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From Ranger to Rancher: Picking a Fight With Big Food | Patrick Montgomery | Ep. 473

September 28, 2026

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5 min read

From Ranger to Rancher: Picking a Fight With Big Food

Patrick Montgomery spent his twenties as an Army Ranger, deployed multiple times, and lost his brother-in-law on his own first deployment. When he got out in 2014, he planned to become a large animal veterinarian. Instead, he started Casey Cattle Company out of a pickup truck, nearly bankrupted it, survived a viral Food & Wine hot dog review that crashed his Shopify store, and eventually founded Valor Provisions — a membership-based platform designed to bypass the four companies that control 85% of American protein. "I think this might be a bigger fight than anything I did on the military side," he says.

The Transition Problem

Montgomery is blunt about the military-to-civilian transition. The military's Transition Assistance Program (TAPS) was, in his experience, actively harmful. He describes a presenter who told a room of separating combat veterans that "nobody wants to hire you if you're in a combat MOS because they think you're all crazy." Montgomery believes the military should hand off the offboarding process to NGOs and extend it from two weeks to three or four months. "What a level of influence they have," he says of the TAPS contractors. "I would so much rather see that person leaving people there with hope or inspiration than the message that they put out."

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (00:35) **Inter-service Rivalry and the "Quiet Professional"** - The hosts discuss the pointless nature of post-9/11 inter-service trash-talking online, contrasting it with the unified cooperation seen during active combat.
  • 2 (04:08) **Business vs. Military: The Hardest Job** - Patrick Montgomery states that owning a business is exponentially harder than his military service, citing the lack of a "time machine" to fix structural mistakes.
  • 3 (08:55) **Leading by Doing: The "Hop In and Do It" Philosophy** - Montgomery explains his leadership tactic of silently performing menial tasks (taking out trash, working the till) to set an example for his team.
  • 4 (10:37) **The Failure of TAPS and the Need for Real Transition** - A critique of the military's Transition Assistance Program (TAPS), which the hosts argue leaves separating service members with a negative, victimized mindset.
  • 5 (14:29) **The Business Origin Story: From Vet School to Cattle** - Montgomery recounts his journey from planning to be a large animal vet to starting Casey Cattle Company after a demoralizing job interview.
  • 6 (16:35) **The "Food & Wine" Hot Dog Explosion** - Montgomery details the viral moment in 2019 when a Food & Wine review of his Wagyu hot dog crashed his Shopify store with half a million visitors.
  • 7 (19:57) **The Pandemic Boom and the "Midas Touch" Trap** - During the 2020 pandemic, the shutdown of major packing houses caused protein to evaporate from grocery stores, leading to a 3X growth for Casey Cattle.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Patrick Montgomery served in the 75th Ranger Regiment from 2010 to 2014, deploying to Afghanistan the day after the Bin Laden raid. Six weeks into that first deployment, his brother-in-law, also a Ranger, was killed in Paktika. Patrick escorted the body home. He got out, went back to school at Mizzou, and in 2016 founded KC Cattle Company, a farm-to-table Wagyu operation that went from selling steaks out of a pickup to a national brand after Food & Wine named its hot dog the best in America. He now runs Valor Provisions, a membership marketplace connecting American farms and ranches directly to consumers, and writes children's books about historical figures.

This one covers the death notification and why clarity matters more than comfort, what it does to a family when a service member does not come back, and the nephew growing up with no memory of his father.

From there it turns to business. The 2019 article that dropped half a million people on a website holding 40 packs of hot dogs. The pandemic surge, the inflation crash, and the structural mistakes that cost him. Then the bigger fight: his argument that four companies control most of America's protein, that foreign ownership of our food supply is a national security problem, and that the fix comes from the bottom up.

Valor Provisions: https://valorprovisions.us/

Today's Sponsor: 

Black Rifle Coffee: 
https://www.blackriflecoffee.com

Firecracker Farm: 
https://www.firecracker.farm

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