Dave Maples: Thoughts from Dave

Thoughts From Dave

Dave Maples Executive Vice President

Have you ever been challenged to think about a situation in a different way? Or to change the way you do a long-standing process. What about the way you do business? Kentucky’s beef industry or really the beef industry in whole has been under challenges for quite some time. In the Kentucky Cattlemen’s Association Long Range Plan (LRP) there is a section that envisions a Beef Learning Center. You might ask why and I would ask why not. Kentucky’s history with cattle goes back to the early settlers. We have grass, water and a large population of cows that produce calves that are shipped to the mid-west to be finished and processed. When the Beef Learning Center was proposed to the Kentucky Office of Agriculture Policy the conversation quickly turned into a brisk conversation, much like the conversation was when the LRP was being developed about cattle/beef marketing. We were challenged with co-op ideas, packing plants, products on the grocery store shelf and several reasons of not the right time. So, over the Fourth of July weekend I had time to drive and think about the challenging comments placed before me. I got the opportunity to spend three days with my daughter who is a senior in Bio-medical Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is spending her summer taking Physics, Cell Biology and Speech. The only class that she is taking that I can really relate to is the Speech class. However, out of curiosity I did pick up a book that she had to read for her Physics class. I was expecting to open a book that was way over my head and that I would have no understanding of but the book was really about how to break the study of mathematics and science down to where you could learn the subjects. In reality the book was about how to break any complicated subject or problem down and look at the situation in different ways to solve the problem. The book quickly intrigued me. One of the points of the book was that we are either in focused mode or diffused modes in our thinking. We can be so focused on solving a problem that often time if we relax our mind, and release our attention and focus on nothing in particular, the solution can come easier to us. There were two examples given and the author asked the reader to solve. One was a pyramid. The test was that you could only move three coins to invert the pyramid. It was noted that some children get this exercise instantly. How quickly can you solve it?

The second example was to read the following sentence and identify how many errors it contains: Thiss sentence contains threee errors.

For me to have a weekend off and put my mind in the diffused mode was relaxing even if I was still thinking about my problems at work. Is there a way to move a few coins like in example one to really change Kentucky’s beef industry to make it better or is it that our industry is not really broken? It will be interesting to see where the leadership in Kentucky Agriculture takes us in the next couple of months. I can tell you with certainty that over the past twenty-five years we have not invested in our land grant colleges agriculture infrastructure and our research farms. And the sad part of this is that we have some really talented scientists and researchers at the University of Kentucky and the USDA Forage Animal Research Unit but no one knows what they are doing.