Manatee County cattle rancher gets creative to fight inflation

MYAKKA CITY, Fla. — As the price of meat continues to increase and affect Florida residents, one rancher in Myakka City is getting creative with using the natural resources on his land.

Raising cattle takes a lot of hard work, but when you’ve been in the industry as long as Jim Strickland has, it’s a lifestyle.

“I love being outside, I love being in the woods, and I love cattle,” he said.

But he says it’s gotten more expensive for ranchers to meet USDA standards, so to offset costs, Strickland said he has turned to selling natural resources on the ranch like honey, wood or heart of palm. He also uses invisible fences for his cattle to cut down on costs and labor time.

As a sixth-generation cattle rancher, Strickland said being a cowboy is in his blood — he’s been at it since he was a kid, helping his dad and grandfather.

Since then, Strickland said he’s experienced many changes to the meat industry over the years.

“The price of meat is supply and demand,” he said. “Right now, we are at the lowest cattle herd numbers in the last 50 to 75 years. Inflation has a point in our bottom line — certainly other things have a point in our bottom line.”

Strickland said a lot goes into bringing meat to the table, and recently it’s become more expensive to do that.

“We have to pay the trucker, we have to pay the veterinarian, we have to pay the processor,” he said. “Then the processor takes it to the distribution facility — we have to pay the distribution that drives to the retailer. There are seven or eight hands in this meat product.”

Strickland’s raising more than a thousand head of cattle on about 17,000 acres spread out between the eight ranches that he owns or manages. But he says with more people moving to Florida, the amount of available land has decreased.

“It’s actually shrunk,” he said, noting that he used to lease as many as 40,000 acres. “Now we are down to where we are, less than 20,000 acres scattered around.”

That’s why Strickland said it was important to better utilize the land he has by producing other goods to sell.

“We do everything we can to monetize what we are doing on this ranch to be able to hang on this ranch,” he said. “This is going the same way across America. The exact same way.”