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Strange OT didn't post this.

Big Muddy rancher

Well-known member
Jolley: Five Minutes with Bill Donald, incoming NCBA president
01/28/2011 09:33AM

In just a few days, Bill Donald will pick up the reins of the big and occasionally unruly horse that’s the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. Yeah, Bill Donald, one of the founding fathers of R-CALF. Well, now, are lions lying down with lambs? Have America’s Tea Party-driven right wingers decided to kiss and make up with those nasty, ultra-liberal socialists who rule the overly-educated, Ivy League left wing? Will devout F-150 fans start buying Silverado’s?

In a word, no.

I asked Bill about his early involvement with R-CALF and he set me straight on his work with a group that was created in his native state of Montana and why he left during their formative years.

I asked about what he wanted to accomplish during his year at the top and decided he had his finger on the pulse of the cattle republic. I had already surveyed some of the more vocal and involved people in the business for another article and got responses like “Bridging the divide on production methods vs. quality... presenting a unified front” and “Unification is the key. We must not look back at past differences (speaking about the beef industry) and begin utilizing producer’s dollars to fight the real enemy…Animal Activists.”

That was Bill’s position, too. For a long time, the cattle industry has wisely circled the wagons to face a very skilled and well-directed outward attack from animal activists. The only problem? Cattlemen started firing inwards wounding that rascal sitting in the wagon just on the other side of the camp fire.

As ugly as things have gotten in American politics (the Washington, D.C. version) they were even uglier in the Denver-Billings axis. The infighting took our collective eye off the attacks that were being mounted ever more skillfully by the likes of HSUS, PETA, Food & Water, Inc and a whole growling and hungry wolf pack of similar special interest groups.

The public’s emotions were being played, unfriendly-to-agriculture laws were being passed and standard farm practices were being portrayed as evil while ag groups played dueling banjos with press releases and personal attacks. A more-or-less unified gang of animal rights groups cheered us on as we wasted our ammo on one another instead of the real enemy out there.

One of Donald’s key messages during our conversation was simple. “Stop it!” He wants us all to play nice. Here are a few other things he said:

Q. You’ve held key positions in R-CALF and NCBA, two organizations that rarely agree on anything. How did that happen?

A. About 10 years ago, my friend Leo McDonald asked me to help with a project questioning what we saw as a dumping issue with Canadian and Mexican cattle (Editor’s note: The group was the predecessor of today’s R-CALF). We took it all the way to the International Trade Commission and lost so I wanted to move on.

I was on R-CALF’s executive committee then but, for me, it was about the dumping issue, not about starting a new organization. Many of the people involved wanted it to become a permanent thing, though. I voted in the minority so I left.

I was the first president of the Crazy Mountain Stockgrower’s Association and served on the board and as president of the Montana Stock Growers Association. I was on the NCBA Policy Division committees, the NCBA board and was NCBA Cow/Calf Council chairman. Never in my wildest dreams, though, did I think I would be here.

Q. This is probably a watershed year in the cattle business. The herd is as small as it has been in half a century and input costs are as high as they’ve ever been. What’s your outlook?

A. I’m very bullish on the cattle business. Exports are up, markets that were closed or restricted have opened again. Living standards around the world are improving - the world will demand more protein. We’ve doubled our cowherd the last few years and we’re keeping all our calves over to yearlings.

Q. You’re a policy man so what policy issues will be important during your year as head of NCBA?

A. New GIPSA rules will be finalized this year. There are a lot of other regulatory issues we have to deal with – what about dust and other pollutants? What kind of adjustments will we have to make as an industry? We need to work closely with congress to make sure our voice is heard.

Our relationship with the Cattlemen’s Beef Board will have to be clearly defined. We’re working on an OIG audit now, and a third party is interview state beef councils, the CBB and everyone involved to define what we have to do and how we should design the audit. The result should mean more transparency.

With smaller herds, those dollars are smaller now but it’s still a lot of money. The state beef councils collect the money and send half of it to the CBB. Producers who pay their hard-earned dollars into the program have to have a high degree of confidence that their money is being used wisely.

Q. Let’s talk about the challenges the industry will have to face. There are a lot of them; what are the biggest hurdles the industry will have to overcome?

A. There are a lot of them but the Association can’t be all things so we’ll have to choose where we’re going. The challenges seem to be never ending but the attacks from groups like HSUS and Western Watersheds have to be addressed. There’s the ban on horse slaughter that’s turned into something more inhumane than intended.

We need to look at where we are on prices and their effect on supply and demand and international trade. Margins may be tight right now but there’s only so much you can charge for a steak and still sell it.

Let’s take the rough edge off and start finding some common ground, start creating some solutions and working together to solve these problems.

Q. “Working together” seems to be a new theme these days. With all the hard feeling generated in the last few years, can it actually happen?

A. My goal of coming in as president this year is to get the industry to become more unified. It’s time we became more focused. The attacks against livestock production from groups such as HSUS mean must have a unified voice. We have to realize that people are trying to put us all out of business. We’re in this fight together and we need to work with other groups in this industry.

We can talk more regulation or less regulation but if we’re busy fighting among ourselves, we’re not going to get anywhere. We need to have a united voice to maintain the freedoms we need to be successful.

I liken it to the work that the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance is doing. They’ve pulled together a wide range of ag organizations and realized that they have to take some issue off the table – the corn/ethanol issue, for instance - to achieve their goals. I think we can work with other cattle industry groups to achieve our goals, too.

Chuck Jolley is a free lance writer, based in Kansas City, who covers a wide range of ag industry topics for Cattlenetwork.com and Agnetwork.com.
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Anonymous

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Oh I'm sure NCBA leadership would just love nothing better than to have a big "koombea group hug" and no longer have anyone questioning their dancing to the tune of their Big Packer/Big Feeder corporate puppet handlers or NCBA's use/misuse/theft of the cattle producers Beef Checkoff tax...

But NCBA's past is too well known- and there are still too many honest cattlemen around to see that happening...

Especially now- when a limited audit of only a few NCBA dealings over 2 years of their Checkoff dealings has shown they have been ripping off hundreds of thousands of producer paid tax $ a year..... And a majority of Checkoff payers has called for major changes in Checkoff contracting...

And to try and make this a conservative/liberal issue is just a smokescreen--Even the conservative Farm Burea has joined with the producer groups calling for a split of the Checkoff and NCBA to get their hands out of the cookie jar....

The only thing that surprises me is that this isn't a Dittmer AFF authored article :wink: :p
 
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