Photography by Nicolette Hahn Niman
Driving his truck through a pasture perched above the gleaming Pacific, with the hills of San Francisco visible to the south and Point Reyes jutting into the ocean to the north, Bill Niman pulls up next to a hulking black steer. “Dogie!” he shouts, hopping out to pat the animal on its flank. Returning to the truck, Niman explains that the steer was orphaned several years ago when he was just a few months old but refused to take a bottle, determined to tough it out on his own. “Now he weighs 2,000 pounds, maybe more,” Niman says, pride evident in his voice.
It’s easy to see why he would respect his old steer’s resilience and determination. At an age when most people are thinking seriously about retirement, Niman (who looks considerably younger than his 67 years) is setting out to build a second brand in the natural-meat business, having parted ways a few years ago with Niman Ranch, the legendary company that still bears his name. He recently added turkeys to his livestock lineup. And when he and his wife, Nicolette (an environmental lawyer and animal-welfare activist who is, in fact, considerably younger), aren’t tending to their grass-fed cattle and heritage turkeys, they’re busy raising Miles, their 3-year-old son.
While working to build awareness of his new brand, BN Ranch, Niman is also intent on providing a template for sustainable agriculture. “When I left Niman Ranch, one of the things I was passionate about was creating a model farm that other people could copy,” he says. Having served on the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, he had become even more aware of the glaring flaws in our food-production systems that Nicolette had been addressing in her work as an attorney for Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Waterkeeper Alliance.
Together, he says, they decided they could promote positive change by becoming “missionaries for sensible food production.” If Niman’s past influence on how food animals in this country are raised is any indication, he’s likely to create a lot of converts.
Niman has come a long way — not just geographically — from his early days growing up in Minneapolis, where his father ran a small grocery store. He was finishing a degree in anthropology at the University of Minnesota in 1967 and facing the almost certain prospect of being drafted to fight in Vietnam when he learned he could get a deferment by teaching in a poverty-stricken area.
He found a position teaching in a cotton-growing town in California’s San Joaquin Valley, as did a number of other (as Bill puts it) “alternative culture” types; however, his cadre of like-minded teachers was let go after that first year due to pressure from the town’s conservative old guard. After obtaining a credential from the University of California, Berkeley, Bill landed another teaching job in the coastal village of Bolinas, 30 winding miles north of San Francisco.
Before long, he felt the pull of the back-to-the-land movement. “This subculture that I was part of decided we needed to raise our own food,” he says. “There was already a heightened concern about industrial food production and just being a self-sufficient community.” With his first wife, Amy, he bought an 11-acre parcel in 1971 and started raising goats, horses and chickens.
Joined by writer Orville Schell, who lived in a converted chicken coop on their property, the Nimans eventually turned their attention to small-scale food-animal production. They started with pigs, which they fed on spent barley from San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing and expired Nancy’s yogurt from Oregon. They added beef cattle to their operation after Amy was given six Hereford calves as partial payment for tutoring the child of a ranch family a few miles up the road. Sadly, Amy didn’t live to see the herd these calves would ultimately spawn; she was killed in a horseback-riding accident on Christmas Day 1976.
The following year, Niman and Schell bought a 200-acre property across the road from the original ranch and shifted their focus exclusively to cattle. Their reputation began to soar after some of the most respected restaurants in northern California — including Chez Panisse, Zuni Café and Cafe Beaujolais — began to not only buy their grass-fed beef but also identify it on their menus. Still, it wasn’t until the National Park Service bought their land in 1984 for an expansion of Point Reyes National Seashore and leased it back to them along with an additional 800 acres that Niman was able to quit the construction job he’d been working to make ends meet and devote full attention to cattle ranching.
In the ensuing years, Niman changed business partners as his natural-meat business expanded to take advantage of other ranches and other types of livestock — most importantly, hogs. Niman Ranch formed a separate company to market pork from a nationwide network of family hog farms that raised their animals outdoors rather than in the warehouse-like confinement structures that have become the industry norm. Perhaps the clearest signal of the company’s success came in 2001, when the Chipotle chain of Mexican restaurants contracted with Niman Ranch to supply all of its pork.
But as so often happens with visionary entrepreneurs after they bring in outside investors, Niman ultimately had a falling out with the management of Niman Ranch. In 2007, he formally severed his connections with the company.
Making a Model Farm
Strolling past a flock of multicolored turkeys as they scurry around the yard making a joyous racket, Niman points out a Naragansett and a bronze. They represent two of the six breeds of heritage turkeys (sort of the poultry equivalent of heirloom tomatoes) that he and Nicolette brought back from Kansas as day-old hatchlings in the back seat of a rented car.
An important part of running a model farm, Niman believes, is maintaining a diversity of animals. For a while, they kept a herd of goats, which eat weeds that can compete with grass in the grazing pastures. “My goal was to improve the ranch for the cattle, but in the process we got the goat-meat business going and developed some interest through my network nationwide.”
When his former ranch managers relocated to Idaho with the goats, Niman decided to try his hand with heritage turkeys. “Heritage turkeys really cannot be scaled industrially,” he says, “so they provide an opportunity for smaller farmers to raise something that the marketplace recognizes has value.”
As for his cattle, Niman is raising them the old-fashioned way: grass-fed, without antibiotics or hormones. Unlike feedlot cattle, which can be fattened on grain based on demand, grass-fed cattle are dependent on the cycles of grass growth to be in prime condition for eating. “That’s the beauty of the animal — they can convert all this naturally occurring cellulosic material into wholesome and wonderful food,” Niman says.
He knows he has his work cut out for him to bring beef lovers around to his way of thinking. “The way grass-fed beef is raised today, it’s not living up to consumers’ expectations, because it’s not done properly,” he notes. “What we’re trying to do is to produce grass-finished beef that tastes every bit as good or better than grain-finished. That’s what everybody did in this country up until World War II. It just takes having the right genetics and the time and patience to allow the cattle to get fat.”
