Blake Albers grew up in the same corner of northeastern Nebraska where his family had been feeding cattle for nearly a century, waking each day to the sights and sounds of the Wisner-area feedlot his great-grandfather built in the late 1920s.
“I grew up next to the feedlot, just like my dad and grandpa did,” Blake told WLJ. “It’s always been part of our family story.”
In 1928, his great-grandfather, Herb Albers Sr., started the family operation, beginning with livestock pens and soon adding grain-finishing cattle. Four generations later, Blake would take that same foundation and begin steering it toward a new frontier: direct-to-consumer beef.
Today, the family operation blends row crops, cattle feeding and custom yard services. Multiple branches of the family work within the business, and Blake is the oldest of his generation involved in day-to-day operations. He formally joined the family feedlot in 2012 after graduating from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a degree in agricultural economics.
From the start, his role leaned toward numbers and markets. Blake became deeply involved in risk management and stayed immersed in agricultural market trends, building on an analytical skill set that would later shape his entrepreneurial path.
“I was always really focused on livestock analysis and markets,” Blake said. “I thought most problems could be solved on a spreadsheet.”
That mindset was tested almost immediately. Blake entered the business during a brief, robust cattle market in 2013-14. Then prices unraveled in 2016, forcing him to confront volatility just as he was building confidence and ambition.
As cattle prices weakened, Blake began looking for ways to close the widening gap between livestock values and boxed beef prices. That search led him into export markets. He helped develop custom export programs and eventually built a promising deal to ship beef into Asia until a phone call reshaped his trajectory.
“We couldn’t get that first load air-freighted,” Blake recalled. “All of a sudden I had about 35 head worth of beef I had to sort through and figure out what to do with.”
Building Albers Craft Beef
Instead of walking away, Blake improvised. He turned to third-party portion cutters and grinders, selling beef locally and learning the downstream side of the industry almost by accident.
“That’s really where I got sucked into the beef side of things,” he said.
What began as a one-off solution slowly turned into a pattern: finding customers, figuring out cuts, learning how trim moved and understanding how retail pricing worked compared to live cattle values.
By 2018, Blake formally co-founded Lot 279 as a separate entity from the family feedlot. He deliberately kept it structurally independent because, at the time, the broader family operation wasn’t ready to jump into retail beef.
In the early years, Lot 279 looked more like a boutique butcher shop than a processing plant. Blake and his wife, Britt, sold directly to local customers, tested pricing, and tried to balance carcasses, a challenge most new beef brands struggle with. They experimented with everything from freezer beef bundles to 10-pound case packs of non-middle meats, which proved critical in building a customer base that wasn’t immediately ready to pay premium steak prices.
“That was basically what built our company,” Blake said of those early case-pack sales. “We tried just about everything to generate sales channels and participate in value-added beef.”
The learning curve was steep. Blake quickly realized that beef wasn’t just an analytical puzzle—it was a relationship-driven, logistics-heavy business.
“Beef is still a very belly-to-belly business,” he said. “You’ve got to know people to be able to trade beef. I thought it was a spreadsheet problem. It’s not.”
By 2021, the numbers forced a decision. Sales were growing, but margins were thin, and the workload was heavy. Blake and Britt had to choose whether to shut the project down or make it big enough to matter.
The next leap came with real estate. Blake acquired a 24,000-square-foot former distributorship building and began building out processing modules. To manage risk, Blake leased part of the building to another tenant, using the rental income and retail sales to offset overhead while the plant ramped up.
“We tried to build it with cash flow off retail sales,” he said. “We didn’t want to pull a bunch of equity out of the greater family operation.”
In October 2024, the facility became USDA-inspected, allowing Blake to offer small-batch further processing for like-minded producers as well as branded retail products. The company also received a USDA grant aimed at helping local farmers access premium markets, reinforcing Blake’s vision of making the facility a regional hub for value-added beef.
“We decided further processing for ourselves and others—while developing retail, e-commerce, wholesale and trading partners—was the way to go,” Blake said. “At our size, it had to be an all-encompassing approach with a flexible processing facility at our disposal.”
That flexibility became central to the business model. Rather than focusing only on breaking whole carcasses for retail, Lot 279 began positioning itself as a hybrid operation: part branded meat company, part co-packer, part value-added processor. Blake now does core processing work for established contract players, alongside boutique runs for emerging beef brands that might only be doing 36 to 90 head at a time.
The decision to emphasize further processing was as much about survival as ambition. Blake had lived through the COVID-era bottlenecks, when he had customers but couldn’t get cattle killed. He had also watched direct-to-consumer marketing costs skyrocket as privacy changes and competition made online customer acquisition far more expensive.
Further processing, value-added products, and co-packing work gave him multiple revenue streams that didn’t depend entirely on high-end steak margins or social media advertising.
“Ultimately, that was the way to go,” Blake said. “It had to be all-encompassing. We needed retail, e-commerce, wholesale, trading partners and processing all working together.”
The result is an operation that sits in a rare middle ground—larger than a locker-plant startup, but far smaller and more nimble than a multi-million-dollar packing facility.
“There’s not very many people doing it at this mid-level size,” Blake said. “We set ourselves up on a project that was big enough to matter to our family, but not so big that I can’t get it to completion.”
Diversification and the next generation
For Blake, the move into beef processing and direct-to-consumer sales was never just about chasing margins—it was about building something durable enough to carry the family operation forward. With multiple generations already involved and more children coming up behind them, he saw a looming reality: the traditional feedlot and farming model alone might not be able to support everyone who wanted a role in the business.
“There’s just a lot of family,” Blake said. “My brother’s got four kids, I’ve got two, my sister’s got one. Everybody gets along great here, but there had to be more jobs and more things going on.”
In his mind, Albers Craft Meats and the Lot 279 facility weren’t side projects—they were strategic expansions designed to create new lanes for the next generation, whether their interests leaned toward marketing, processing, logistics, e-commerce or food product development rather than day-to-day cattle feeding.
That diversification mindset also reflects how earlier generations of the Albers family survived market swings. Blake sees value-added beef as the modern version of that same strategy.
“Livestock markets are volatile,” he said. “If one thing isn’t doing as well while other things are doing well, that’s okay—that’s pretty standard.”
Today, Blake is expanding cautiously. He’s pushing further into ready-to-eat products, co-packing for other brands and limited wholesale distribution—especially for value-added lines that don’t depend on thin margins from premium steaks.
At the same time, he remains grounded in the realities of cattle markets and family diversification.
“You kind of get what you wish for,” Blake said. “Robust cattle markets create challenges on the packing side, but that’s part of diversification.”
From Herb Albers Sr.’s livestock pens in 1928 to a USDA-inspected craft-meat plant nearly 100 years later, Blake’s story is one of continuity and reinvention. His path, from feedlot analyst to export entrepreneur to craft-meat founder, reflects both the volatility and the resilience of modern agriculture.
“We’ve come a long way,” Blake said. “It took longer than I wanted, but it’s finally becoming meaningful enough to play ball with the whole family operation.” — Charles Wallace, WLJ contributing editor
