“Stay away from that cow,” says Tim McLaughlin, co-owner of Crossbuck BBQ. “This one is real agitated.”
He met the cow just over a year ago at KV Ranch in Clifton, Texas, about 40 minutes west of Waco. He co-owns the ranch with Richard Kincheloe, whose family has owned the property since 1995. The two met as their children attended Prince of Peace Catholic School in Plano, where both families reside. At KV Ranch’s sprawling 7,500 acres, you’d be free to approach any other animal except for that one cow.
“Here’s the ribeye off the steer Tim was talking about,” Richard Kincheloe says, showing a photo from his phone of a darker cut of meat. “The big thing you’ll notice is the color. A darker cut means more blood retention at the time of slaughter. More blood retention equals stress.”
It might be hard to stay calm in the face of imminent death, but what’s the point of that death at all if the end product is going to suffer?
“When we harvested the cow that was calm and happy, it had very high quality meat,” McLaughlin says.
“It’s just because it wasn’t agitated,” Kincheloe adds. “It wasn’t overworking itself. It wasn’t just running its muscles for no reason at all.”
An epiphany: Frustrated cows equals disappointing meat. Happy cows equals better meat.
A plan: Separate a group of cows from the rest to be given special treatment. Slaughter them for better results, then sell the formerly happy meat at a premium.
It was too good not to try, but how?
“Our main focus was fly control, water availability and scratching post availability,” McLaughlin says. “If there’s flies all over the place and they’re flapping their tail, they’re agitated. We want to keep the animal as calm as we possibly can through its life.”
This group of cows and the process they go through have been branded as Crossbuck Cattle Co. There, a cow should fight no battles — insects, thirst, itch or even illness. Happiness is the number one priority.
“We no longer call ourselves an antibiotic free farm because if a cow gets sick, we’re going to take care of it,” McLaughlin says. “If we’re going to keep the cow happy, we’re going to keep the cow healthy.”
This method is a new experiment, but being on a farm is nothing unusual for McLaughlin, who spent summers on his grandparents’ cattle farm in Iowa.
“I have memories of my grandma going outside, yanking vegetables out of the ground and snapping a chicken’s neck,” he says. “That was dinner, and that’s something that stays with you.”
And it did. McLaughlin has been cooking professionally since he was 17. He went on to study at Le Cordon Bleu, a prestigious French culinary institute. At 23, he was named executive chef at David Slay’s Zuzu’s Petals restaurant in St. Louis. He’s never looked back, helping open Lockhart Smokehouse in 2011 before creating Crossbuck BBQ in 2022 with fellow pitmaster Damian Avila.
With cooking experience all over the country, McLaughlin recognizes how unusual his situation with KV Ranch is.
“With Tim’s program, if he cooks you a brisket, he knows exactly where that steer was fed its entire life,” Kincheloe says. “We are growing Texas beef on a Texas ranch for Texas.”
Texas has responded. Crossbuck Cattle products are sold out of a small pop-up next to the cash register at Crossbuck BBQ. Inside a fridge and surrounding shelves, housemade sausages, tallow and a variety of cuts of beef in vacuum sealed bags are available for sale. Since launching earlier this year, Crossbuck has sold out of its products twice.
“As a chef, to be this close to the product is super exciting,” McLaughlin says. “You talk about farm-to-table, this gets real close to the table. We own the farm together, and it ends up on these tables.”