You'Re listening to the Farm Walks Podcast. I'm your host Nicole Witham, AKA Farmer Nicole. The Farm Walks Podcast is brought to you by Tilt alliance and Washington State University Food Systems Program. If you want to learn more about all the topics and episodes, head on over to our website farmwalks.org to look through episodes and find us wherever you enjoy your favorite podcasts and be sure to keep a lookout for in person or on Farm Farm Walks throughout Washington State. In this episode of the Farm Walks Podcast, I'm talking with Beth Robinette of Lazy R Ranch located in Cheney, Washington. Beth is a fourth generation rancher carrying on holistic management practices that center the symbiotic relationship between grasslands and grazing ruminants. Beth is also adapting the family ranch's relationships to customers and markets, its history and indigenous communities, marginalized communities seeking education and land access, and of course climate change and fire safety. I'm pretty psyched to be checking in with Beth as I am admittedly a major fangirl of Lazy R and Beth's work.

Later in the episode we're connecting with Sarah Lemon, the WSDA Regional Markets Program Local Meat Marketing Specialist. Hear what sort of resources and offerings the wsda, WSU and WA meetup have coming your way.

Hello, my name is Beth Robinette and I am the owner operator of Lazy R Ranch. We grow grass fed beef on 800 acres in Spencer Spokane, Washington. You can find our products on our website lazyrbeef.com and you can follow us on social media. He new Cowgirl camp.

I have with me today Beth Robinette from Lazy R Ranch and you're out there in the Cheney Spokane area in the Inland Empire.

That's right, yeah.

So tell us more about the ranch and yourself.

I'm the fourth generation of my family here on the Lazy R. We're a grass fed beef operation. We do cow calf through finish and we direct market all of our beef as custom locker beef. So we work with a custom on farm butcher that is also a multi generation family business that we've worked with for a long time which is a really cool relationship to have. The ranch is about is a little over 800 acres. We're just west of Spokane, about 16 miles west of Spokane, about halfway between Cheney and Medical Lake. So if you're familiar with with that part of Eastern Washington, hopefully that helps put us on the map a little bit. But if you've driven through that part of the world on the interstate, you've actually been through the Lazy R before.

My my family came there in 1937 and it ran the place as a dairy and then it sort of transitioned to a conventional beef operation. And then my dad in the mid-90s, really transformed his grazing management. He got introduced to, to the work of Alan Savory and the concept of holistic management. And he had the opportunity to train with Alan, to study with Alan for two years through this project, through WSU actually. And he ended up going on to be a holistic management educator. And all of that was kind of happening right around the time I was old enough to pick up an electric fence reel. So I really got a ground level view. So I consider myself like a second generation holistic manager.

Yeah.

Which is kind of a cool place to enter the work from.

Yeah, there was a lot of like paths and work that happened before you, and now you get to step into that and continue to build upon it. So you currently are marketing your beef primarily through direct market avenues. Tell us a little bit more about that.