By Patricia Aiken
Growing up on Western movies had its impact on second- and third-generation ranchers Mike and Justin Pettit, father and son. True to form, they mentally don their white hats daily to navigate ranching life’s twisting trail, always embracing adversity as an opportunity in disguise.
Those “opportunities” have multiplied of late. Fire, COVID shutdowns, a lawsuit, cancer and the daily gamble of ranching have all tested the family behind Santa Carota Beef, the carrot-fed beef operation the Pettits built 25 miles east of Bakersfield, Calif.
The Pettits have been feeding beef cattle cull carrots for the last 40 years, hence the name Santa Carota Beef. It all started with Arnold Pettit, whose parents came West from Minnesota when Arnold was 4, parallel with the Dust Bowl migration. Hoping for a better life, they lived in a tent in a farm labor camp for Pitt Cotton. Arnold and his three siblings picked cotton before and after school.
“There were railroad tracks right next to their tent, and the kids would walk along the tracks whenever they had a break looking for whatever fell off the train that was edible. Grandma boiled it, and that’s what they had to eat. Pretty tough times back then,” Mike said.
“As he got older, my dad would look for work with two separate farmers. He’d do anything. One was Clyde Parker, cousin to Butch Cassidy.”
Clyde and his wife, Eleanor, themselves childless, took Arnold to live with them on their ranch when he was 12. Arnold always called the Parkers his foster parents and learned ranching while working side by side with Clyde.
After a stint in the Army, Arnold returned in 1958 to help Clyde improve the ranch and married Linda [LAST NAME] the same year. Liking the fireman’s schedule, Arnold became a firefighter and worked with Clyde in his off time.
In 1961, a neighbor called Clyde asking for help to recover a bull that had gotten out. Clyde saddled up and went to get the bull. Tragically, the bull gored his horse, which rolled over on Clyde, killing him. Mike, born the following year, never had the honor of meeting Clyde.
As the years trickled by, Arnold was known simply as Pop Pettit.
In the mid-’80s, when carrot juice was consumed mostly by California hippies and rabid health-food enthusiasts, Bill Bolthouse had a fledgling carrot company. There was a stack of hay next to the plant.
“Looking to buy hay,” Mike said, “Pop and Bill shook hands, and Pop got the hay. He never received an invoice, so he went into the office, and nobody knew what he was talking about. It turned out the vice president was the brother-in-law of one of Pop’s best buddies. He said, ‘Make our wastewater issue go away, and you can have all the hay you want.’ Dad and I started a partnership. We leased the 40 acres right next to the plant, sowed alfalfa and watered it with the carrot wastewater.”
Pop and Mike started feeding calves carrots after they were weaned to get them to the 850-pound mark.
“I’m old school. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Mike says. “But Justin was always pushing me to finish one on carrots. We sampled it on his birthday in 2017. We were like, man, this is good. We’ve got something here. From there it just took off. That’s how Santa Carota Beef came into being.”
Justin adds, “Luckily I had married into produce marketing. My mother-in-law sells those cotton candy grapes. So we got to borrow their marketing team. We looked into where people who had tried to make their own label or vertically integrate. They sell their steaks but end up with freezers full of ground beef.”
Their adversity-into-opportunity mindset took over.
“We leaned into that. At the time, we were selling meat out of coolers in the back of our pickups to anybody who would buy it. Restaurants, folks in parking lots, whatever we could do to make it move. We finally got into this burger chain because they wanted a dry-aged burger on their menu. They had 25 locations in five states. Overnight we were long on steaks, which I guess you’d call a good problem.”
JBS has a Grass Run Farms program. Two weeks after Santa Carota was plugged into the program, JBS raised its price across the board.
“If you want to piss off a chef, you give them a price and then you change it after they make the menu. These chefs told JBS to pound sand and called us,” Justin recalls.
Even though they were off to the races with chefs in Las Vegas and Beverly Hills, they were still probably selling at a loss. Santa Carota broke even at the beginning of February 2020 and turned its first small profit the first week of March 2020, the week COVID shut down the world.
The Pettits were back to selling at farmers markets and out of the back of their pickup again.
