A brief funeral dirge for R-CALF (1998-2007)
After a series of market-shaking news events, a group of ranchers, a well placed market-owner, and his fringe Billings-based Ag-Newspaper gathered together to form a new cattle organization. The founding members were disenfranchised by mainstream cattle organizations, angry about the role of producers in the beef value-chain, and deeply distrustful of both free trade and packers. The group banded together as a vehicle for its financier to fund a number of injunctive court actions targeted at closing borders to trade, re-examining the usage of the beef checkoff, and assessing the transparency of the beef marketing chain. The recently deceased R-CALF took up the mantle of the champion of the small and independent cattle producer and for a time, they succeeded in forwarding their aims.
While R-CALF's strident opposition to free trade was short-sighted and self-serving, the organization did at least as much good as harm to the beef industry in its short life. The beef checkoff has long been used as an open checkbook transfering public money to NCBA, a private organization, through a series of contracting arrangements that would make Haliburton proud. The scrutiny that has been placed on the use of these generic promotion funds will undoubtably benefit the industry as a whole and clean up many past inproprieties. Further, the pressure that R-CALF placed on the mainstream organizations to consider broader perspectives and to open up their policy development to individuals beyond their traditional insular core will eventually make them more responsive to the needs of average members. The beef value chain has been shamefully obscure, so any action to provide more factual information is useful. The use of injunctions and hand-picking sympathetic judges to curcumvent science and the legislative process is shameful, but was an effective lesson to the industry that a good lawyer can make flawed logic go a long ways.
R-CALF had a sharply split personality, as shown by its contradictory policies on COOL and National Animal Id. While the group fought agressively to inact a traceback system identifying the country in which an animal was born, raised, and slaughtered for market purposes, RCALF strongly opposed a system designed to traceback animals to the specific ranch on which they were born, feedlot they were raised, and plant they were slaughtered for food safety purposes. The systems could (should) have been one-in-the-same, but instead were conversely fought and supported in the same agresive tone.
As with all splinter movements founded on rebel principles, the R-CALF inevitably splintered upon itself. So it was in the last two weeks as R-CALF colapsed under the wieght of its own split personalities. While the good they've done on check-off and grass-roots organizational policy making may have long-lived usefulness, the damage they've done to the credibility of a single voice for the industry is likely temporary. Now that we've buried our splinters, it is up to us to build something better from the remaining good wood.
