or even a thousand different cows. That makes traceability difficult, and tracking the source can be a nightmare if there’s a recall. Labels like “Product of USA” are often slapped onto imported beef that was simply processed or packaged here, adding to the confusion.

And it’s not just how the beef is packaged or blended, it’s how the cattle are raised. To speed up production, factory systems rely heavily on growth hormones, antibiotics, and high-energy feeds designed to fatten animals faster. It’s a race for weight, not for taste. Faster. Heavier. Cheaper. Everything that once made beef good, such as natural growth, regional character, and flavor, gets stripped out along the way. That’s where it all falls apart: true quality, local character, animal welfare, and honest food, all sacrificed in the race to go faster and cheaper.

The Loss of the Local Butcher Shop

It wasn’t always this way. Butchers used to be part of every town, family-run operations that knew the ranchers by name. Over the years, independent processors were regulated out of business, one by one. What’s left is a meatpacking system so consolidated, so centralized, that it squeezes small producers out of the market.

The big four beef packers—JBS, Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef—control about 85% of the market.

One of the biggest players is JBS USA, which operates a massive beef processing plant in Tolleson, Arizona. That facility alone can process up to 6,000 head of cattle in an eight-hour shift. The scale is staggering—and it has to be, because Americans eat a lot of beef and expect it cheap. But when you build for speed and volume, you lose everything that once made it good. Corners are cut, and quality is lost. 

And when we traded thousands of local butcher shops for a handful of massive plants, we didn’t just lose quality, we lost food security.

When COVID hit, that same JBS plant shut down for just one week, and suddenly, there was a beef shortage. Not because ranchers ran out of cattle. But because there wasn’t anywhere left to process them.

Shutdowns like that can be devastating for producers like Windmill Mountain Ranch. Cattle still need to be fed, watered, and cared for daily. And when operating on tight margins, even an extra 10 to 15 days of delay can be a breaking point, especially for smaller ranches.

It was a wake-up call. When processing is controlled by just a few major players, the whole system becomes fragile. 

Selling to big packers is the easiest option for ranchers, but not all of them want their beef going through that system. They want their hard work to mean more than just turning a profit. That matters too, of course, but they also want the community to enjoy their beef.

Unfortunately, small local butchers, who take time with the animals and pride in their craft, face hurdles at every turn. While large plants have full-time USDA inspectors on site, small processors often struggle to get inspection time at all. And when they do, it can come with a large price tag. Fees pile up fast and become unmanageable for smaller operations.

Wyatt explains, “It’s hard for small processors to survive. They get boxed out by rules and costs that were made for huge plants, not for people who want to slow down and do it right.”

And when inspections happen, it’s not the slow, careful process you might imagine. In the biggest plants, cattle are checked at a speed of about fifteen seconds per animal. Six thousand cattle, eight hours, and barely a moment for real care.

That’s not food safety. 

“The USDA acts like it’s here to protect consumers,” Wyatt says. “But the more I learn, the more I realize it’s built to protect the big packers—and keep them big.”

Why Bigger Isn’t Better

We already talked about what happens when you trade thousands of local butcher shops for a handful of massive plants. You don’t just shut down local processors and lose quality; you lose food security. It only took a one-week shutdown at JBS during COVID to show how fragile the system really is. 

That should have been a wake-up call. But here we are, still feeding a system that runs at a staggering pace, at the cost of everything that should matter.

Today, cattle often travel hundreds of miles just to reach a slaughterhouse large enough to take them. Wyatt said it’s not unusual for them to be hauled across state lines, packed into trailers for up to 23 hours straight. That’s miles and long hours of stress for the cattle.

Further, think about what it takes to run 6,000 head of cattle through a plant in just eight hours. That’s hundreds of animals per hour. Every hour. Moving, pushing, forcing. It’s not hard to figure out what gets lost when you move living beings through a system built for speed instead of care.