“When the ground beef really ran out at the grocery stores, my wife, Corinne, was selling ground beef out of the back of her Suburban like it was crack cocaine in Compton.”
The California governor was leading the league on insane COVID policies, such as no social gatherings.
“So we opened up our barn on Thanksgiving and let anyone who wanted to come out. We had one of the biggest turnouts. Going into December, they were busting restaurants for being open. The only lawfare they could do was have the ABC—Alcoholic Beverage Control—take away people’s state liquor license. I had enough and just loaded up the backseat of my pickup and started going to all these restaurants that were open. I would just donate meat and tell them, ‘We’ve got your back. We’re praying for you. Hopefully you can make a little extra money on this,’” Mike said.
He said he originally got the idea because of celebrity chef Andrew Gruel in Orange County, who is a good family friend. Gruel put out a burger on his menu, and all the proceeds went to a fund he created to help restaurant workers because they were out of work. Restaurant workers are the sales staff, really. So the Pettits donated about 10,000 pounds of trim raw material for that burger program, then started taking care of their hometown and donating boxes of steaks to anybody who was open.
“I posted a video on it, and it got traction. All our local people were replying, ‘Hey, go to this restaurant, they’re open.’ When ABC started tracking our posts and trying to shut down those restaurants, it became a game of cat and mouse. So I’d have people direct message or email me. Every day I would just get up, and I would go find restaurants and help them out, let them know they’re not alone. That we’re in the fight with them.”
They got such a following out of it, they ended up taking a couple of pallets of meat to the ranch and had people come out. They set up a dispatch list, prayed over the meat, gave everyone a couple of addresses, loaded up their back seats and turned them loose, covering Bakersfield and almost every restaurant that was open under protest.
“There’s a fireman who has a restaurant and pizza joint,” Mike said. “I brought him a box of New Yorks. His wife was there and said, ‘Justin, they want me to close the restaurant, and my employees won’t get a paycheck before Christmas. If I do that, their unemployment won’t kick in until after the first of the year. We can’t do this.’ So I just told them whatever they need and gave them meat. It was just the right thing to do.”
Fire is part of the Pettits’ history, too. A fire on the ranch around 2012 threatened both their current ranch and their legacy ranch. Justin and [BROTHER] worked on hotshot crews fighting forest fires when they were younger. Mike was a firefighter for 20 years specializing in bulldozers, and Pop fought fires for 30 years.
“Our neighbors called, and we went up and fought everything with shovels. Dad walked a bulldozer up. The fire was licking the eaves, but we held it.”
The neighboring Rankin Ranch was in trouble, and the Pettits were able to save the Rankins’ place, an amazing family who incidentally carries RANGE Magazine.
“Now with a chainsaw and a ‘water buffalo’ trailer, we did a burn operation all the way down because no one came to help us. We ended up tying into another fire that came off Breckenridge Road. When we got to the bottom, it seemed like the whole world was there. All the lights and sirens, and they did a full investigation on us.
“The Rankin family said, ‘We will pay your attorney fees. You’re not going to jail over this. You just saved our ranch and did the absolute right thing.’ A friend loaned us a radio, and we started talking to Air Attack. I named us the Pettit Task Force, and we went right back in the fight.”
The Borel Fire, which started July 24, 2024, was not fully contained until mid-September. Before that fire, Pop was about to go into hospice. Justin was lobbying the family to bring him up to the legacy summer ranch.
“We were trying to make decisions on whether to save our cows or save the summer ranch.”
They managed to save the cows, but the cattle were stressed by the move down to the 110-degree heat in the valley.
During that fire, Pop died.
As the world tried to return to normal after COVID, “The restaurants brought us back on. We were in a big growth mode. But in 2023, our orders really went down for our ground beef program. The math just wasn’t mathing,” Justin says.
“There’s a distributor between us and the restaurant group that grinds our raw material, puts it into burger patties and gets it to Sysco, U.S. Foods or direct to the restaurant. When they canceled an order and said they had product, we knew it couldn’t be true.”
