March Madness is upon us, for most Americans that’s about college basketball but it makes me think of calving heifers. Hope your calving is all quiet nights, calves that shoot right out and jump up quick, and minimal confusion. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association Convention was the first week of February and Nevada was well represented. Past NCA Presidents Joe Guild and J.J. Goicoechea are in the leadership ranks and doing a great job. We attended some very informative sessions, CattleFax being one of my favorites. They said that all the fundamentals are in place to see our markets improving over the next few years, as long as we keep Black Swans on the endangered species list, we’ll be taking a bigger piece of the pie.
Their weather presentation was a bit of a mixed bag, there’s agreement in the weather community that La Nina will be replaced by El Nino this year but not much agreement when. El Nino events are better/wetter for us and hopefully it comes sooner rather than later but it looked like for most of Northern Nevada our spring will be near normal-whatever that is. Being a weatherman is like being married- it’s pretty hard to be right. We also attended presentations from some of our leadership at the D.C. level in BLM and USFS, and EPA. As difficult as the political climate is now, it seems these folks are willing to build relationships to understand what our challenges are and rest assured your NCA leadership will be doing just that.
Quite a bit of policy work happened as well at Convention. The Marketing Committee got a little spicy but at the end of the day we adopted policy that should lend transparency to the marketplace while retaining marketing options with minimal government intrusion. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for letting me intrude in your world a few minutes, and as always appreciate your support!
Jon Griggs | President, NCA