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For most ranchers, the hardest part isn’t raising the cattle, but what happens after they leave the farm. Once they’re loaded onto someone else’s truck, so is most of the control. Processing, distribution and, too often, the biggest share of the profit all belong to somebody else.
Steven McBee Jr. looked at that system years ago and decided he wasn’t going to keep playing by its rules.
So while Washington is now investing up to $500 million to strengthen small and midsize meat processors, the 33-year-old rancher has spent the better part of a decade building his own way around the bottleneck.
Credit: Steven McBee Jr.
“Everybody in this industry gets told to raise your cattle, sell them into the commodity system and take the price you’re given,” McBee said. “We looked at that and thought, Why stop there? If we wanted more control over our future, we had to own more of what came next.”
It’s the mindset that built McBee Farm & Cattle Co. on a first-generation family farm in Gallatin, Missouri, where McBee works alongside his father, Steve Sr., and brothers Jesse, Cole and Brayden. There was no inherited land, no inherited cattle, no generations-old banking relationships. What the McBees did have, they put on camera.
Since The McBee Dynasty: Real American Cowboys premiered in 2024, viewers have watched the family build the business in real time, setbacks and all. “We never wanted the polished version,” McBee explained. “The equipment failures and the expensive lessons made the cut right alongside the wins, and that’s the point. It’s the same fight every farmer and rancher in America is in right now.”
The numbers behind that fight are brutal. The four largest beef packers controlled about a quarter of the U.S. market in the early 1970s. Today, they handle roughly 85 percent of U.S. beef processing, leaving independent producers with few options once their cattle are ready for market. Add rising input costs and unpredictable weather on top, and the margins go from thin to gone.
The way out, McBee figured, was hiding in plain sight. Americans were buying more protein, meat snacks were taking off, and very little of that value was making its way back to the producers themselves. “At some point, we quit asking how to get a better price for our cattle, and we started asking how to build something people could actually buy from us.”
Credit: Steven McBee Jr.
That “something” was a snack stick. McBee had been circling the idea since 2017, but selling a branded, shelf-stable product meant taking on parts of the business most ranch families never touch. “We had to become beginners over and over,” he said. “There wasn’t a shortcut. Every new part of the business came with a learning curve of its own.”
The first brand launched in 2020, and once demand proved real, a production facility followed two years later. The biggest leap came in 2023 with the purchase of the company’s own meat processing plant. After months of upgrades, it earned federal inspection and SQF certification, a top-tier food safety standard. A fulfillment center came next, built right on the farm so every order now ships from the same place the cattle are raised.
“We built the ladder one rung at a time, and each step was funded by the one before it. Farm, facility, fulfillment. One family, zero middlemen, and we can stand behind exactly what’s in the package and how it got there,” McBee said.
The timing couldn’t have been much better. Meat snack sales have climbed more than 45% over the past four years to a $4.4 billion category, and McBee says demand for the company’s snack sticks is already outpacing what the current facility can produce. Today, the products ship directly to customers through McBeeFarms.com and sit on shelves in more than a dozen states.
Growth hasn’t pulled the business away from Gallatin, either. The next facility is going up in the same rural Missouri community, built with local labor and expected to create 25 full-time jobs on top of the more than 30 the company already supports.
That local focus extends beyond the business, too. Along with donating snack sticks to nearby schools, the company brings children from underserved Kansas City neighborhoods to the farm through its Kids in the Outdoors program for horseback riding, fishing and a firsthand look at where their food comes from.
McBee’s next project is a little different. He’s building a men’s retreat program on the farm that combines the outdoors with conversations around emotional regulation and mental health.
For him, all of it comes back to the same goal.
“I want McBee to be proof that the American family farm isn’t dying. It just needs a different business model,” he said. “However big this gets, the rhythm won’t change. My brothers and I work side by side every day, and we still all sit down to dinner together every night. If we do this right, the next generation of farmers won’t have to invent a thing. They’ll just copy us.”
For most ranchers, the hardest part isn’t raising the cattle, but what happens after they leave the farm. Once they’re loaded onto someone else’s truck, so is most of the control. Processing, distribution and, too often, the biggest share of the profit all belong to somebody else.
Steven McBee Jr. looked at that system years ago and decided he wasn’t going to keep playing by its rules.
So while Washington is now investing up to $500 million to strengthen small and midsize meat processors, the 33-year-old rancher has spent the better part of a decade building his own way around the bottleneck.