When Justin did his research, he found the numbers were more than half a million pounds off. Santa Carota’s premium product brought double the commodity price. When he confronted the processor, the numbers went back up. The slowdown, then the jump back to previous numbers, was painful for production. There were not enough cattle ready to harvest.
After demand letters didn’t work, Justin and Mike filed a David-vs.-Goliath lawsuit May 1, 2024. Two years and several law firms later, the processor has dug in its heels and knows it can financially outlast them.
In the meantime, Justin sold his house to live on the equity. He and his family moved to Texas to get his 6-year-old daughter, who has cerebral palsy, much better physical therapy.
“It just made sense to rent a house, hunker down for a couple of years to get through this thing.”
He runs the e-commerce side from Texas. Mike and two longtime cowboys handle the ranch.
That habit of loading up and helping did not end with COVID. Chef Andrew Gruel alerted Justin to the Palisades Fire. Justin, by then in Texas, knowing they were always the first to saddle up, called Mike.
“You want to do something about it, Dad?”
Most of their beef was in Texas for their e-commerce site or at a packinghouse. But they had one cold storage with a couple of pallets in Bakersfield. Once their community knew Mike was going, they turned up with clothes, diapers, baby wipes and water. So with the horse trailer loaded with frozen meat and the flatbed with donations, “he drove down through the fire and straight to a restaurant. He asked if they had a forklift.
“‘No, but we have manpower,’ came the answer, and the crew started unloading by hand. Right in the parking lot, they set up a donation distribution center. The chefs were thawing beef and cooking a week’s worth of meals while others were running back and forth making deliveries to the makeshift camps.”
The next “opportunity” threw a wrench into life.
Mike was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, on the last day of 2025. They didn’t want to do small-town cancer treatments or run back and forth to Los Angeles, so Mike is living with his other son [NAME] in Katy, Texas, near Houston. Even with a great attitude, cancer treatment is no walk in the park.
Now Justin travels back and forth to the ranch to manage the herd with their two hands. Mike’s horse and dog are now therapy animals at Justin’s house in Texas.
“The best thing for the inside of a person is the outside of a horse,” insists Justin.
Mike comes up about once a week.
After a discouraging mediation on a Tuesday, they gathered heifers Thursday.
Justin recalls, “My best friend came down and helped me. He ran the squeeze and brought his tractor. After we got the heifers done, I just stopped and shot a video with a $12 mic to let everyone know the fight we’re in and what we’re up against. It was hard to ask for help. I told how we had a GoFundMe. Didn’t think anything of it, put it in God’s hands and got back to the cow work.
“I posted it that afternoon. I reposted it and tagged Secretary Rollins Thursday evening. We flew back to Texas with broken hearts on Friday. By Saturday night, in the middle of National Ag Day with ranchers and farmers at the White House, she personally messaged me on social media and gave me her email address. She emailed me back the next morning, and by midmorning I had a meeting with her, USDA attorneys and the chief of staff on it. They’re looking to help. We had a great 20-minute chat.
“We’re usually the first to saddle up for people in need. It was hard for us to ask. But when the chips are down, the right people give it back,” Justin shares.
So far, that GoFundMe video has raised $78,000 and a similar amount in beef sales.
As of this writing, the Pettits have a bench trial scheduled for mid-August and hope to have this completely resolved and behind them soon. Mike underwent immunotherapy at MD Anderson in Houston, Texas. His fighting spirits are strong, and he’s ready to get back to work.
Let’s pray that’s by the end of the year.
Patricia Aiken lives in Diamond Valley near Eureka, Nev. She’s grateful she had the opportunity to meet Mike Pettit, a truly remarkable man. He was pleased to be interviewed for RANGE. It was an honor, Mike. Patricia can be reached at [email protected].
Photo Credit: Under a cottonwood on Cottonwood Creek in 2024, father and son, business partners, and best friends, on the left, Justin, and Mike on the right. When the cartels
set up illegal cannabis greenhouses across the road, Mike invited the police,
who were losing their pistol range to eminent domain, to move their range to
the Pettit’s side of the fence. “When the cop cars showed up to start target
practice, these guys packed their bags and left,” Justin laughed.
This story originally ran in the Fall 2026 Range Magazine
