Many of you already know that beef demand is the best it has been in over 20 years at 65 on a graph called the beef demand index. In 2000 this number had fallen from 100 to 50 in the previous twenty years from 1980. How was the cattle industry able to reverse this downward trend from two decades ago?
Cattle raisers got real smart real fast about improving certain inherited traits like feed conversion, marbling, and overall carcass grading quality, and they are still getting better. You’ve no doubt read that about 80% of the beef cutout now grades choice or prime which would have been only a dream twenty years ago.
Consumer knowledge and acceptance has been a focus of many breed organizations and industry associations like Farm Bureau and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA). Having beef checkoff dollars to spend by these two and other contractors to the checkoff on things like research, education and advertising has also helped to grow demand for your ultimate product – meat on the plate.
You could ask yourselves where we would be without Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner and the answer would be: not where we are now. Of course, this is not the only reason we have a higher quality, very much in demand product that customers around the world favor. Many organizations have been working diligently for many years to solidify beef’s reputation as a major source of tasty, nutritious protein.
One such organization is Certified Angus Beef (CAB). Please stay with me you non-angus beef producers while I make my next point. I have just returned from a meeting with my fellow officers and the CEO of NCBA with the Angus Breed CEO and the President and volunteer officers of CAB at CAB headquarters in Wooster, Ohio. You have all no doubt seen the CAB logo and advertising in grocery stores and restaurants signaling they are serving or have beef in the case that has met the quality and other standards of CAB.
CAB experiments with recipes and educational materials for customers and creates advertising for licensed partners to help them sell more beef. It is an advertising adage that selling is easier when the customer is familiar with the product, is comfortable with it, and it is convenient for them to buy and use the product. CAB spends the bulk of its time and money trying to put these principles into the mind of consumers of beef.
When a person or organization in agriculture does good things for themselves it usually benefits the whole industry. I would argue that CAB is helping the Angus sector of the cattle industry most certainly but is also benefitting the whole industry as it helps to drive demand for beef. Every time a consumer sees the CAB picture of a steak on the grill or a roast on a platter, they are thinking of eating beef in general and that benefits every sector of the industry.
The NCBA contingent was invited by CAB to this meeting to explore ways we could pool resources to provide good outcomes for the whole industry. I am sure there will be critics of this kind of activity as a waste of dues dollars on a “boondoggle.” I understand this sentiment, but I completely disagree with it. However, true leadership seeks to expand horizons, include all points of view and searches for ways to do things even better and not rest on your laurels.
Most members of NCBA will tell you they belong because they want the industry perspective brought to bear on issues in Washington D.C. Here are two examples of successes in 2019 where NCBA led the way and created real value for its members.
NCBA was the leader among all farm and ranch organizations to fight against devastating proposed tax hikes on family-owned farms and ranches by mounting a grassroots campaign with more than 1,800 producers which kept crucial tax provisions like stepped up basis in calculating estate taxes and like-kind exchanges in the House version of the Build Back Better bill.
The Association also succeeded in getting the back end 150 air-mile exemption for livestock haulers and secured multiple extensions of the hours-of-service exemption for truck drivers hauling livestock. This obviously helped during the pandemic in keeping livestock commerce moving at a real-time pace. It will also help as we go forward and try to manage commodity transportation during this time of driver shortage and limited transportation choices.
My experience last week reminded me that organizations such as CAB and NCBA are working full-time with maximum effort on problems they can solve and issues they identify as opportunities while letting the critics make noise about how nothing gets done or these industry organizations are not run by ranchers and farmers. The people in that room in Ohio last week were real ranchers or folks who had grown up in ranching and were now working for the industry that nurtured them.
We have heard especially in these last couple of years of packer control of the cattle business and cattle industry organizations because of excessive profits being made by the big four packing companies. There is no denying they have made a lot of money. The U.S. cattle market is the most complex, complicated, diverse, and intricate commodity market in the entire world. Saying the excesses in this market can be solved by quick fixes or government-controlled solutions in a black and white way is being ignorant of the market complexities and the many influences both inside and outside the industry affecting that market. Market forces are working and other sectors besides the packing industry can expect better times ahead.
And it pains me to repeat myself about something I said in response to a question at the most recent Nevada Cattlemen’s Convention last December in Elko, but here are the facts about the NCBA/Packer sector relationship. There are four packer seats on the NCBA’s 250 plus member Board of Directors. I have been to almost every board meeting of NCBA in the last 21 years and I have never seen a packer representative sit in one of those seats.
As Treasurer of NCBA, I am very aware of the NCBA financial picture. Packer revenue through paid dues is 7% of NCBA’s total revenue. The cow-calf sector of NCBA represents 65% of the membership on the Board. If there is packer control of the 65% cow-calf sector and feeder sector of the NCBA membership, I would like someone to show it to me or quit criticizing and contribute to real solutions that benefit the whole industry. Criticism and analysis are an especially important part of any organization’s process. However, it also needs to be based on facts and truth.
As a relatively small export state Nevada surely benefitted from NCBA efforts to ensure seamless transportation of our livestock during these last few years. Furthermore, Nevada’s family farmers and ranchers can rest a little easier knowing that estates will not be burdened to the point of having to sell the ranch because of excessive taxation upon the death of a prior generation. These are real solutions to real problems.
I am a proud member of NCBA, and I support many of the policy decisions made by the grass roots membership which give guidance to NCBA’s paid staff in dealing with policy decision makers in Washington D.C. and elsewhere. However, I do not always agree with those policies but that is the nature of belonging to any association.
I’ll see you soon.