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You’ve probably never heard of Frank Stronach. Sure, he’s a Canadian billionaire – yes, they have them there! – and an auto-parts cum horseracing magnate. But rather than hanging up his wrench spurs retiring, he’s decided to try his hand at turning grass-fed beef back into a mass-market product.

According to this report in Macleans (Canada’s equivalent of TIME magazine), Stronach is buying up land outside of Ocala, Fla., at a furious pace – 70,000 acres and counting. His plan: to create a massive ranch with “30,000 cattle, a 61,000-sq.-foot abattoir that would slaughter up to 300 cows a day, and a biomass power plant that would extract methane from manure.” It’s a grand vision:

 Stronach’s Adena Springs ranch plans to market its beef to Florida grocery stores for consumers keen on fresh local produce, as well as serve the meat at Stronach’s network of racetracks. There are plans for a restaurant chain that would serve Adena Meats, and Stronach hopes to expand the business across the United States and Canada.

But it’s not just the numbers that caught my eye. So did the fact that he intends to put slaughter facilities on the ranch itself and to raise and finish the cattle on grass. According to Adena Springs’ General Manager Mark Roberts, Stronach – echoing many a sustainable livestock farming advocate – expects the cows “will have all good days and then one bad day.”

Despite those sentiments, at the scale he’s planning, he’s not exactly a latter-day Joel Salatin (who believes the proper scale for an individual operation is small). And he stands in contrast even to one of the few “large-scale” natural meat operations already out there – Niman Ranch, which achieved its significant capacity through a network of small farms.