Harvesting animals has always been part of how we survive. It’s not something to hide from; it’s essential to our survival. But somewhere along the way, we stopped treating harvesting animals with the respect it deserves. We can be humane and thoughtful, and we don’t have to race cattle through concrete tunnels and steel kill floors just to shave a few pennies off the price of a hamburger.

Consumers can change this. Keep reading. 

Why Stress Matters

When cattle are stressed before processing, their bodies release a flood of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. That stress makes the meat tougher, darker, and less flavorful. It’s one of the reasons low-stress handling matters—it protects the quality of the beef just as much as the breed or the feed.

Wyatt explains, “When a cow begins to fear for their life, their pH levels will increase, affecting everything, including the taste of the meat.”

I asked: how could a processing plant running 6,000 head in eight hours possibly prevent stress?

Wyatt’s answer was simple. “They don’t. You’ve probably heard of grades like Prime, Choice, Select, and Commercial—but there’s also Cutter, and something called dark cutter beef.”

Dark cutter happens when the animal’s too stressed. The meat turns a deep, ugly red—almost like liver—and everything that makes the meat taste good gets lost. Instead of the rich, buttery flavor you get from cattle raised with care, you’re left with beef that’s dry, flat, and sometimes metallic.

Cutter beef, the USDA’s second-lowest grade, is what you get when stress takes over. The muscle tightens, the flavor fades, and the tenderness is gone before it reaches the grill. The more fear and exhaustion an animal endures, the worse the meat. That’s what the grading system is really tracking—not just marbling, not just age of the animal, but the toll of a system that pushes too hard, moves too fast, and forgets the life it’s taking—turning a gift into something barely fit to eat.

At Windmill Mountain Ranch, it’s different. Their cattle travel less than an hour to a local processor. From the truck to the harvest floor, stress is kept to a minimum.

“We don’t haul single animals,” Becki said. “There’s always a companion in the trailer. It keeps them calmer. It matters.”

It’s not just genetics or feed that make good beef. It’s the handling. It’s the care. It’s the respect for the life you’re taking.

Consumers can change this. Keep reading. 

A Smarter Way to Buy Beef

Real quality—the kind you can see, smell, and taste—starts and ends with knowing your rancher.

Some ranchers, like Windmill Mountain Ranch, sidestep the factory system by selling beef the old-fashioned way: by the quarter, half, or whole animal.

A quarter beef gives you about 100 pounds of take-home cuts, a half yields around 200 pounds, and a whole steer brings in close to 400 pounds of beef for your freezer.

The beef is processed by a local butcher, packaged, labeled, and frozen, just like grocery store meat, but marked “NOT FOR SALE” because it didn’t pass through a USDA plant.

You’re not buying random cuts out of the grocery cooler. You’re buying a share of a real animal from the rancher of your choice.

At Windmill Mountain Ranch, they offer not only quarter, halves, and wholes, they also offer USDA-processed individual cuts for those who just want a few steaks at a time.

Either way, your dollars stay closer to the land, and your beef comes with a name and a story, not a corporate logo.

And when you buy local, you’re not just helping ranchers. You’re protecting real choice for yourself, too.

“If I were selling to a grocery store in Sedona or Camp Verde and they wanted grass-fed beef, I could have a real conversation about making the switch,” Wyatt said. “And if there was ever a problem, they’d know exactly who to call. That’s safety—and it’s customer service.”

When you step outside the factory system, even just a little, you help rebuild something real.

And the beef? Phenomenal. Richer, cleaner, and a world away from the gas-flushed, store-bought cuts flashing fake color and a “Product of USA” sticker they didn’t earn.

Stewardship, Respect, & Responsibility

I first met Becki at the Verde Natural Resource Conservation District meeting in Camp Verde. I went looking for ranchers to interview, and left with a lot more. What I learned that day was hard to hear but too important to ignore.

If we want local beef on our plates, it’s not enough to buy it. We have to protect the land that makes it possible.

