Our Story
By Michael and Joseph Ring.
When our mother, Lisa, was a young girl exhibiting show cattle, she dreamed of competing in the live show at the Illinois State Fair. She was a very frugal girl and wanted to figure out how to pay her way to be able to compete. After a look at the prize money to be awarded at the state fair, she discovered that the live show premiums didn’t pay much, but the carcass show (a contest that judges meat quality rather than animal phenotype) had a much higher payout for the winners. She determined that if she could place in the top of the carcass show, she could pay for her trip to show her live calves at the state fair.
That was all she needed to know. She contacted anyone she thought could help her. She tried to learn the best possible practices for feeding and taking care of cattle to make them gain weight and have the highest possible meat quality. She and her sister, Annette, ended up with many champion carcasses over the years and many happy trips to the Illinois State Fair.
Now fast forward a few years.
When we were six years old, our grandfather and our mother gave us each one cow. That was the start of our herd, and we’ve been growing ever since. While our parents are no longer with us, our mother’s drive to create the best possible carcass quality has carried on through our generation.
Today we operate a custom cattle feedyard with our family in northern Illinois, as well as growing crops and caring for our cow herd. When you buy beef from us, it has been grown here on our farm since the point of conception. This is important to us for many reasons.
1. We know the pedigree of our cattle and their breed composition.
2. We know how they have been handled and fed for every day of their lives.
3. We know that our meat has a special “Terroir” (or flavor) as a result of these genetic and environmental factors.
4. We want to make sure that the product we offer to our family, and friends is absolutely the best that it can be.
Ring Brothers Beef LLC was founded in 2020 in an effort to fully capture the value represented in these factors. We want to market the best of the best to people that will appreciate our beef rather than selling it into the wholesale market. We are currently marketing less than half of our calf crop through this program in an effort to offer only the highest quality calves possible.
We’d love to chat with you about our process and have the opportunity to provide you with some of our top quality beef.
Thank you for reading, and thanks for visiting Ringbrothersbeef.com