FME 2022

NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING

Beef Banditos

By Lee Pitts

A

fter getting my animal science degree I received a Rotary Graduate Fellowship to attend any university in the world for one year, all expenses paid. Plus, if I chose a country where they didn’t speak English, I’d receive three months of extensive language training. I decided on the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, Australia, continued on page 2

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Livestock Market Digest

BANDITOS

cont. from page 1

to study international agriculture.

(I skipped the language training because I mistakenly thought they spoke English in Australia.)

I was correct in thinking international agriculture was the next big thing and I decided upon Australia because I thought they’d be our biggest beef competitor. But I made el-biggo-mistako!

I should have learned Portuguese, studied communicable diseases of beef cattle, packed my bags and headed for Brazil.

BREAD BASKET OF THE WORLD? In picking Australia over Brazil I could not have been more wrong.

Just consider these facts: • Brazil is now the world’s largest beef exporter accounting for 23 percent of all global beef exports. They export two million tons in carcass weight each year or one-fifth of their production.

• The two biggest beef packers in America and the world are Brazilian owned.

• Economists estimate that Brazil can produce beef for 30- to 50 percent less than U.S. ranchers.

• Brazil has the world’s second largest commercial cattle herd (India is first). At the end of July of this year Brazil had almost 190 million head, compared to 98.8 million in the United States. (This July marked the first time we’d fallen below 100 million head since 2015).

• It’s been estimated that Brazil has about 260,000,000 acres of undeveloped fertile grasslands – a territory larger than the combined area of France and Spain to further expand.

• While 90 percent of the beef produced in Brazil is grass-fed they do have the potential to produce a grain-fed product. Slowly but surely, crop by crop, Brazil is overtaking the U.S. in a variety of farm goods.

For example, Brazil has become the world’s largest producer of soybeans with $28.6 billion in sales compared with the United States’ $25.6 bil-

lion. Brazilian ag backers brag that their country has now overtaken the United States as the “breadbasket of the world.”

WHO’D HAVE EVER THOUGHT? What prompted this story was a chart produced by the USDA’s Economic Research Service that graphed monthly U.S. beef imports from Brazil. The chart begins in January 2015 and goes through January of this year. The chart shows we’d been slowly but steadily increasing imports from Brazil, but when plotted on a graph the imports looks like a flatlined hospital patient until January of this year when it goes straight up like a gymnasium climbing wall with the amount of beef imports into the U.S. increasing 500 percent in the first month of this year! IN JUST ONE MONTH! In January 2022 Brazilian beef imports to the U.S. totaled 352 million pounds, nearly 57 percent higher year over year and 47 percent above the 5-year average, according to the USDA. On the surface one could conclude that the higher poundage from Brazil was a result of China’s embargo on Brazilian beef due to mad cow concerns. China had been the destination for more than 40 percent of Brazilian beef exports so Brazil was forced to look elsewhere for customers, and they found one with a fat wallet in America.

So when the Chinese embargo was lifted in December 2021, Brazil had already found more new customers to which they’d already redirected their beef. So now they had those new markets in addition to an old customer in China. This year, the major destinations for the Brazilian beef, after China, have been Hong Kong (155.6 thousand tons) and the United States (66.49 thousand tons).

If one takes the time to look behind the numbers, you’d find an even more chilling reason why Brazilian beef imports increased 500 percent in one month. In the past, beef imports from Brazil consisted of heat-treated beef products, used primarily in the burger busi-

ness. But January’s numbers included 83 million pounds of FRESH beef made possible because in February 2020, the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service determined that fresh beef from Brazil was safe and eligible for import into the U.S. As a result, imports of fresh beef from Brazil have exploded upwards on a trajectory that does not bode well for American ranchers.

We’d better get used to such shocks to the system. With the continuing war between two of the world’s largest grain producers, Ukraine and Russia, and cash strapped, inflation-riddled countries across the globe desperate to accumulate more stable American dollars, the only way they can get the greenbacks is to sell us more farm goods.

