Bichelmeyer Meats still thrives on its rural roots

Bichelmeyer Land and Cattle is situated on 4,000 acres of rolling hills near Williamsburg, Kansas, about an hour southwest of Kansas City. The land was first settled by Ernest de Boissière, a Frenchman whose anti-slavery sentiments had made him an unpopular figure in New Orleans. De Boissière set up a silk-farming colony in Franklin County in 1870, employing dozens of French immigrants and their families to produce up to 300 yards of silk fabric a day. As the workers left or assimilated, the silk farm shut down, but several of the original stone structures remain, and today the land is still referred to as Silkville Ranch.

Depending on the season, the ranch has about 500 cattle, split between red angus and black angus. They graze on native grasslands, supplemented by grain and silage at the Nunemaker-Ross feed lots near Lawrence. The diet includes spent grain from Boulevard Brewery, which Joe Bichelmeyer likes to joke keeps the cows relaxed by providing a low-level beer buzz. Day-to-day operations are run by Lowell and Teresa Anderson, with weekend help from the Bichelmeyers.

Because the ranch and the market are owned by my husband’s family, I’ve been able to visit and photograph Silkville for the past several years.

“Ranching allows me to observe how nature works, not only with the cattle but with the hawks, the birds that are flying, the snakes that are crawling on the ground, the coyotes that I see running across the pasture, how all this enters in and makes the whole of the ecology,” Jim Bichelmeyer says. “I’ve come to understand what needs to be done in nature a little more, how things usually work out for the best when you hold off intervening for a while.

“You learn to read not only cattle, but the temperament of your horse, or how horses vary in their temperament,” he adds. “I’ve come to learn how people’s temperaments vary. It’s part of life.”