Ranchers lease land from the U.S. Forest Service, working alongside hikers, campers, OHV riders, and even hot air balloon tours. It’s public land, but it’s also working land, and too many people forget, or never learned, what that really means.

When OHV riders leave marked trails, they tear up fragile soil. Erosion follows, sending silt into the water tanks and streams that ranchers and wildlife depend on. It’s the same slow damage now choking Bartlett Lake—a problem that didn’t begin with floods, but with footprints and tire tracks, one careless or unaware turn at a time.

Further, when fences are cut so OHV riders can trespass, cattle roam into places they shouldn’t be. Fences in Munds Park? Cut those and the cattle can end up on the I-17—a horrible disaster waiting to happen. Every broken fence costs ranchers time, money, and sometimes, lives.

And then there’s the uglier side.

There have been cases where people have shot cattle for sport—left them bleeding out in the dirt, wasted and rotting under the sun. It’s not hunting. It’s not an accident. It’s cruelty. It’s theft. It’s a punch in the gut to ranchers.

Every cow lost this way is more than money stolen. It’s a sad statement about our society, a sign that somewhere along the way, we lost our connection to nature and our respect for life.

How to Be a Better Steward

Know where you are. Use apps like OnX Hunt to tell the difference between public and private land. Respect boundaries—and remember that a fence is there for a reason.

Stay on marked trails. Don’t cut across open land, trample meadows, or carve out your own path.

Don’t break the living crust by going off trail. In the high desert, the “soil” isn’t just dirt. It’s a thin, living layer that holds moisture, prevents erosion, and anchors everything that grows. Break it, and the land starts slipping away.

Camp only in designated areas. Pulling off into open spaces damages fragile ground and risks wildfires.

Respect the work that’s been here long before you showed up. Fences, cattle, and backroads are not yours—they’re part of a system that feeds people. Respect it.

If you love this land, show it. Ride like you mean it. Camp like you mean it. Leave it better than you found it.

What the Ranchers Want You to Know

At the end of our conversation, I asked Becki and Wyatt, “If there’s one thing you want people to take away from this story, what would it be?”

They didn’t hesitate.

“Know your farmer. Vote with your dollar.”

If you want to see local meat in your stores, ask for it by name. And when they can’t deliver—and they won’t—walk away. Make a statement. Then turn to your local rancher and buy direct.

You’ll pay a little more—but you’ll taste the difference. And honestly, it might make you a little mad. This is how food used to taste. This is how it should taste. Somewhere along the way, greed took the wheel, and we were left eating tires.

This isn’t just about good food. It’s about survival. It’s about protecting food sovereignty. And if you’re waiting for the government to fix it, don’t. Change doesn’t start with them. It starts with us.

Buy local. Support the land—and the people who live by it.

What Makes Windmill Mountain Ranch Beef Different

“When you buy direct from us, the beef comes from a single animal—it’s not mixed with meat from dozens of others or run through a factory system,” Wyatt explains. “We raise our cattle from calf to finished weight, then take them to a USDA-inspected facility for processing. The result? You can see the difference on the grill, and you can taste the difference. I had a chef from Christopher’s Steak House tell me it was the best beef he’d ever had. We’re focused on flavor—not just shelf appeal at the grocery store.”

From left to right: Nate, Justin Stewart, Dawnie Stewart (matriarch), Wyatt, Becki, Dustin, Ty, Jacey, Hadley, Tammy, Denton Ross

Meet the Family Behind Windmill Mountain Ranch

Windmill Mountain Ranch is a true family effort. Dustin and Becki Ross work alongside their sons Wyatt and Nate, their wives Hailey and Regan, Dustin’s brother Denton and wife Tammy, and parents Justin and Dawnie. Full-time ranch manager Ethan Crockett and his family help keep daily operations running. Together, they form the heart and hands of a ranching tradition that’s generations strong.