Who’d have ever thought that the day would come in this country when we’d depend on the rest of the world to feed us, instead of the other way around?

FAST LEARNERS There’s another reason American ranchers should be concerned about more beef from Brazil: they are fast learners. Brazil has massively expanded its beef production while reducing the area of land used to pasture cattle. Since that day 50 years ago when I chose Australia over Brazil beef productivity in the South American country has risen 146 percent. At the same time, the area on which beef cattle are pastured was brought down by 13 percent. Food production costs are lower in Brazil than in Australia.

That’s because labor is cheaper, fresh water is more abundant and Australia doesn’t use slave labor. But that’s a story for another day.

According to the Brazilian packers most of the world is under the wrong impression when they accuse Brazil of getting big at the expense of virgin Amazon rainforest. Just consider that the Amazon states of Amazonas, Roraima and Amapá were responsible for only one hundredth of one percent of that 146 percent growth! But Brazilian envi-

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2022 Fall Marketing Edition ronmentalists say that the Brazilian Canada, Europe, the Middle East, cattle sector is responsible for one- Africa and Asia. fifth of all emissions from commodHow did JBS get so big in the ity-driven deforestation.

U.S. you might wonder? On July Perhaps most importantly, 12, 2007, American regulators let Brazilian ranchers have the full JBS purchase Swift & Company in backing of Brazilian politicians who a US $1.5-billion, all-cash deal. The realize the value of agriculture. Or acquisition made the newly consolis it because they’re bought off? idated JBS Swift Group the largest For example, JBS went on its 20 beef processor in the world. Then BILLION dollar buying spree of in 2008 American regulators let meatpackers around the world, JBS purchase the beef operations of including a couple crown jewels in Smithfield Foods for $565 million.

America, with money from Brazilian (They allowed the Chinese to buy banks that the owners of JBS, Joesley the pork part of Smithfield, the and Wesley Batista, secured illegally largest pork producer in the world)!

Then in 2009, JBS acquired by bribing 1,900 Brazilian politicians and meat inspectors! In a plea Pilgrim’s Pride Chicken Company deal the brothers told prosecutors that has operations in the U.S. and how they bribed bank and govern- Mexico and customers in more than ment officials to receive low-interest 100 countries on six continents. loans. They agreed to pay a 3.2 bilThen there’s another Brazilian lion dollar fine and go to jail but the packer grabbing U.S market share brothers are both free and are now you may not have ever heard of. worth six billion dollars. (They later That would be Marfrig that regulawent back to jail on insider trading tors let buy 85 percent of National charges but are currently not incar- Beef, the fourth largest American cerated). That gives you some idea beef packer. Leucadia, an investhow far the Brazilian government ment firm, invested $868 million to is willing to go to help their multi- acquire 79 percent of National Beef national corporations. They’ve been eight years ago and by the time they cultivating new markets around the sold out to Marfrig they’d gained 3.3 world and in just the first 11 work- times their original investment. ing days in July, Brazil exported That transaction overnight dou89,100 tons of either fresh, chilled, bled Marfrig’s sales and makes the or frozen beef with a daily average Brazilian company the second largest beef processor in the world. of beef exports of 8,102 tons.

