Riding Herd “The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.” – JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
June 15, 2019 • www.aaalivestock.com
Volume 61 • No. 6
Even When We Win, We Lose A Better Checkoff?
The cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man or take unfair advantage.
BY LEE PITTS
D
NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING
on’t you get tired of hearing that popular fads and trends start in California and are later picked up or copied elsewhere? In some cases, it’s true, like canvas and denim jeans that got their start in the Gold Rush and can now be seen on a wide swath of the American public. And it’s probably safe to say that some good things like smoking bans in restaurants, Silicon Valley, McDonalds, Apple Computer, the Bakersfield sound (Merle Haggard and Buck Owens), modern theme parks, police helicopters and the organic food movement did get their start in California and have had a positive effect on the nation. But just as many other California exports have had a deleterious effect like Hollywood idiots, the skateboard culture, gangs, LSD, strip clubs, hippies, crystal meth and like, you know, like Valley girl speak. You know? Still other trends can either be perceived as good or bad, depending on your perspective, like bottled water, the Beach Boys, food trucks, California cuisine, wine snobs and to a large extent, the beef checkoff. After all, California was a leader in getting a state beef checkoff and was so instrumental in the establishment of the NCBA that one of the past presidents of the California Cattlemen’s Association (CCA), John Lacey, was made NCBA’s first President. Another old pruney was given the dubious “honor” of making the motion at the NCA convention in San Antonio that merged the old NCA with the Beef Board to form the NCBA. On the other hand, it was a
group of 40 Californians who went to San Antonio to lead the fight against the “New Deal” checkoff. In doing so we were pretty much the only people who foresaw that the while the NCBA would be a great thing for multinational packers and bureaucrats seeking high six figure salaries, not so much for the ranchers footing the bill. Now California is rolling out what they’re calling the California Cattle Council and if done right it could be a different kind of checkoff that could be a role model for other states to follow. In fact, I’d like to see it replace the beef checkoff, after all, cattlemen don’t produce beef, we produce cattle.
A Steak Is Not A Steer Earlier this year California became the first state in the nation to form a Cattle Council that will collect a dollar per head on every animal over 250 pounds to be used in fighting
the environmental and regulatory zealots that proliferate in the state. In many ways it sounds like what we should have done in the first place instead of gathering up the hundreds of millions of beef checkoff dollars only then to hand it over to multinational packers for their research and the promotion of generic foreign beef. A referendum took place earlier this year to determine if $1.00 should be assessed on the sale of live cattle to fund the Cattle Council. A cynic could say that this was just another way to gather up a dollar a head after a referendum to double the state beef checkoff to two dollars failed last year in California. But whereas that referendum to skim off another dollar per head for the California Beef Cattle Council failed, the referendum to take a dollar per head for the California Cattle Council passed with 68 percent voting in favor of its implementation.
The reason for its passage could hinge on the BIG difference between the words “cattle” and “beef”. According to Dave Daley, a fifth generation rancher, professor of animal science at Cal State Chico and former President of the CCA, “The effort to establish a council that would focus on live cattle issues, separate from the beef checkoff program, has been in the works for three years. In contrast to the California Beef Council which focuses on the promotion of beef as a product, the California Cattle Council is tasked with addressing live cattle issues including topics such as land and water use, wildlife’s interaction with cattle, open space preservation, predators, greenhouse gas emissions and animal welfare concerns.” Daley hints at something cattlemen should have realized when they first established the beef checkoff and that is, a steak is not a steer. Ranchers who keep the beef checkoff alive don’t sell beef in the grocery store, yet they are financing the promotion and research for the packers and retailers who don’t pay the checkoff. As we’ve all seen, improving the retail and wholesale price of beef does not necessarily equate to higher prices for ranchers. A case can be made that in some continued on page two
Socialism Is Bad for the Environment BY SHAWN REGAN /NATIONAL REVIEW
A
s the Soviet Union began to collapse, the socialist economist Robert Heilbroner admitted that central planning had failed economically but said we needed “to rethink the meaning of socialism.” Now it was the thing that had to emerge if humanity was to cope with “the one transcendent challenge that faces it within a thinkable timespan.” Heilbroner considered this one thing to be “the ecological burden that economic growth is placing on the environment.” Markets may be better at allocating resources, Heilbroner thought, but only socialism could avoid ecological disaster. Not long after, however, it became clear that the socialist economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were not just economic failures; they were also environmental catastrophes. Economist Jeffrey Sachs noted at the time that the socialist nations had “some of the worst environmental problems in the entire globe.” Air and water pollution abounded. By one estimate, in the late 1980s, particulate air pollution was 13 times higher per unit of GDP in Central and Eastern Europe than in Western Europe. Levels of gaseous air pollution were twice as high as this. Wastewater pollution was three times higher.
And people’s health was suffering as a result. Respiratory illnesses from pollution were rampant. In East Germany, 60 percent of the population suffered from respiratory ailments. In Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), nearly half of all children had intestinal disorders caused by contaminated water. Children in Poland were found to have five times more lead in their blood than children in Western Europe. Conditions were so bad that, as Heilbroner acknowledged, the Soviet Union became the first industrialized country in history to experience a prolonged peacetime decline in average life expectancy. As the Iron Curtain lifted, socialism’s dirty environmental secret was exposed: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were the most polluted and degraded places on earth. “When historians finally conduct an autopsy of the Soviet Union and Soviet Communism,” economist Murray Feshbach and journalist Alfred Friendly Jr. wrote in 1992, “they may reach the verdict of death by ecocide.” Consider the destruction of the Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which has been called “one of the planet’s worst environmental disasters.” Once the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water, it shrank to less than continued on page four
by LEE PITTS
Thunder Butts
I
’m sure you’ve heard that Progressive Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez from New York and Ed Markey from Massachusetts have said in the Green New Deal that we need to eradicate cows from the face of the earth if mankind is to survive the next 12 years. New Jersey Senator Corey Booker said, “The devastating impact from emissions from the meat industry must end.” I find this hilarious because Booker is a vegan and it’s common knowledge that vegans eat a lot of beans and legumes. Scientists tell us that the average person has attacks of flatulence 14 times per day (really) but vegetarians and vegans, because they consume more beans and legumes, can easily double that daily production, which explains why Booker is one big gasbag. The reason I’m not using the same word the Democrats use to describe this bovine flatulence is because my mother raised me to be a gentleman and in our house the word f**t was a four letter word and if she heard one of her kids using it we’d have our mouth washed out with soap. Yuck! The only word that comes close to replacing the word the Progressives insist on using is flatulating, which I’m quite sure my mother wouldn’t approve of either. But in finding an alternative word I found my Thesaurus doesn’t include the word f**t or f**ting. I could change the spelling and use phart or pharting but that’s just beating around the bush. So I turned to my dictionary which suggested this alternative: “Simultaneous combustion as a result of retention of excessive methane.” But it’s ridiculous to use up that many words in my allotted space so for the rest of this essay I’ll just use the first letters of all the words in that definition which turns out to be “scaaroroem”. Catchy, don’t you think? My encyclopedia contained all sorts of interesting information about scaaroroem, for example, did you know that in the 19th century there was a Frenchman by the name of Le Potomane who could actually make melodic music by scaaroroeming? Also, did you know that even dead people scaar-
continued on page five