NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
WAS IT NAUGHTY OR NICE?
NCBA REMINDS THAT CHECKOFF BELONGS TO YOU by National Cattlemen's Beef Association Chief Executive Officer Colin Woodall In July of 2020, a petition was started by several individuals and groups like R-CALF to call for a referendum on the future of the Beef Checkoff. USDA initially gave the petitioners one year to collect signatures from 88,269 cattle producers who had paid into the Checkoff during the previous year. When their time was up in July 2021, they were woefully short on signatures. The petitioners then asked USDA for more time and cited COVID-19 restrictions as one of the reasons they did not have the opportunity to engage with as many producers as they would have liked. While we felt this was a disingenuous request given their use of an online petition portal, USDA nonetheless granted their request for an additional 60 days. Due to the 30 days it took USDA to make this decision, the petitioners actually got an additional 90 days to collect signatures. When time was finally up in October, there were not enough signatures to meet the threshold of having 10 percent of America’s cattle producers ask for a referendum. NCBA decided early in this process to not fight the petition. We did this because the Checkoff belongs to you, and we believe that you and every other cattle producer should have the right to decide the future of this great program. We had hoped the petitioners would conduct the petition process with integrity, but we soon found that was not the case. They definitely make the naughty list because of the way they characterized the process and some of the tactics they used to collect signatures. A referendum is about killing the Checkoff, but the petitioners were telling producers that it was going to be a chance to make some changes to the program. That is absolutely not the way this works. A referendum simply asks if you support the continuation of the Checkoff. It does not allow for any changes to be considered. Therefore, we can only deduce that the petitioners aimed to kill the Checkoff because why would you waste Checkoff dollars to conduct a vote on a program you want to keep? That is right, your Checkoff dollars would have been used to conduct the vote, and USDA told us it could easily be hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this. That is hundreds of thousands of dollars that would not go towards beef research or promotion. I had conversations with a few producers who signed the petition that told me they would 56 California Cattleman January 2022
not have done so had they really known what the referendum was going to do. We are also aware of many unsavory tactics used to collect signatures. There was one effort that put the names of those who signed the petition into a pot for a drawing to receive a cash prize. We heard of a similar process to draw for a pair of boots. We even heard of somebody at a gas station asking whoever walked by to sign the petition. Reports of other actions came to us throughout the year as our members saw the petition process in action. Even with desperate tactics, the effort did not produce the signatures needed. I see the lack of signatures as a de facto referendum on the Beef Checkoff. It was no secret in the countryside that this petition was collecting signatures. Petitioners were at fairs, trade shows, rodeos and other gatherings of cattle producers. They had the presence and tools to get the 88,269 signatures, but ultimately did not because of the great programs delivered by the Checkoff. The nice list is chock-full of Checkoff-funded projects and programs being delivered by State Beef Councils, the Federation of State Beef Councils and NCBA as one of nine contractors to the national Beef Checkoff. We are making the most of your Checkoff investment. If you have watched any holiday movies on the Hallmark Channel recently, you have seen Beef. It’s What’s For Dinner. commercials. Throughout the fall, Checkoff-funded commercials aired during college football games on television and on Sirius XM radio. Our year-long Beef. It’s What’s For Dinner. sustainability campaign delivered our cattle health and environmental stewardship message to tens of millions of consumers. We are also taking full advantage of online e-commerce advertising. Our e-commerce summer grilling campaign with Kroger stores delivered awesome results by selling an additional $60 of beef for every Checkoff dollar we used to advertise. That is what you expect from your Checkoff, and that is why the petition process came up short.