The top destination for the Headquartered in São Paulo, the Brazilian beef in 2021 was China but company has an operational base in the Brazilians had to suspend ship- 22 countries, exporting to over 100. ments to its number one customer Marfrig has about 90,000 employafter confirming cases of atypical ees with 33 units of cattle industry mad cow disease in early September. (24 in Brazil, five in Argentina, and But Beijing quickly resumed imports four in Uruguay), 21 industrial units of Brazilian boneless beef products of chickens (14 in Brazil, four in from cattle less than 30 months old. Europe, and three in the United States), 48 plants for industrial THE PACKER HATH goods and processing (16 in Brazil, NO COUNTRY five in Argentina, three in Uruguay, How did Brazil become the eight in the US, one in China, one biggest beef bully on the block? in Thailand, one in Malaysia, one It was largely achieved by three in South Korea, one in Australia, Brazilian meat companies going on and 11 in Europe), four industrial a shopping spree. The most well- pig units in Brazil, two industrial known is JBS, a leading processor units of turkeys (one in Brazil and of beef, pork, lamb, poultry and one in Europe), five plants of lamb prepared foods. With its American (one in Brazil, three in Uruguay and headquarters in Greeley, Colorado, one in Chile), 27 factories of feed JBS includes 65 production facili- for chickens, turkeys, and pigs (21 ties, 49 prepared foods facilities, six in Brazil, three in Europe and three feedlots, six live hog operations and in the U.S.), two trading companies eight transportation terminals with (Chile and the United Kingdom), operations in 28 U.S. states, Canada, 14 industries and commercial officPuerto Rico, Mexico, Europe, es for leather (one in Brazil, four Australia and New Zealand. There in Uruguay, one in China, one in are more than 100,000 JBS employ- Germany, two in the U.S., one in ees who process more than 200,000 Argentina, one in Mexico, and three cattle, 500,000 hogs, 45 million in South Africa). The daily capacity chickens and 80,000 small stock is 31,200 head of cattle, 10,400 pigs, (lambs, sheep, goats and veal calves) 10,400 sheep, 350,000 turkeys, and PER WEEK, providing more than 3.7 million chickens!

32 billion pounds of product each In addition, the company has an year to markets in the U.S., Mexico,

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SOMETHING SMELLS ROTTEN In the past Brazil has tried to cover its black eyes with tainted beef. There’s the ongoing practice of using slave labor, questionable production financing and Brazil’s reputation for covering up its animal health issues.

Brazil has repeatedly failed to report outbreaks of mad cow disease. In 2010 when mad cows showed up in Brazil’s herd notification was not made until 2012. They did the same thing in 2014, 2019, and in June of 2021 when two new BSE-infected cattle were detected

by Brazilian authorities but were not reported for months. The World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) requires countries to report within 24 hours any animal disease event that could be of international concern.

In early 2017 Brazil was found to be exporting rotten and tainted beef containing blood clots and lymph nodes. After that the U.S. imposed a very weak partial suspension of beef imports. That suspension only applied to fresh beef and not precooked beef, and the partial suspension did not occur until several months after the scandal was disclosed.

Says R CALF’s Bill Bullard, “What’s been clear in our yearslong relationship with Brazil is that its government cannot be trusted to comply with U.S. beef import requirements. What is equally clear is that our Agriculture Secretaries are slow to respond, and may only partially respond, to known food safety threats.”

Brazilian slaughtering plants have consistently failed to pass U.S. food safety audits. After conducting at least 18 audits of food safety practices in Brazilian slaughtering plants, all failed due to numerous food safety issues.

The biggest safety problem with Brazil is Foot and Mouth disease.

As usual, R CALF’s Bill Bullard hit the nail on the head when he said, “American FMD safeguards subjects the U.S. cattle industry to a clear and significant danger of FMD introduction and consumers to unsafe beef for which there will be no origin designation due to Congress’ repeal of mandatory country-of-origin labeling. This means the only meaningful protection available to U.S. cattle producers against the introduction of FMD and to U.S. consumers against consuming unsafe beef will be sheer luck.”

It’s not only their beef that smells a little rotten, it’s the power that Brazil seems to have over American regulators. It makes one wonder if Brazil has been up to its old tricks and are buying off American politicians, bureaucrats and inspectors the same way they did in their own country.

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Riding Herd

installed capacity around 126,000 tons of processed products, and more than 178,500 pieces of leather processed per month. Marfrig is the global leader in hamburger production and the second largest beef protein company on the planet.

