Benchmark Modern Steak won best marbled Angus in Canada in 2016
By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com
The search for the perfect steak led to a partnership between a Picture Butte, Alta. rancher and a Calgary, Alta. restaurateur.
Michael Munton, operator of Benchmark Angus, and Stephen Deere, owner of the restaurant Modern Steak, purchased a bull in 2016 for more than $80,000. The bull had just won an award for the best marbled Angus in the country.
The pair named the bull Benchmark Modern, a combination of their respective businesses.
The chef and rancher are beginning to see returns on their investment as cattle sired by Benchmark Modern are heading to market.
Munton, whose family has been ranching for almost 100 years, takes extra care to ensure the animals meet all the necessary characteristics to warrant customers paying $59 for a T-bone steak at Deere’s restaurant.
“It’s a continual pursuit of trying to raise superior beef all the time,” he told Farms.com today. “We ultrasound every animal at a year of age and that ultrasound tells us how much marbling is in the carcass, how big the ribeye is going to be and how much backfat the animal has.”
The heifers are also scanned, and the complete set of data helps dictate which pair can produce the best beef.
“We take all of the ultrasound data and use it in our breeding decisions,” he said. “We’ll take an animal with lots of ribeye and put it together with one that has lots of marbling.”
Members of the food industry are impressed with the pair’s ambition.
Using data to breed better cuts of meat can be a game changer, said Michael Allemeier, a culinary educator at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology.
“I am amazed how science has become so much a part of the craft of raising animals, an in particular, the beef,” he told CBC yesterday. “To kind of hinge everything on the genetics of one specific prize bull – that is really taking things to the next level, I think."
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