Riding Herd
“The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.”
by LEE PITTS
– JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
September 15, 2017 • www.aaalivestock.com
Volume 59 • No. 9
A Mother’s Plea
Beware The Reducetarians I L
BY LEE PITTS
Published market prices are (by definition) based on your competitors’ self-reported prices. So if you are religiously relying on USDA or another published price, aren’t you in effect letting your competitors price your product? Another common approach is talking with customers to “see what the market is doing.” In that case, aren’t you by definition allowing
’m not in the mood today to try and be funny. Normally I don’t believe writers should use their privilege or their podium to preach to people. In most cases I don’t have the qualifications or the credentials. This column is in response to a plea from a long and loyal friend. I’ve written about Carole Levitz before. She’s the daughter of one of the greatest magicians who ever lived, The Great Cardini. As an amateur prestidigitator myself, I’ve always had a “magical” bond with Carole. Besides being a great auction clerk Carole is also a mother and grandmother, although today her brood is greatly diminished. One minute Carole’s daughter and granddaughter were alive and well and the next a drunk driver killed them both. If you needed further proof that life isn’t fair, as often happens in such tragedies the drunk wasn’t seriously injured. And hear this, it was his fourth drunk driving offense. Writing a sympathy card to Carole was some of the hardest writing I’ve ever done. And I’m a writer! I got a lovely note back and Carole enclosed the memorium they handed out at the funeral. As I perused the cover with a dozen photos of Carole’s beautiful family celebrating life’s goodness, I felt my throat tighten and what felt like a tear in my eye. Nah, it couldn’t be, big boys don’t cry. Inside the pamphlet were two photos of Raeleen and Raegan, next to each other in print as they were in life. By the time I’d read the unfinished story of Raegan I was angry enough to kill the idiotic driver myself. Because of one of life’s lowest creatures never again will Raeleen call her mother, because there is no cell service in heaven. Carole will never get to see her beautiful granddaughter Raegan walk down the aisle in a wedding dress. When I’d finished reading about Raegan, by all accounts a shooting star who was loved and respected by
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BY LEE PITTS
et’s put something in proper perspective here, shall we? To hear the vegetarians talk you’d think they were a majority of our population but there is the same percentage of vegetarians in the United States as there are black people in Alaska, Asians in Arkansas, Muslims in China and gay people in the United States. They comprise the same amount of folks in this country as natural redheads do, and I can go weeks at a time without seeing one of them. But then I don’t get around that much. But you get the point... they are an extremely vocal mini-minority at best. I find it ironic that there are roughly the same number of vegetarians in this country as there are farmers and ranchers, and you know how outnumbered we are. To listen to the Hollywood crowd and the liberal left tell it, vegetarianism is growing rapidly as people give up steaks for salad and hamburger for humus. But the lie they tell that vegetarianism is growing rapidly while meat consumption is falling is just one of the many mistruths they tell on a regular basis. Beef may have been on the ropes five years ago but as more and more people tasted tofu for the first time, or tried to choke down vegetarian lasagna, they have quickly and very quietly come back to beef.
Beef’s Dark Decade
NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING
It’s true that for a long time
May your belly never grumble, may your heart never ache, may your horse never stumble, may your cinch never break.
meat consumption was on a downward spiral and vegetarianism was on the rise. In 2014 for instance, Americans ate 19 percent less beef, 10 percent less pork, and 1.5 percent less chicken than they did in 2005. In 2009 it’s estimated that only one percent of our population identified themselves as vegetarians or vegans. (A vegan not only doesn’t eat meat, they use no animal products of any kind.) Although the veg heads claimed that 5 percent of our population were vegetarians, most surveys now put the number between two and three percent. Still, if we accept the three percent number that rep-
resents 300 percent growth in a decade’s time. That’s a growth number we usually see only associated with tech stocks and government debt. Probably at its peak 16 million people in this country were vegetarians. Forty two percent of them became vegetarians because they saw an educational film, 69 percent said they were vegetarians to support the ethical treatment of animals, and 45 percent said they had further transitioned into veganism. 52 percent of all vegans said they had been eating vegan for less than 10 years. Vegetarianism seemed to really appeal to two groups in
particular: women, and to be more precise, young women. In 2009 when only 1 million people were total vegans, 79 percent were women. That number has stayed the same while 59 percent of the larger vegetarian group are women. Forty two percent of vegetarians are age 18 to 34 years old. But the fact still remains, vegetarians are an extremely small minority. Looking in the rear view mirror, there were several reasons for beef’s fall from grace such as animal agriculture being blamed for climate change, water and air pollution, antibiotic resistance, cruelty to animals and for the general ill health of all Americans. According to a report from the always suspect National Resources Defense Council, Americans cutting their beef consumption was due to Americans finally waking up to the environmental damage that cows were wreaking. Back in 2012 continued on page two
It’s Not 1870 & Prices Won’t Win the Long Game MEATINGPLACEGUEST.COM
Pie Growth Mindset
GUEST BLOG BY JANETTE BARNARD
Having a fixed pie mindset in a growing pie era is crippling. When you lower prices to gain market share, you are foregoing profit. This isn’t hypothetical lost profit. If the market is at $2 per pound and you sell at $1.75 per pound, then you can calculate how much it cost to buy the market share you were chasing. Was it worth foregoing that profit when you could have gained market share by adding value and differentiating to bring in new demand rather than just (expensively) reshuffling existing demand in the short run? Because that market share will have to be bought again and again if that’s your tactic.
T
he Wild West gets the glory, but Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday have nothing on the industrial tycoons of the late 1800s. The rapid development of the oil, steel, railroad and related industries is enough to make your head spin, especially when you layer on the fast and loose ways the tycoons took hold of entire industries and bent them to their will. Basically 1860-1890 is just a single story on continuous loop: a guy buys controlling interest in a company, drives down prices to take market share and bleed competitors, buys controlling interest in competitors, raises prices across the board, then buys a yacht or ten. Rinse, repeat. The main storyline — regardless of the commodity — is gaining market share by competing on price. That is the path to empire building. Or at least it was back then. But it’s not 1870. You are not John Rockefeller. And in the modern meat industry, you have far more profit inducing levers to pull than just lowering price. Three levers other than price:
You are not a price taker; do know who is pricing your product?
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