As much as I look forward to the NCA Convention every year it’s always a relief when it is over, especially when you are the President.
Our Convention was cut a little short with the passing of Will DeLong. With everyone wanting to attend the services in Winnemucca the Executive Committee made the decision to hold the Awards Banquet early and postpone the Board of Directors meeting until a later date, which was an easy decision to make. Will was family and a good friend of mine; I have no words.
If you weren’t able to attend the Convention this year you really, and I mean really missed out. Our Executive Director did an outstanding job of holding everything together! Big thanks to all of our agency friends that came and gave updates. It was a really good opportunity to engage with them and ask questions. Next to the NCBA crew. I deeply appreciated the strong showing that they made. Colin, Gene, Tanner, and Kaitlynn were OUTSTANDING in their panel updates. Having the opportunity to engage closely with high-ranking leadership was awesome. There is a lot of BS being spread around about them being controlled by the packers and it just isn’t true. They really are a grass roots organization governed by their membership (which is ranchers who attend the meetings). All of the NCBA crew are highly intelligent, motivated and working on your behalf no matter what propaganda you might be made to believe. They came all the way too little ol’ Nevada to hear our concerns. If you’re not paying your NCBA dues you should be! I couldn’t come up with a better team to engage on our behalf in Washington D.C., than the team at NCBA.
The CattleFax update during the “Sam Mori Inspirational Breakfast” was very well done. If you can’t attend anything else during the convention I highly recommend you make it to this event. In a two-hour breakfast you get all the necessary industry business planning data you need to set up your operation for success. It always baffles me how many producers make huge business decisions on “gut feeling” without any hard data to back it up. This business is hard enough to make good decisions even with all the best data and information, so why would a person think they could make well informed decisions without any information? We all have to guess what the market is going to do, but we can at least try to make an educated guess, be informed like Sam!
The goat branding Thursday night was a blast! Thanks to Tommy and Nora Lee for bringing the goats and making it happen and to all the kids that came to rope.
We were able to present some awards Thursday night during the dinner in the Trade show. It was low key, but very nice and I was glad for the opportunity to celebrate some deserving folks in our industry.
Big thanks to our vendors and sponsors that always hang with us even through the changes that happened this year. If you’re in Fallon and need a meal I highly recommend the Slanted Porch. They were great to work with and the food was awesome.
Even though the Convention this year was not well attended it was maybe one of the best we have put on. Thanks again to everyone that did attend and hopefully next year we can get a few more folks to attend because they really missed out.
By Hanes Holman, President, NCA