Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
- You know Mark Zuckerberg as the CEO of Meta. But he's also a cattle rancher.
- Zuck said last month he started raising cattle and feeds them beer and macadamia nuts.
- He explained the interesting choice of diet on a podcast episode Friday.
Mark Zuckerberg recently added cattle ranching to his list of hobbies, and he relies on a surprising choice of feed for his cattle.
The Meta CEO said on Instagram last month he'd started raising wagyu and angus cows on his ranch in Hawaii and that he planned to feed them beer and macadamia nuts, which the ranch would also produce.
He explained the diet choice on an episode of the "Morning Brew Daily" podcast released Friday.
He said that while most commercial cattle operations are constrained by the costs of what they feed their cows, he doesn't have that problem.
"I'm not trying to do this commercially," he said. "I'm just trying to create the highest-quality stuff we can."
Zuckerberg said he wanted to feed his cows the "densest, most nutritious" food so they can both gain weight and "be the most delicious cows."
"As a human, what do you think is the thing that basically you just sit and eat a lot? It's like beer and nuts, basically. Nuts, super dense. Beer induces appetite, which I think people are familiar with."
It's common for cows that produce high-end beef to be given beer to stimulate their appetites.
He wrote in an Instagram post last month that each of his cows consumes 5,000 to 10,000 pounds of food a year, and his daughters are helping plant the macadamia trees.
Cattle aren't all Zuck has planned for his Hawaii ranch. Wired reported in December that he's building a $100 million compound with a 5,000-square-foot underground bunker, an escape hatch, and at least 30 bedrooms and 30 bathrooms.