LMD Feb 2017

Page 1

Riding Herd

“The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.”

by LEE PITTS

– JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

February 15, 2017 • www.aaalivestock.com

Volume 59 • No. 2

Checkoff Cheaters LEE PITTS

T

he beef checkoff is under assault from every direction. For years cattlemen have been told by the USDA, the Beef Board, NCBA, and state beef councils that your checkoff dollars are secure and are being well spent. So it must be very embarrassing for them that we now have 2.6 million pieces of evidence proving that those assurances were all a big load of Grade A bull manure. This past October the Oklahoma Beef Council filed a lawsuit seeking the recovery of $2.6 MILLION DOLLARS that was allegedly embezzled from the state’s beef checkoff by a former accounting and compliance manager. One Melissa Morton, who was supposed to be making sure the money was spent properly, was allegedly forging checks to herself all the way back in 2009, right under the noses of state checkoff officials.

A Veil of Secrecy

NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING

Harvest Public Media is the hero here. It was their journalistic curiosity that led them to find out about a forensic analysis done at the behest of the Oklahoma Beef Council. In that analysis it was found that Morton allegedly had started off small by forging 12 checks totaling $30,632 in 2009. Once she saw how easy it was and that no one was watching, allegedly her illegal activity escalated to the point she allegedly forged

You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough. 131 checks totaling $557,789 in 2016. Putting this in perspective we find that in 2014, the state beef council took in $3.6 million in revenue and Morton embezzled $316,231 of it. As syndicated columnist Alan Guebert wrote, “In other words, your money is so safe with checkoff groups that in one year an employee stole nearly nine percent of the state beef council’s annual revenue and no one was the wiser. And this had been going on for seven years! How does a dime or more out of every checkoff dollar collected by a state’s beef council go missing for more than seven years without anyone

at any level even noticing?” The Oklahoma Beef Council sat on the news of the embezzlement until Harvest Public Media started poking around. When the heist finally was revealed the Chairman of the Oklahoma Beef Council, Tom Fanning, said, “Our board and staff take great pride in serving beef producers in investing their beef checkoff dollars to grow and protect beef demand. Discovering you have a staff member that did not share that vision and abused our trust has been a devastating blow to all of us.” Pardon us for being blunt Mr. Fanning but when Melis-

sa Morton is indicted it won’t be for “not sharing a vision” or “abusing your trust.” She’s an alleged swindler and she made the Oklahoma Beef Council look like a bunch of patsies! Dudley Butler, former head of GIPSA, said, “The government has almost no oversight over this money and this is exactly what happens.” Mike Callicrate, founding member of the Organization for Competitive Markets, said he wasn’t surprised: “The check-off operates under a “veil of secrecy and this just adds to the suspicion that I think a lot of cattlemen have that our dollars are not being utilized in a way that actually benefits the cowboy that’s paying the beef check-off.” As usual Alan Guebert said it best: “The national beef board takes in roughly $80 million a year with little oversight by the USDA. Little wonder, then, continued on page two

Suffering to End Suffering: The Heroic Effort to Eradicate the North American Screwworm BY DR. JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK PUBLISHED MARCH 25, 2009

I

t was a gruesome infection. From pioneer days until the mid-20th Century, the North American screwworm was a scourge of cattle. Any little cut from thorns, any open wound left from birthing, any eye infection that wept, would soon harbor the larvae of the dreaded primary screwworm, Cochliomyia hominivorax. The adult female fly is attracted only to living flesh, and the eggs she laid hatched into maggots that burrowed into the wound. Their feeding and secretions expanded the wound, providing more space for more eggs. What was a small innocuous cut soon grew into an extensive infection that caused much suffering and could kill the animal. And the fly was not picky. She laid eggs on wounds beyond cattle: in pigs and sheep and wild deer. The screwworm had been a natural parasite on wild animals; up to 75 percent of newborn deer died from the infections. The herds of cattle raised by ranchers merely expanded their population. And the fact that the screwworm fly infested wild deer meant that ranchers could not control the fly by herding their domestic animals through “dips.” Infected wild animals would always provide a reservoir of screwworm flies to re-infect the cattle herds. Then researchers discovered a special weakness of this fly: unlike most insects, the screwworm only mated once. And nuclear technology

provided a way to sterilize flies with radiation, enough to make them infertile but not enough to harm their reproductive behavior. Entomologists reared immense numbers of screwworm flies in a huge “fly factory” near Brownsville Texas and later at the southern end of Mexico. The inactive fly pupae, waiting to change from maggots into adults, were at a perfect time to be dosed with radiation and dropped from airplanes. This new technique, new in the 1950s and 1960s, was called “sterile release.” We had spread huge amounts of pesticides to kill insects. But because natural selection soon selected resistant strains, not one insect species has ever gone extinct from pesticides. But for the few species that only mate once, the distribution of huge numbers of sterile insects for several generations drives the species to local extinction. The screwworm caused huge losses of livestock across the southern United States and south into Central and South America. When the initial experimental release of sterile flies eradicated the screwworm from the island of Curacao, the U.S.D.A. launched a campaign to raise the fly, sterilize them, and drop them from airplanes in a slow sweep across the United States from Florida westward. By constantly bombarding both farm and wilderness areas with sterile flies, the few surviving fertile flies could no longer find fertile mates. continued on page four

Gypsies, Tramps & Beeves

I

get my news from paperview. I read the newspaper. I don’t watch much television and have found that your average security camera monitor is more entertaining than TV. I do however watch the occasional weather report on TV, but I don’t know why I bother because it’s always the same: “Torrential sunshine today with scattered darkness tonight.” In our area weatherpersons come and go like gypsies and cold fronts. Some are good and some are bad. Generally speaking I’ve found that the best TV weatherpersons are found where the weather is the worst. My problem with most TV weather reports is that the weather is not taken seriously enough. To me the weather report is far more important than what happened in Syria or what Congressperson got caught with his pants down, or his hand in the till. I guess I’ve been in the beef business for too long but the weather is no joking matter. In many instances the weatherperson is some sort of clown. It’s no accident that Willard Scott, the most famous weatherperson in TV history, was the original Ronald McDonald, or that his “training” to be a weatherman included stints as Bozo the Clown. We’ve certainly had our share of clowns where I live. There was one tramp who looked like she was dressed by Victoria’s Secret and another guy with a huge honker. His nose was so long when he stood sideways to the camera and pointed to a low pressure area it looked like he was pointing with his schnozzola. We called him Pinnochio and it was fitting because, oh, how he lied. I’ve met a few “celebrity weathermen” over the years because at many of the charity auctions we worked the local TV station would send the weatherperson to “jazz up the auction.” Usually these local stars felt compelled to imprint their personality on the sale. Years ago I was at a Junior Livestock Auction and the local TV station had sent their weather reporter with the idea that his presence

continued on page seven

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