Jon Mark Beilue: Productive partnership for many

WT meat lab, Cactus Cares team together for mutual benefit

Photo: Doc’s Prime Cuts and the Caviness Meat Science and Innovation Center at West Texas A&M University provide thousands of pounds of beef each year to Cactus Cares. Seen here are Wayne Craig, executive director of Cactus Cares; Shelby Padgett, director of Cactus Cares; and Dr. Ty Lawrence, professor of animal science and director of the West Texas A&M University Beef Carcass Research Center.

It’s hard to say who benefits most from this partnership – Cactus Cares, students in the West Texas A&M University meat lab, or their fellow students in need of quality food.

Maybe just call it a tie. They all benefit greatly.

“It’s a great partnership for us,” said Dr. Ty Lawrence, professor of animal science and director of WT’s Beef Carcass Research Center. “It allows us to support the community and the cause of Cactus Cares and give our students another daily task that is a beneficial part of their learning experience and education.”

Cactus Cares is the philanthropic arm of Cactus Feeders, producer of more than 1 million commercial fed cattle and 700,000 market hogs annually. Cactus Feeders has feedlot operations throughout the Texas Panhandle and southwest Kansas and hog operations in Iowa, South Carolina and Georgia.

In 2018, the Cactus Feeders board of directors sought to establish outreach and charitable help in the regions they serve. Out of that came Cactus Cares. Wayne Craig went from head of IT and software development of Cactus Feeders to executive director of Cactus Cares.

“Cactus Cares is a way for our company to help those less fortunate in the regions we serve,” Craig said. “It’s about neighbors helping neighbors.”

Cactus Cares provides scholarships and grants for college- and tech-bound youth as well as leadership mentoring within its five-state footprint. Its biggest impact is providing beef and pork to food banks and direct donations to outreach groups like Sharing Hope Ministry, which serves at-risk and incarcerated women and Eastridge Mission Center in East Amarillo.

Enter the WT and Cactus Cares university meat lab program. WT is one of eight university meat processing labs in Texas and elsewhere that provide beef and pork to local outreaches through Cactus Cares.

“We recognized early on that one of the biggest challenges we had was getting quality protein to our food pantries,” Craig said. “We could give money to food pantries to purchase beef and pork at Wal-Mart, but many times, they cannot get that in the supply they need.

“Universities have the meat available. We thought it would be a way to support ag education and support food pantries and get benefits with the same dollars.”

Cactus Cares began using the WT meat lab operation in 2019. In October of 2020, the 501(c)3 purchased 2,000 pounds of ground beef from Doc’s Prime Cuts, WT’s retail store that’s available to the public. Groups contact Cactus Cares with beef and pork requests, and Craig works with Lawrence and Doc’s to provide meat for the likes of High Plains Food Bank and Hillside Christian Church, as well as Sharing Hope and Eastridge Mission Center.

Then came another group to serve, one much closer to home, one the meat lab shares a campus with: WT students. Food insecurity may not seem like a problem for college students, but it’s a rising one — not just at WT, but across the country.

“A lot don’t realize that meal plans come with a cost and they can be expensive,” said Rebekah Bachman, assistant dean of the Paul Engler College of Agriculture and Natural Sciences. “When a student is not living on campus, on-campus dining is not economical for them.”

The pandemic only accelerated the issue in 2020 across many campuses where hourly jobs were often shut down as well as many places to eat. With fewer options and less money, food — especially healthy food — can be an issue.

FeedingAmerica.org acknowledges that data studies among college campus are limited nationally, but food insecurity among college students is thought to be much higher than the national household average of 13 percent. Some campus studies show more than 50 percent of college students will experience food insecurity at some point during their academic stay.

“It didn’t come as a surprise to me. The shock to me came much earlier when my children started in the public school system,” Lawrence said. “That need is everywhere in our community in Canyon. So it’s no surprise that need exists on college campuses as well.”

Of 150 food banks nationally who participated in a 2018 Government Accountability Report, 129 of them addressed hunger among college students. The WT meat lab, while not a food bank, is doing work similar to that. Bachman and Sarah Pierce, facilitator for WT’s Health Integration Services, had discussions more than a year ago to identify the number of students affected by hunger.

A further discussion in the fall of 2020 with Lawrence and Craig formed a collaboration. Students in the WT meat lab would provide ground beef through Doc’s retail store that qualifying students could receive at no cost.

Those students are identified through Student Medical Services, Student Counseling Services or through faculty, staff or other students. Those food-insecure students are funneled through Pierce. That gives WT the anticipated amount of ground beef.

From February 25 to May 6, 2021, Doc’s supplied 515 pounds of ground beef for WT students. That likely will be close to the same amount of beef during the fall semester.

“This is another outlet for our product, and a great one,” Lawrence said. “It doesn’t fundamentally change what our (meat lab) students are learning. It’s the same process one way or another. The only difference is they know this is philanthropic and helping directly other students.”

The WT meat lab, or the Caviness Meat Science and Innovation Center, opened in 2018 in the Engler College of Agriculture and Natural Sciences. It processes beef, pork, poultry and lamb. It replaced the aging one on campus that had been around for 46 years. At more than 15,000 square feet, it’s more than five times the size of the old lab.

Doc’s Prime Cuts, where the product is sold, is named for Dr. Ted Montgomery, the first meat scientist at WT. Demand peaked during the pandemic with a record of $25,800 worth of product sold to the public in one eight-hour day in May 2020. Sales have since stabilized since May and June 2020, but have been steady. Cactus Cares has been and will continue to be a consistent customer.

“We are able to multiply our efforts,” said Shelby Padgett, director of Cactus Cares, “by not only supporting groups receiving the beef, but also supporting the WT meat lab and all the great work they are doing.”

Do you know of a student, faculty member, project, an alumnus or any other story idea for “WT: The Heart and Soul of the Texas Panhandle?” If so, email Jon Mark Beilue at jbeilue@wtamu.edu.