To rumble down dirt roads or across an abandoned channel of the Jefferson River is to behold a corner of southwest Montana: trees lining the banks of a winding creek, whitetail deer grazing the edge of a hayfield. Save for the solar panels powering a pivot irrigation system and other signs of modern farm and ranch life, it’s not hard to imagine the valley south of Three Forks just as Lewis and Clark saw it over 200 years ago.
Neither Robert Keith nor Tom Groneberg were born in Montana but as the saying goes, they got here as fast as they could. Robert made his first trip west on a family vacation to a dude ranch in Wyoming. A Chicago native, Tom moved to Missoula for a creative writing program, eventually working, managing, and owning ranches across Montana. In 2004, Robert founded the Beartooth Group, an investment collaborative focused on restoration, stewardship, and marketing of rural properties. Tom joined Beartooth in 2020 as a ranch manager.
“I was drawn here," Robert explained. “My wife and I and our family were spending every vacation in Cody, Wyoming, on the family ranch. And I realized it’s not just where you’re drawn but can you make a career there, too?”
Robert worked in the world of finance and investments, living in New York and Silicon Valley. The West, though, captured his heart. After their stay at the dude ranch, his family purchased a ranch in Cody.
A conservationist to the core, Robert felt strongly about the importance of protecting and preserving the environment but also in finding a way to show people that agriculture, and especially cattle, can be used as a tool to reach environment and conservation goals.
“The big picture of what we do is trying to solve a couple of problems,” Robert explained. “Some consumers don’t buy beef because of climate change worries. For some, it’s easy to knock on cattle for being hard on the landscape. But we thought, ‘what if we can show that cattle can have a positive impact, that we can do the reverse of those two things and actually help the landscape?’”
In 2019, Beartooth Group purchased a ranch near Willow Creek and embarked on several projects: restoring the creek and wetland areas, planting wildlife-friendly crop plots, implementing intensive grazing practices to revive grazing areas, and educating the public on the coexistence of conservation and agriculture.
“Cattle are a part of the whole,” Tom explained. “I look at those big, dry hillsides above the river and the best use is to have some critters grazing that old dry grass.”
Throughout a lifetime in agriculture, Tom appreciates the value of creating a sustainable legacy.
“When people find out who I work with, they say, ‘Oh, you’re ranch flippers.’ But that doesn’t get to the heart of it,” Tom said. “The real changes take years and years. We may not even see it in our lifetimes. But we still do it. Because it’s the right thing to do.”
While restoration work may take decades, Robert and Tom also wanted to encourage people to “think before they eat” in the here-and-now, thus the idea of “Philosopher’s Beef,” offering local consumers an opportunity to buy carbon-neutral beef. They purchased some yearling heifers from a ranch in central Montana and raised them on grass and spent brewer’s grains from a brewery in Bozeman.
And they began to tell their story: cattle roaming river bottom pastures much as bison did 200 years ago, their hooves pounding in the seeds, fertilizing the earth as their grazing enhanced root systems and the landscape’s ability to sequester carbon. At harvest time, they worked with a local butcher to process the meat, packaging delicious cuts of steaks, burger, meat sticks, jerky, and bratwursts.
Consumers loved it. People who’d been eating a vegetarian diet came on board after learning the positive impacts cattle could have as part of regenerative agriculture.
“The really cool thing to think about is the terroir of this meat,” Tom explained. “There’s an aspect of climate and a story to this beef: how it was raised, how it was treated, and how it was harvested. Hopefully, that story is felt when you sit down with your family and have a steak birthday dinner. We hope it is an experience you’re grateful for, that this was all worth doing.”
Find Philosopher’s Beef online at PhilosophersBeef.com.