The third leg in this three-legged stool of Brazilian beef domination is another firm I bet you’ve never heard of. That would be Minerva who owns 27 industrial units and 3 processing units, 14 distribution centers and 11 international offices from which they sell meat to over 100 countries.

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Livestock Market Digest

S

The Legend of El Diablo

ometimes oil field workers and cowboys get along, sometimes they don’t. I’ve played both roles and have come to the conclusion that the degree to which they get along is dependent on whether the cattleman is receiving royalty checks.

In addition to working at a gas station pumping gas, washing windows, inflating tires and fixing flats, I worked three summers in the oilfields to pay my way through college. I’ve mentioned previously that after I got my animal science degree, I took a job as a cowboy making $650 per month which was $200 less than what I was getting in the oilfields as a roustabout with no college degree. Both sides of my family worked in the oilfields so it was easy for me to get a job paying $5.25 per hour when the minimum wage was $1.25. It was a good job, I learned a lot and I met some interesting

characters, like Buster who owned the ranch that surrounded the oilfield where I worked. Buster was an old, single, miserable cuss who drank a lot and raised roping steers out of the worst cows I’ve ever seen.

Buster had good reason to be mad at oilfield workers because the same oil company that leased the land where I worked also had a lease on Buster’s land, only they never drilled on it. Which meant Buster was getting no royalty payments while his next-door neighbor was cruising the world in his yacht with his beautiful 24 year old girlfriend.

Buster told everyone that the reason the oil company had not drilled on his land was because they were using directional drilling to drill under his land and get all Buster’s oil for free. I wouldn’t put it past them but in the oil company’s defense the field where I worked consisted of a couple hundred shallow wells that were drilled before directional drilling was even invented. I’d say on average the wells produced about 30 barrels every day since 1889.

The oilfield where I worked was not conducive to running cattle because it was almost straight up

and down, had no water, and was rockier than my boss man’s marriage. And there wasn’t enough feed to keep a goat alive. That’s why it seemed odd during my first summer to see this mysterious bull appear out of the fog and then disappear after terrorizing the place. I only saw the bull they called El Diablo (The Devil) once and I can tell you he was a huge monster with horns that were wider than a Sherman tank and twice as deadly. The pumpers who checked the wells every day were refusing to exit their pickups for fear of being shish-kabobbed by the mysterious El Diablo. And these were not sissy men, but guys who regularly engaged in barroom fisticuffs and squashed rattlesnakes with pieces of drill pipe.

By the time I arrived on the scene El Diablo had already put a big dent in the boss man’s Lincoln Continental, had knocked over several stands that held 55-gallon drums filled with vile chemicals and made a mess of the pipe farm where El Diablo liked to hang out. After every episode the boss would phone Buster to come and get his bull but Buster insisted the bull wasn’t his,

but who else could El Diablo belong to, there wasn’t another cattle ranch within 30 miles?

During my second summer, Buster came into the doghouse where we ate lunch and played cards and gave us all the evil eye. “Where’s your boss?” he demanded.

We all pointed to the office door and Buster barged into the office and demanded to know if the boss had seen El Diablo lately? “I haven’t seen him but why should you care about him Buster, I thought you said he wasn’t your bull?”

“He’s not,” said Buster who was just trying to avoid paying for all the damage El Diablo did.

The boss told Buster, “You might ask the guys in the doghouse but I haven’t seen him.”

So Buster demanded to know if any of us peons had seen El Diablo recently. “Now that you mention it,” said Bob, a former Golden Gloves champion who weighed 250 and was six feet five, “we haven’t seen him. But would you like a piece of jerky? I made it myself.”

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Legislation to Help Market Beef More Effectively

by Heather Smith Thomas

I

n the past few years a number of bills have been introduced in Congress to try to remedy the crisis of a shortage of marketing options for livestock producers. There were several additional bills proposed in 2020 after the pandemic revealed flaws in the food supply chain, but with the new administration and a new Congress, all bills from 20182019 and early 2020 had to be re-introduced. There is still no new action on the main three --- the New Markets for Sate Inspected Meat, the PRIME (Processing Revival and Intrastate Meat Exemption) Act and the Strengthening Local Processing Act. Two new ones were introduced this year.

