TUESDAY SPECIAL: Valley Interview : Importer Bets on Ostrich Meat as America’s Next Beef Alternative

Across America, interest is rising in the ostrich as a low-fat, low-cholesterol alternative to beef. Farmers, investors and even retired people are paying up to $60,000 for a pair of breeding ostriches hoping to get in on the ground floor of an as-yet-unproved market in ostrich meat. Santa Clarita businessman Keith Bell, 42, is taking a different tack. Bell, who also imports tobacco from Burma, holds the only U. S. license to import ostrich meat from South Africa, its primary worldwide source. He hopes to have a large share of the market by the time the U. S. flock has grown large enough to support commercial processing in five to eight years. He was interviewed by staff writer Doug Smith.

Question: What drew you to the ostrich business?

Answer: I was traveling in South Africa and the general region, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Malawi. I tried the ostrich and it was very tasty. This was something completely different. I’d never seen it here. So when I returned to the states, I called the South African Consulate here to see if there was an exporter.

Q: What does ostrich meat taste like?

A: You can’t really tell it from a filet mignon. It doesn’t have a gamey taste. All the ostriches were domesticated, raised in South Africa for 150 years, actually 200. Longer than they’ve been raising cattle, they’ve been raising ostriches for the meat and different things.

Q: What other things?

A: Seventy-five percent of the value of the bird is the skin, which is used for shoes. Twenty-five percent of the value is split between the feathers and the meat.

Q: What are the feathers used for?

A: Aside from Las Vegas showgirls, they’re used for the computer industry. Ostrich feathers, as opposed to any other bird, have no oil. If you see an ostrich out in the rain, he’ll be soaking wet. So, when they go over components, it picks up all the dust but leaves no residue.

Q: What’s an ostrich skin worth?

A: Probably about $3,000 a skin. You can get a pair of Tony Lama boots, the very first-class ones for about $15,000 a pair, which is really expensive.

Q: But in America, the primary aim is to develop a large flock for meat production. Don’t you worry that Americans are too squeamish to eat ostrich?

A: It’s going to take a bit of time. People look at this more as a zoo animal. I call it the cute bird syndrome. People will look at it and say, “I saw one in the San Diego Zoo.”

Now they’ll go buy a pair of ostrich boots, because that’s normal. But to actually eat the ostrich, which has nice eyes, little eyelashes and things like that, there is some resistance to that.

Q: That seems silly to you?

A: That same person will turn around and buy a big plate of New Zealand spring lamb and never think twice about it. Lambs are very cuddly and very nice and they don’t bother anyone. I’ve never heard of a group of 300 tourists on the outskirts of Auckland being mauled by a renegade band of lambs, trampled or something, where an ostrich will kill you in a second. They’ll just go right through your chest. Especially during breeding time, if you get near them they’ll chase you. And if they get near you, they just come down, all 350 pounds, with those, like, two toes, extremely sharp. In the wild a lion won’t attack them.

Q: Have people been killed by ostriches?

A: Two of them last year. Two farmers, just not thinking or getting too close in the pen.

Q: And yet people all across America who don’t have any experience farming are buying ostriches to breed. Is it safe?

A: I would think there’s going to be an enormous problem unless you’re really familiar with the bird. It’s really different from past times when they tried to raise chinchilla or mink, when you keep them in a cage. You’d better really know exactly what you’re doing, because they can be very dangerous.

Q: Could the business be lucrative enough to justify those risks?

A: The American Ostrich Assn. is promoting the breeding stage right now. You buy a $60,000 pair and they start laying eggs. You’ll get about 40 eggs a year, and each egg is worth about $1,500, each fertile egg.

Q: It would still take you several years to recover your investment, wouldn’t it?

A: Right. So you have to look at it for not making your money back by the weekend. You’d have to look at it for making your money back over a period of time. And the other thing is, during that period of time the ostrich can die, it can run into a fence. If you have an ostrich going down an open road and you chase it, it’ll never turn off or stop. It’ll just keep going until it has a heart attack. It’ll die. They’re bizarre animals.

Q: Don’t you have any fondness for the animal?

A: The ostrich has a head the size of a baseball. The biggest part of the head is the eyes. It has a brain about the size of a dime. So, in other words, you’re not going to get a lot of poet laureates out of the bunch.

Q: So, you think people could come to accept eating ostrich and a huge middle-class market will arise?

A: Now I’ve heard people say from the American Ostrich Assn. the meat will be the main part of the profit of this bird. I tend not to agree with that. You can’t really make enough off this stuff unless it sells for about $50 a pound to make enough money to let that skin go very cheaply.

You’re not going to find it at Denny’s, in other words. I would say Denny’s is kind of a middle-class establishment where you could probably have a reasonable meal for $6 or $8. So I can’t see where that would come about because you would have to raise so many of them where the skin market would be lost and then this stuff would have to go for like two bucks a pound, and by the time it went through a distributor it would still wind up for seven or eight dollars on the guy’s plate at Denny’s. At $2 a pound, I’m sure you’re not going to make a profit, as the farmer.

Q: So, if not the Denny’s patron, who will buy your ostrich meat?

A: A lot of those people may spend eight days on a holiday in Northern Sweden, and maybe be given a plate of reindeer brains. This would be a normal thing to have. Or in Nepal for a bit of yak tongue or something. They will try these different things, and they will experiment. A middle-class person who maybe takes two weeks and goes to see grandma in Wyoming, or something of that nature, they’re not exposed to quite as many things. But the people that seem to travel a little more, have more expendable income, have tried different types of things.

Q: And they’re willing to pay for them. What does your packaged ostrich meat go for?

A: This would go (for) about $28 a pound.

Q: Where is it sold?

A: At this time, places like Bristol Farms, which is very upscale. They’re taking the stuff and slicing it and sealing it.

Q: But as the U.S. supply increases, the price will decline, won’t it?

A: It’s kind of a Catch-22 proposition. If they try and produce a lot of ostriches to bring the price down for the meat, and the price of the skin goes down, the farmer is not going to realize the money that he put into it.

Q: And some people who paid $60,000 for a breeding pair may take a bath?

A: Because any time that the prices come down to the point of cattle or beef, you’re going to have to sell the fertile egg for $100 or $200. You’re not going to be able to keep that price up there at that level.

I don’t mean to look at it and say it’s a pyramid scheme, but it is a situation where if you get into it now, hopefully you’re going to get your money back through the breeding process. But even if you build your stock up and you’ve got all this money invested in these birds, you just couldn’t go out and slaughter them. Hopefully you’ll be able to make your money back by selling the chicks or the young fertile eggs, because the price is going to have to drop enormously. You get a breeding pair in South Africa for 5,000 rand, That’s about $1,200. So, $1,200 compared to $60,000.

Q: But if the American Ostrich Assn. is right and the supply grows so plentiful that the price falls, it would undercut your price. What will you do?

A: We would like very much to do some kudu and springbok jerkies. They’re both very, very tasty.

‘It’s going to take a bit of time. People look at this more as a zoo animal. I call it the cute bird syndrome. People will look at it and say, “I saw one in the San Diego Zoo.” ’