At the Cattle Industry Summer Business meeting in San Diego, California, Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster Ron Hays had the chance to talk with National Cattlemen’s Beef Association CEO Colin Woodall. One of his responsibilities is planning the future direction of the NCBA. To read and listen to Hays’s earlier conversation with Woodall about the Beef Checkoff, click here. In another conversation, they discussed reducing regulations to ease the burden on newcomers to the beef industry. To read and listen to it, click here.
Our coverage from the 2024 Cattle Industry Summer Business Meeting in San Diego is being powered by Farm Data Services of Stillwater.
At the Richard McDonald Leadership Institute session at the Summer Cattle Industry Meeting, Woodall and Cattle Industry leaders requested and got feedback on the state of the cattle industry from participants. “Richard McDonald was a long-time President/CEO of the Texas Cattle Feeders Association. When he passed away the Texas Cattle Feeders Association donated money for us to have this leadership institute to help develop the future leaders of this association. We are going to sit down with them and do an old-fashioned swat analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. We are going to hear from our members how they think we are doing and where we need to focus our time.”
Woodall plans to use the feedback to formulate NCBA’s strategic plan which will be revealed in San Antonio during CattleCon 2025. “This is an exciting time for us because demand is great. The consumer is with us. They want our product. We know that we play a role in the discussion of maintaining open space and being able to upcycle with our cattle by taking grasses that have no use to humans and turning them into a high-quality protein. The overall quality of our product is the best it’s ever been and only continues to improve. We have opportunities for niche local marketing that is giving younger producers the ability to market their cattle like they’ve never had in the past. This truly is a beef renaissance time for us.”
Woodall promised to ensure that NCBA’s strategic plan would be set up to capitalize on all of the aforementioned opportunities to be sure that NCBA would still be relevant in another 120 years and the industry would still be strong and vibrant.
A previous goal of the NCBA was to reduce the cattle industry’s carbon footprint, and Woodall said that they continue to make progress albeit not as quickly as they would like. “Our focus now is trying to identify what additional research we need to conduct in order to get new information on practices and procedures that we can help our producers take advantage of.
“When people talk about things such as sustainability and our sustainability goals, we’ve done a really good job of showing producers that this is not about government involvement, climate change, or more red tape. Its about helping them improve what they are doing on their operations so they can have better pastures and ranges in order to withstand droughts when they show up. This is about resilience. Not caving to the bureaucrats or the activists. It’s about telling our story and helping our producers improve.”
Hays and Woodall also talked about the challenges of telling the story of beef production and why it is so important. Woodall says that the bottom line is that organizations like NCBA are needed to fight for the individual cattle producer, and especially, to keep the government out of their business.
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 at the top of the story for today’s show and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.
