Happy Holidays from the Ryan's!

On behalf of Ruth, myself and our entire family, I want to extend our sincerest wishes for a safe and happy holiday season to you and your family! We'll be spending the holidays at the ranch with our children and grandchildren. We hope that you'll be spending special time with your family and loved ones as well.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

A Day in the Life

People often ask me what I do these days now that I’m not playing baseball. Sometimes it can be hard for athletes to go from a professional career to the real world. But I’ve been blessed to continue to work in baseball while also focusing on my other loves – my family and raising beef. Balancing those three passions is my biggest challenge.

In baseball, I’m an owner of the minor league baseball teams the Round Rock Express and the Corpus Christi Hooks. On days that I’m home in Central Texas, I’ll work from my office. And if it’s during the season, I’ll attend as many of the Round Rock Express home games as I can.

I’m also special assistant to the president for the Houston Astros. That means I go to Houston a couple of times a month during the season. In the off-season, I attend the mini-camps, and then I go to spring training in Florida for a couple of weeks to work with the minor leaguers.

Every week I’ll also make it to one of my ranches. I have managers at each of the ranches and they do the daily operations, but I like to spend two or three days at each ranch working cattle or other chores that need attention. When I go to the Ray Ranch in South Texas, I’m just a short drive from Corpus Christi. So I’ll incorporate a trip to the Hooks office and maybe see a game or two while I’m there. That way I’ll combine my ranch visits and my baseball commitments on one trip to the area.

But of all the things I do, family is the most important. Ruth and I helped solve the family dilemma by moving to Central Texas to be near our three children and their families. Ruth’s parents also moved to the area so we’re all able to stay in touch on a regular basis. And being with my family makes the rest of my “jobs” all that much more enjoyable.

The Natural Approach

Some people confuse the terms “organic” and “natural.” Organic beef follows stringent requirements that include never allowing the cattle to eat anything but certified organic feed and never giving it antibiotics even for healing purposes.

By comparison, the beef that my partners and I send from our ranches to your plate is an all- natural product. We manage our cattle to meet the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) definition for natural: Our products never contain any additives. In addition, the products we produce are never more than minimally processed.

I've included a few pictures here of ranchers and partners involved in our program. The first photo is of Chuck Schronk, Charlie Harrod, a rancher from Arkansas, myself and Wendell Schronk of Beefmaster Breeders United, San Antonio, Texas. The second picture is of me talking with Dr. Charles Graham, DVM of Gonzales, Texas.

We provide our customers this assurance by working only with licensed feedlots that feed only high quality grain. We even guarantee that our cattle receive no growth hormone implants or antibiotics during the last 100 days of the feeding period to go beyond the “minimally processed” requirement.

But there’s much more going on with our natural beef products. Because we want to provide you with some of the finest beef that you’ll ever eat, we work with others in the beef industry to achieve huge strides in beef quality assurance.

That means we raise and handle our cattle with the finest care. Our customers have demanded this and we have moved much further down the road in providing high levels of cattle care than ever before.

Ranchers refer to the mood of cattle as their disposition. And it’s our goal to create an environment that generates only cattle with good dispositions 100 percent of the time. We have built our cattle working facilities so that our cattle are always comfortable. And we support beef industry efforts to educate the trucking companies that transport our cattle from the feedlot to the processing plant to ensure that they understand how to keep these cattle stress-free through harvest.

Our commitment to you doesn’t end there, however. Nolan Ryan's Guaranteed Tender Beef selects only the tenderest beef at the processing plant. We then age it for 14 days to be sure every bite is tender and full of flavor. We are proud that USDA certifies our tenderness and aging process.

Remember: Natural does not mean organic. However, perhaps what you are really looking for is beef that is minimally processed yet provides other quality and cattle-care components. If so, that’s what we produce with Nolan Ryan's Guaranteed Tender Meats.

Being Grandparents

Ruth and I are grandparents of one boy and four girls, and when fall comes around we really miss the activity that our grandkids generate during the summer. Although not all of them are school-age yet, fall months seem to lower their speeds.

Our grandkids are the reason Ruth and I moved from our longtime home in Alvin to Central Texas. We wanted to be near them and it’s been really nice to see them all the time. During summer, it’s not unusual for all of them to come by my office during the same day. And if they don’t, I know they’ll filter through at some point during the course of the week.

