Featured today in this Beef Buzz is the President Elect of the Kansas Livestock Association Troy Sander. Sander is the chief operations manager for Heritage Beef, which operates feedyards in Haskell and Labette counties. Sander is based in Oklahoma City.
His interest in the cattle feeding industry began early in life as he worked alongside his father, Vernon, who was the assistant manager at the former Hays Land and Cattle near Hays. Sander graduated from Fort Hays State University with a degree in animal science in 1991 and took a job as a management trainee with Continental Grain Company’s XIT Feeders near Dalhart, TX.
After completing the training program, he continued gaining experience, first as the animal health manager at Grant County Feeders in 1995, then as assistant manager at Colorado Beef in 1999. After 12 years with Continental Grain Company, he moved to Heritage Beef, where he served as general manager at Heritage Feeders in Wheeler, TX, and eventually was promoted to his current role as operations manager. For nearly 20 years, he has been responsible for buying feeder cattle and overseeing marketing, operations and commodity procurement.
In this Beef Buzz, Sander discusses his trip to Washington, D.C. to brief policymakers on cattle marketing and business issues. He shares his perspective on unique innovation and quality improvements in the cattle industry, and the future for greater beef demand. He says that it’s important for those involved in policy work in our nation’s capitol to understand that our complex marketing chain has fully taken advantage of the improved genetics of our beef cattle in the US- and that it helps provide value back to the owners of the cattle in the beef chain proportionate to the quality of the animals being raised.
Sander says the cattle industry has changed how we market cattle a great deal over the years- “How that has changed over the years and how we have differentiated ourselves by moving to alternative marketing agreements and different types of grid marketing and those things- and really the message for the day that they left with(the staffers) and the current policy that we have on the NCBA books right now- we are good stewards of our industry and we are good stewards in how we market our cattle and we want to keep those decision making processes within the producers’ hands and not in the control of the government. We want to make sure we are the ones making marketing decisions and not the government making decisions for us.”
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.
