At the annual Livestock Marketing Association meeting, Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster, Ron Hays, caught up with the vice president of government and industry affairs at the LMA, Chelsea Good, about industry conversations regarding livestock marketing.
“Our government affairs committee worked with Congress really hard over the years to get a dealer statutory trust passed into law, so a lot of what we talked about was Packers and Stockyards and their enforcement of that,” Good said.
Good said the LMA is not pleased with the USDA at the moment.
“There have been some default situations where I think that they have an enforcement responsibility to come in and take an accounting of livestock and make sure that the unpaid sellers are first in line,” Good said. “They haven’t always been living up to their requirements there, so that was a big part of the discussion last night is we have given Packers and Stockyards a better tool to make sure unpaid sellers of livestock to a livestock dealer are made closer to whole. Now we are going to have to put their feet to the fire and make sure they actually are doing what they are supposed to do there.”
Regarding the USDA looking into revising some rules, Good said the USDA has mainly been focused on the GIPSA (Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration) competition rules that have been tried for over a decade and have not succeeded.
“Nobody cares about competition more than a livestock auction,” Good said. “But why don’t we get a little more creative.”
Auctions would like to invest in small and medium-sized packers, Good said, but legally, those auctions cannot do so.
“There is a stated Packers and Stockyards prohibition that keeps an auction owner from owning or investing in packing capacity,” Good said.
As the Farm Bill currently does not have a livestock title, Good said there are some livestock priorities that would be appropriate in the Farm Bill under a miscellaneous title.
“When I talk about livestock priorities, I am talking about the animal health provisions,” Good said. “We are supportive of the FMD (Foot and Mouth Disease) vaccine bank, and we are supportive of the NADPRP (National Animal Disease Preparedness and Response Program) program that provides funds for emergency management.”
Good said LMA is also supportive of utilizing electronic tags, but there needs to be long-term solutions, so the cost of those tags does not fall on producers.
“If USDA wants to move to requiring electronic tags for those currently covered animals, they need to find a way to pay for those,” Good said.
The Beef Buzz is a regular feature heard on radio stations around the region on the Radio Oklahoma Ag Network and is a regular audio feature found on this website as well. Click on the LISTEN BAR for today’s show and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.
