CattleWomen’s Corner

cowsrus17@outlook.com

strive to be better!

By Oregon CattleWomen’s President Jenny Coelho

Time marches on and we are already into the later part of summer. Soon our children and college-age students will either be going back to school or doing distance learning through Zoom and online courses. No matter what the venue of how education will be delivered, we all need to strive to be better teachers, business owners, employees, parents and grandparents as we navigate through the challenges and changes that we are sure to encounter throughout the rest of this year. It may be as simple as writing things down so that we are more organized or just taking a moment each day to do one thing that will make an improvement to what we can accomplish within our day. Remember to take care of yourself so that you can instill and pass onto younger generations the importance of what we do within our industry. Tony and I had a great vacation with our children and grandchildren over the

Fourth of July. We went hiking, fishing, golfing, and kayaking with them and we enjoyed all the moments of seeing all their different personalities and talents. Their Uncle Cash (our son) was asking them all what they want to be when they grow up. They had all kinds of answers from a singer, a pro-athlete to a veterinarian. We can only help and hope that their dreams come true!

Short supplies from ag products to water for our farmers and ranchers have been causing headaches for many of us this year. I have been out visiting with some of our local restaurant owners throughout southern Oregon and northern California, they are telling me that they cannot purchase some of their regular meat products to provide to customers. Some of these restaurant owners are struggling to fill their meat orders as supply of product is short right now and the price of the wholesale product continues to increase due to the short supply. How can we expand locally and provide a quality, but reasonably priced product and not be so reliant upon our meat products being shipped in from another country, state or halfway across the U.S.? There are actions and steps to be taken as to where and how our beef products will be processed and marketed within the different regions across our country.

I believe there is opportunity out there for our current local processers to expand. It may take some ingenuity from our local beef producers to step up and help make that change in providing a product locally that is ready to process and market to our local restaurants and grocery stores. However, to do that, our farmers and ranchers must have the necessary water to provide the feed to produce the beef products that are desired by local consumers. These are some of the challenges that need to be addressed through local, state, and national legislation. Remember to contact your local county commissioners and your state

and national legislators about your concerns and challenges of being able to provide a quality product to our general population. OCW and ANCW News

A Summer education activity for our Collegiate and Junior CattleWomen will be announced in early August. Look for more information via the OCW email.

OCW scholarship awards were selected by the OCW Scholarship committee in June. There were twelve applicants, but due to this being our very first year in awarding scholarships and limited funding, we were only able to award scholarships to four applicants. We had a great selection of qualified applicants and encourage these applicants to apply again next year. We as “Oregon CattleWomen” need to put our thinking caps on as to how we can raise a substantial amount of money for scholarships as we have a definite need to fulfill in helping students who want to be involved in our industry. Our scholarship awardees will be announced in next month’s article with a short bio about each of them. Thank you to all who applied!

ANCW Mid-Year Business Meeting – has been changed to a virtual zoom meeting and will be held on Wednesday and Thursday, August 12-13, 2020. We will be sending out updates about the virtual meeting and would love to have our Oregon CattleWomen join in to learn more about what the American National CattleWomen are doing and what their plans are within this next year. Check out their new updated website at https://ancw.org/. •

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