RIDGWAY – Looking out across a green expanse of grassy pasture just north of Ridgway, local rancher Debby Wooddell points to the silhouette of a cow stooping to munch grass beneath a stand of trees.

“That one is from the original herd,” she says, explaining that it is one of the cows that had been grazing on a lease when she and husband Larry bought the property in 2004. How she can tell that cow from all the other black and red cows shuffling leisurely through the grass just beyond where we stand, I can’t tell. But she goes on to explain that all the cows we can see from our vantage point on the road through Tonatiuh Ranch are the “mammas,” who will remain on this lush patch of pasture until their babies are big enough to move to the next patch, where the rest of Tonatiuh’s exclusively grass-fed cows graze. Wooddell is tall and lean and muscular-looking in her blue jeans, and standing on the dirt road leading to her ranch-style home perched on the hill overlooking her herd of cattle mammas, she looks perfectly at home. Amid irrigation ditches, fences, cattle, and acres upon acres of grass, Wooddell seems not only comfortable, but really in her element.

As she explains more to me about herd rotation, sustainable grazing, and why cow manure is a terrific fertilizer, it’s difficult to imagine Wooddell being anywhere but here, or doing anything but what she does. I especially have a hard time imagining her as a high-powered business executive who, along with her equally ambitious husband Larry, worked in places like New York, Chicago, and London, in offices of some of the globe’s biggest banks.

But the couple’s background in finance come better into focus when we talk about the business side of Tonatiuh Ranch, a local purveyor of grass-finished, and also natural beef.

She explains that grass-finished beef (beef that comes from cows who spend their lives grazing on open fields of grass as opposed to traditionally-raised cows that are fed bulk-promoting corn and grain, often in densely populated feedlots) is healthier for consumption and its production is typically more sustainable, but Tonatiuh Ranch is not

an exclusively grass-fed production. It also engages in raising all-natural beef for selling to national natural beef distributors.

“Grass-fed is our passion, but if you can’t run a passion as a business it can become a money pit,” she says, going on to explain that Tonatiuh Ranch’s natural beef comes from cows who aren’t given any growth hormones or antibiotics but are fattened (or “finished”) with corn or grain. They do it this way, she explains, as a way to add to their business’s “economy of scale.” In other words, they offer natural beef as a means of keeping their grass-finished business viable in a world where “sustainable” has more than one definition.

“If this were simply a play business, we could afford to have just these guys,” she says, looking out across the pasture grass-fed cows. “But that just isn’t practical.”

This question of practicality, which in the business sense really means financial viability, is a question all small business owners – even those whose businesses seek to make the world a better place – must eventually answer if they hope to stay afloat, especially in this turbulent economic climate. For the Wooddells, two international bankers-cum-cattle ranchers, the answer to the practicality question comes in the form of cows that take less time to raise than their grass-finished counterparts. And this means that Tonatiuh Ranch can increase its production through operational efficiencies, while continuing to support its original, environmentally and financially sustainable business model.

“It comes down to the basic concepts of running a business, and many of those concepts carry across regardless of what business you’re running,” Wooddell explains.

From the economics side, it makes sense for Tonatiuh Ranch to raise cattle that will hit grocery store shelves marked as “natural” beef. Tonatiuh’s natural cows are still given space to roam and graze (more than 11,000 acres, in fact, on a government grazing permit on Dave Wood Road and a number of private grazing leases on Hastings Mesa). But, because they take less time to gain weight and can be sold or slaughtered at an earlier date (after being fed a diet of corn and grain by those who purchase the cows from the Woodells) and because their input costs are less than their grass-fed cousins, Tonatiuh’s natural herd nourishes this business’s financial requisites.

The grass-fed herd, meanwhile, nourishes Tonatiuh Ranch’s owners’ passion for producing locally raised meat that is not only more healthy for the consumer and better for the environment, but is also downright delicious. Tonatiuh Ranch grass-fed beef was featured in Allred’s Restaurant hamburgers last winter, but is almost exclusively enjoyed by Tonatiuh’s local friends and clients in the Ridgway-Telluride-Montrose area. Almost all Tonatiuh Ranch beef, natural and grass-finished, is sold locally, thus cutting down significantly on transportation and other production costs, not to mention the carbon footprint.

“Grass-fed and finished is best. But our goal is not to try to educate the world about why that is, although a lot of people have confirmed that grass-fed and finished is clearly healthier,” she says, alluding to the fact that grass-fed beef is higher in beta-carotene than regular beef and is a rich source of Omega-3s; it is also four to six times lower in fat than grain or corn-fed beef and contains only half the saturated fat, making it significantly lower in calories as well.

Grass-fed is also healthier, environmentally speaking, than traditionally raised beef due to what those cows aren’t fed: Specifically corn, the production of which requires large doses of pesticides (more than any other food crop) as well as fertilizers, which, subsequently, burden an already over-taxed supply of fossil fuels.

Yet since the contemporary agricultural model has evolved to reward large-scale, fossil fuel-dependant production over smaller-scale and typically more holistic operations, grass-fed beef comes at a price. “At the grocery store, grass-finished is also more expensive, and that’s part of why we’ve done what we have to provide a still very high quality product, but at a much more favorable per-pound cost,” Wooddell says. Additionally, grass-fed isn’t, ultimately, feasible for all beef production, since there simply isn’t enough land. “In a perfect world, there would be thousands of acres for everyone to do it this way,” Wooddell says, “but when you look at the mathematics it just doesn’t work.”

For their part, the Wooddells have come up with a holistic, financially and environmentally sustainable model for ranching in the New West that does work.

“What we’re trying to do is create a business that is eco-friendly and sustainable, while producing a product that is healthy and delicious,” she says. “But what we’ve also learned, which is so important in today’s world, is that you need to be flexible and make changes as the world changes. As my grandfather would say; ‘You must recognize opportunities, then reinvent yourself to take advantage of those opportunities.”

Reinvention, in the Tonatiuh Ranch vernacular, means subsidizing a passion with the fruits of what is feasible in today’s challenging economic climate. It means blending function with fervor in a business model that is sustainable, in both definitions of the word.

For more information on Tonatiuh Ranch beef or to place an order, contact Wooddell at hcp@frontier.net or 249-4025 x 15.