Ed Herr, a member of the family that owns the farm and plant in Nottingham, near the Maryland border, swears that snack-fed cattle have just a little extra taste, a little extra juiciness.
"I really don't know why our steers make an even better grade of Angus steer," he said. ". . . It's probably a higher fat content."
Dennis Byrne, the farm manager, isn't prepared to say that potato chips make for a better T-bone than any other cattle feed loaded with carbohydrates, fats and calories.
But he does say: "If you feed them right, they taste good. And we feed them right."
Employees at the snack plant long have been able to buy the Herr's beef in bulk and at a discount.
They can't eat it all, of course. So most of the 1,700 cattle that are fattened up each year are prodded onto trucks and carted off to the Moyer Packing plant in Souderton, Bucks County, to be marketed to restaurants and stores as certified Angus beef.
Now, the Herr family is thinking of selling the beef directly from the farm to the public. It might be a few months before that happens. The logistics and marketing have to be worked out.
On a recent day at the 1,300-acre farm along Route 272, Byrne showed a pair of visitors around the feedlot, silos and barns.
A cold rain was coming down. The steers were huddled, blank-eyed and chuffing steam, in two pens. The color of dark cocoa, each had a number pinned to its ear. Number 1759 ambled over to the steel-tube fence and lifted his flat nose toward a camera.
Each steer each day consumes about 15 pounds of corn, five pounds of grass and 19 pounds of assorted stuff - potato peels, along with rejected or leftover snacks from the plant.
The snack foods are mostly what lands on the floor at the plant. The mix includes the green or brown potato chips rejected from the cooking-and-packaging assembly lines by an infrared scanner.
All of their feed is ground up - like leaves and twigs in a chipper - and stored in the silos. Each day, it is poured into the cattle trough.
