Masami Cattle Ranch

Masami Cattle Ranch was founded in 1988 by Masami Ishida and runs a Wagyu breeding programme across 6,500 acres of Northern California, raising bulls, cows and calves on free range. It crosses a Wagyu bull over an Angus cow for the F1 it is best known for, and also runs F2 and fullblood matings.

The date is the striking thing. American Wagyu barely existed in 1988: the exports of Japanese cattle that founded the entire national herd happened across the 1970s and the 1990s, and Japan closed live exports altogether in the late 1990s, declaring the breed a national treasure. An operation breeding Wagyu in California in 1988 was not entering a market. It was building one, at a time when almost no American customer had heard the word.

The company established its own meat-packing plant at Klamath Falls, Oregon in 1992, four years after founding, and that decision is probably why it is still here.

A producer selling a product nobody recognises cannot rely on the existing supply chain, because the existing supply chain is built to grade, box and price ordinary beef and will treat anything unusual as exactly that. Owning the plant meant controlling how the carcass was cut, graded and described at a point in history when no American buyer had a category to put it in.

Cattle are fed a Japanese-style grain ration delivered by machine and by hand, with no antibiotics, growth hormones or animal by-products. Hand feeding at this scale is a deliberate holdover from Japanese practice, where individual attention to each animal's intake is part of the method rather than a flourish.