Listen to Ron Hays talking with Andy Bishop about the Operating Committee meeting going on in Denver, CO.
Ten members from the Cattlemen’s Beef Promotion Board are meeting with ten Federation of State Beef Council board members on, September 4-5, 2024, in Denver, Colorado, for what is known as the Operating Committee Meeting. Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster Ron Hays caught up with Chairman of the Cattleman’s Beef Promotion Board Andy Bishop to talk about the meeting.
The Operating Committee meeting is to organize a spending plan for the 2025 fiscal year Dollar A Head Beef Checkoff which begins in October.
According to Bishop, the Beef Board and the Federation first viewed the contractors’ authorization requests (AR) at the Summer Business Meeting this past summer.
Bishop said that the contractors gave them reports on what ARs they wanted to be approved for the next fiscal year. The committees scored those, ranked them, and gave the contractors feedback. The contractors changed their requests slightly and sent them to the Operating Committee which chooses how those dollars are allocated and at what levels – if the contractors get funding, and in some cases, do not get funding.
The ARs that the Operating Committee is deliberating over this year are $9 million more than the money they will have to spend at the start of fiscal year 2025. The Operating Committee will have to make some hard choices to find a balanced result.
“Unlike our federal government, we have to balance the budget,” Bishop stated. “We can’t just print more money. It’s a tough process. We are passionate about each and every one of those projects, but at the end of the day, some of them have to go.”
At the end of the Operating Committee meeting this week- the final decisions of the cattle producers will be submitted to USDA for final approval before being implemented in the new fiscal year that begins October 1.
Bishop’s focus is on domestic marketing, which includes the Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner promotion and the Northeast Beef Initiative promotion. “More importantly, though, when you look at international marketing and what the U.S. Meat Export Federation has done, they have managed to take our dollars, and their return on investment is about 24 to 1 – pretty paramount. The amount of export market that they have grown and the impact it has on our producers today – they are adding about $410 to the carcass value and that trickles down to our producers all the way through the segment. That is huge.”
