Riding Herd Saying things that need to be said. October 15, 2021 • www.aaalivestock.com
Volume 63 • No. 10
Save Us From Our Rescuers BY LEE PITTS
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read two items recently that caused me great distress. The first was this: In 2015, 51.5 percent of the consumer dollar spent on beef was returned to the producer, while by 2020 that had dropped to 37 percent. Chew on that for a while. The second item I found in an article written by Janet Levy on The American Thinker website called The Great Reset of Beef Consumption. In it she quoted political commentator and rancher Glenn Beck who is himself a deep thinker. Fellow rancher Beck said in a video he produced that, “You are not going to eat beef in the future — I one hundred percent guarantee it.” According to Levy, Beck went on to say that “in the not too distant future, public land will not be used for cattle grazing, resulting in government-imposed meat shortages. Beck worries that our food supply will be crippled by the globalists, and Americans will no longer have control over what they eat, how it is processed, and what it costs.” While the number of ranchers continues to shrink the number of people who you are paying to protect your interests continues to grow... and they’re getting rich in the process. Pardon the reference to the “other white meat” but the only bacon they are saving is their own.
Don’t We Have A Right To Know?
NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING
Recently at the Digest we received some incriminating information about how the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association has been spending your money. Believe me, getting such info is extremely hard to do. Usually,
The basics to roping and dancin’ are the same: a sense of rhythm, good timing and an eye for distance you have to file a Freedom of Information request and even then, it’s usually heavily redacted. Years ago, when we were the first to expose the fact that the NCBA Chief Executive Officer was making over $550,000 a year and got at least one loan to finance his home some readers questioned our reporting while others got very MAD. The only way we got that information was on the QT from a Beef Board member who was fed up with the NCBA getting the lion’s share of the Beef Board’s money. We shouldn’t have to work so hard to get these tidbits of information. The NCBA should freely put this information in the public domain every year. That they don’t shows that either, they’re embarrassed about making so much money while ranchers are struggling, or they know it might endanger the goose that keeps laying the golden egg: the beef checkoff. Normally we’d say that how
the NCBA spends its money is none of our business IF it was financed by dues but it’s not. At least 80 percent of its money comes from the checkoff which every rancher pays. The fact is, the former NCA was on the verge of bankruptcy and could barely pay the light bill when they went after checkoff dollars via a merger with the Beef Board. Now they are a staff driven behemoth whose interests align more with the packers, who don’t pay into the checkoff. More about that later but first let’s see what Carl Johnson, a multi-generational rancher in New Mexico, was able to dig up.
How Generous Of You According to Carl, the NCBA has enjoyed tax exempt status since 2001 because they fall into the same category as “leagues, chambers of commerce, real estate boards, etc., created for the improvement of
business conditions.” They’ve certainly improved business conditions for the Big Four meatpackers but for the American rancher? Not so much. Since the theft of your checkoff money by the NCBA we’ve lost over half the cattlemen in this country. And cattle prices have only been at we’d call a satisfactory level once in that period, during the two years we had mandatory country of origin labeling for beef, which the NCBA opposed then and still does now. According to Carl, the IRS Form 990 is a form that most organizations claiming federal tax-exempt status must file yearly. (If the NCBA has filed an amended return, it may not be reflected in the data that follows.) In the year 2019 which is the last year Carl could get his hands on the info, NCBA had a total revenue of $65,738,987 and total functional expenses of $66,496,232. So even with all the checkoff money the NCBA still lost money with a net loss of $757,245. During 2019 the NCBA paid out $2,083,342 in employee compensation which amounts to 3.1 percent of their budget. That doesn’t sound too bad until you also read that under a column titled “Othcontinued on page 2
Where is Your Dog Extremist Groups Coming From? Up the Ante in Hopes of Supply he rules for bringing your dog Chain Disruptions into the United States depend on SOURCE: CDC
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where you are coming from. Different types of rabies exist in many mammals, but CDC focuses on importing dog rabies into the United States from certain high-risk countries. CDC experts collect and analyze rabies information around the world to determine a country’s risk for rabies. Dog rabies was eliminated in the United States in 2007 and is under control in some other countries. However, many other countries do not have it controlled, and dogs coming from these countries can import this disease into the United States. There is a temporary suspension for dogs imported from countries that CDC considers high risk for dog rabies. On an extremely limited basis, CDC has the authority to issue advance written approval (CDC Dog Import Permit) to bring a dog from a high-risk country. If you wish to import a dog from a high-risk country, you must apply for a CDC Dog Import Permit at least 30 business days (6 weeks) before you intend to enter the United States. No CDC Dog Import Permits are issued upon arrival. Dogs that arrive from high-risk countries without advance written approval continued on page 4
ANIMAL AG WATCH
BY HANNAH THOMPSON-WEEMAN / MEATINGPLACE.COM (The views and opinions expressed in this blog are strictly those of the author.)
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s I shared about in my last blog, animal rights extremists from around the world gathered in Oakland, Calif., last week for Direct Action Everywhere’s Animal Liberation Conference. The agenda included sessions and workshops on topics including “interconnections between labor rights, racial justice, women’s rights, disability rights, climate justice and animal liberation,” “what you need to know about open rescue and investigations,” civil disobedience tactics and pressure campaigning. As always, the conference also involved extremists taking “action,” such as an “Animal Liberation March” in San Francisco, a mass protest at a poultry processing facility and a protest at a home owned by California Governor Gavin Newsom. The protests at the poultry processing facility and Newsom’s home should be particularly concerning to the animal agriculture community, as they involved the use continued on page 4
by LEE PITTS
Cowboy Church
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he last auction market in our county shut down a few years ago and it was like having our collective heart ripped out. Just this year the auction market that handled the most cattle of any sale barn in California for decades closed its doors too. When we bought a livestock newspaper that served the livestock auction industry 35 years ago there were some 1,500 auction markets in America. Today it’s half that. The auction market was the heart and soul of the cattle business in my area. I hope I’m not being sacrilegious when I say it was like a church. Once a week we’d gather to see our friends who sat in the exact same seats they always sat in. If one of those seats was unoccupied we’d all ask, Is Jim okay? is Dick sick, or, where’s G.B.? I’ve been in some sale barns that go so far as to paint the buyer’s name on the back of the seat and no one else ever had the nerve to sit there. Now without an auction barn we have no place to visit, to catch up on the gossip or to see for ourselves how much our cattle are worth and why some are worth more than others. We’d eat at the coffee shop and solve all the world’s ills. Our county cattlemen’s group met there once month and many of us attended educational seminars before a sale to learn how, where and with what to properly vaccinate our animals with. There was an annual bull sale where you could buy better bulls to improve your herd and a replacement female sale that had a wide reputation for selling quality females. We knew that we always had a place to sell an old cow or two, and if we had some extra grass, buy a few stockers. And we could pick up a check the same day we sold them! It’s ads from auction barns that kept many livestock newspapers afloat and the money that ranchers spend in town one day a week is important to barber shops, the feed mill, the local farm supply, western wear shop and, if the check for the animals you sold was a big one, fancy restaurants. If the sale barn was a church it’s religion was price discovery. The big debate going on in the cattle business
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