As parents, I remember hearing people tell me: “Just wait until you’re a grandparent.” And I thought that didn’t make any sense. How can being a grandparent be any different than being a father and raising your own children and participating in all the things that your children experience? But now I can honestly say that having grandchildren is completely different than I ever anticipated. They bring a lot of joy to our lives. We’re already looking forward to the holiday season when we’ll gather all the kids up and take them to the ranch because they love playing down by the river.

Promoting Beef in Japan

About the middle of July, Ruth and I and our three children—Reid, Reese and Wendy—some of their spouses and one grandchild traveled to Japan to promote U.S. beef for a couple of weeks. It was a great learning experience for our children as well as an opportunity for them to enjoy a different culture. We attended a lot of functions geared around the beef trade in Japan and learned a great deal about the Japanese consumer.

A highlight of the trip was attending a professional baseball game between the Chiba Lotte Marines and the Orix Buffaloes. Chiba is coached by Bobby Valentine, who was my teammate on the California Angels and my manager when I played for the Texas Rangers. Before the game, Bobby and I jointly promoted U.S. beef at a special event for the fans. Then I had the pleasure of throwing out the game’s first pitch. To round out our day, my family and I hosted a reception in one of the stadium’s open-air boxes for Japanese beef buyers.

We enjoyed visiting with the Japanese people. We discovered that, like Americans, the Japanese place a premium on tenderness and all-natural qualities in their beef. But there are differences too. Japanese homes don’t have a lot of freezer space, so they don’t shop in volume. Instead, Japanese consumers shop for fresh food every other day to prepare the next couple of meals. They take a lot of time selecting the right beef cut.

The Japanese enjoy a wide selection of beef products ranging from their native Kobe and Holstein beef to imported beef from the U.S. and Australia. Yet what I came away with was the respect that the Japanese have for U.S. beef and their excitement about being able to purchase it.

It was a great trip because it combined all my passions – family, baseball and beef.

Early ranching memories

Raising cattle is one of the hardest activities I’ve ever been involved with. When you’re responsible for cattle’s welfare, you live with that responsibility 24 hours a day. And just when you think you’ve got everything about them taken care of, Mother Nature will throw something like a drought or a storm at you.

I learned this early on, when I was about 10 years old and growing up in Alvin, TX, during the late 1950s. Alvin is near Houston, and just about 30 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. I had just bought my first cattle—three baby dairy calves—that I was bottle feeding so they could get big enough to eat grass on their own. I rode my bike to their pasture every day to check on them.

Just a few weeks into owning my “herd,” we learned that a hurricane had formed in the Gulf and was headed our way. I convinced my parents that I needed to protect the calves in our garage. They agreed, so I padded the floor and built a makeshift corral. The calves stayed in there for three days until the storm passed. Then, for the next three days, what did I do? I cleaned out the garage. How my mother put up with all that, I’ll never know. But under the circumstances it was my only choice. A disaster was about to hit and I was going to lose my whole operation. I learned right then that cattle raising wasn’t a hobby; it was a commitment. You have to be concerned about cattle around the clock. You have to think about them just as you do your family.

I’m fortunate in that my real family understands this. In fact, they share my passion for ranching. So that means I won’t be the only voice on the blog. You’ll also hear from my wife Ruth, my children, Reid, Reese and Wendy, and maybe even from my fellow cattlemen if I can talk them into it.

Visit us occasionally to get our thoughts about great beef and great baseball. Let us hear from you too!

Welcome to my blog

As you probably already know, I enjoy baseball and ranching. My family, whom I also greatly enjoy, more accurately calls it a passion. And when you have a passion, you want to share what you know with others.

But a blog is something new to me. It’s no secret that I spend much less time on the Internet than I do in ballparks or on my ranches. Yet I can’t ignore the Internet’s power to reach you with my thoughts about being a professional baseball player, a rancher, as well as a husband, father and grandfather. So get ready to get a lot of info about me, baseball and beef from this blog.

Since it’s your love for beef that probably brought you to my blog, I want to tell you that I’m proud that ranching inspired me and some like-minded cattlemen to create Nolan Ryan's Guaranteed Tender Meats. This product is how we extend from our ranches to your kitchen the great nutrition of our high quality beef that we produce to your specifications—tender, lean and minimally processed. I hope you'll visit our site often!