Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster, Ron Hays, spoke with the Vice President of Governmental Affairs at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, Ethan Lane about the presidential election.
President-Elect Trump was the first Republican presidential candidate in twenty years to win the popular vote, and Lane said that the political realm is still digesting the implications of that outcome.
“What do those new voters to the Republican tent view as priority? Are they aligned with more traditional Republicans or our rural Republican voter?” Lane mused. “What kind of impact will that have on this new Trump administration? This isn’t 2016 when they were figuring out where the light switches are. These folks know where to go, and what they wish they would have done last time. It’s going to be interesting to see what sort of mandate we will see coming out of this vote really means for Donald Trump and his administration moving into the next couple of years,”
Trump earned high percentages of various unexpected voting groups like Hispanics, women, and African American men. “We are in a new world here,” Lane said. “It is not aligned with those traditional party lines.”
In the past, the cattle industry has relied on the idea that the average Republican elected official will have a positive view of agriculture; however, Lane says that producers can’t take that for granted anymore.
“I’m not saying that I don’t think Donald Trump supports agriculture,” Lane clarified. “He absolutely does, but some of this group that brought him into office doesn’t trust where their food comes from. Beyond that, what does it mean to have a president who is going to take a much more libertarian view of some of this stuff.”
The idea that we are going to return commerce to the United States is a paradigm that can be applied to agriculture. Lane asked how those principles might apply to transporting livestock across state lines, truck weight issues, or marketing meat across state lines.
Rumors speak of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy joining the administration as part of a non-governmental department, labeled the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) focused on downsizing the imprint of the Federal government while increasing its efficiency.
“Certainly, in the cattle industry, we have never been accused of thinking that we needed to add anything to the federal government, so I can see some areas where we are probably going to be aligned with that. However, the devil is in the details. There are things that need to be done to have safe food, and that we can still get some of that food overseas. We still make $400 plus on every fed carcass from exports, so doing things that prevent our ability to put that beef in front of consumers around the world is something that we won’t be terribly interested in.”
Lane emphasized the importance of educating politicians on the nuances of the cattle industry and what the average cattle producer relies on to sell their calves at a profit.
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