SMALL FAMILY FARMER AND RANCHER RELIEF ACT – In the House of Representatives, David Scott (D-Georgia), House Agriculture Committee Chairman, introduced H.R 8590–the Small Family Farmer and Rancher Relief Act--legislation focused on helping small farmers and ranchers.

When he introduced this bill, Scott said that according to USDA data, the average beef cattle herd in the U.S. is 44 head, and operations of 100 or fewer beef cattle account for 90 percent of all farms and 44 percent of the beef cattle inventory. “Yet, we are losing an average of 17,000 cattle ranchers per year.

Therefore, my bill will target these small family farmers and ranchers so that they will be able to secure their fair share of the food dollar and we can at the same time stem the tide of losing 17,000 farmers per year,” Scott said.

“My bill creates a new program that strengthens the Federal safety net and makes insurance products work better for small cattle farmers and ranchers, both in terms of coverage and accessibility. The second pillar establishes a grant program at USDA to help small farmers and ranchers and producer-owned

2022 Fall Marketing Edition

Livestock Market Digest

cooperatives to undertake innovative business initiatives,” he said.

“By developing more direct-to-consumer and direct-to-institution markets, my legislation will give small farmers and ranchers more control over where they sell their cattle or meat products and provide them with opportunities to add value to their products and increase their profitability.”

This legislation would generate a Small Rancher Market Access competitive grant program run through the Agricultural Market Service.

The money would be used to help cooperatives and small producers add value and market meat in local and regional areas, with a focus on direct-to-consumer and direct-to-institution sales.

Scott’s proposal offers an increased premium subsidy for small ranchers, for insuring a herd of 100 cattle or less under Livestock Risk Protection insurance policies.

It would also create a USDA indemnity program that provides relief to small producers when the price spread dramatically exceeds historical average. The Beef Cattle Spread Coverage Program would provide relief when the farmer’s share of the retail dollar drops below 51.7 percent. The rate is calculated based on the spread between the price of fed beef cattle, boxed beef sold at the wholesale level, and beef sold at retail. It would also offer incentives for insurance agents to better market Livestock Risk Protection policies to small producers, and provide resources to USDA to educate producers and insurance agents on the utility of the livestock insurance programs and the safety net program.

This bill has many supporters but also some sceptics. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) had reservations about the initial draft.

“NCBA is committed to work-

ing with the House Agriculture Committee to protect our most vulnerable producers, and we appreciate the Chairman’s attention on this important issue,” said Ethan Lane, vice president of government affairs at NCBA. “Unfortunately, H.R. 8590, the Small Family Farmer and Rancher Relief Act, as introduced prompts more questions than it provides answers. While collectively we would have preferred to provide input into the drafting of this legislation, we look forward to working with our partners in the livestock community to address the blind spots in this proposal.”

Bill Bullard at R-CALF USA said, “We’re concerned that the Small Family Farmer and Rancher Relief Act does not fix the broken market, and is only a stop-gap measure to prevent the ongoing exodus of ranchers from the industry while we continue working to restore genuine competition to the marketplace. In addition, the measure leaves out what we believe to be the core of the industry – ranchers with herd sizes between 100 and 500 head, which is the group of the 67,000 beef cattle operations most likely to be exclusively dependent on cattle income for their livelihoods. The group with 100 head or less would either have to have a second job or be a diversified farm/ranch operation as 100 head is less than needed for an economically viable operation.”

AMPLIFYING PROCESSING OF LIVESTOCK IN THE UNITED STATES – Also in the House, Vicky Hartzler (R-Missouri.) and Jimmy Panetta (D-California), introduced the Amplifying Processing of Livestock in the United States (A-PLUS) Act, which aims to remove the regulatory roadblocks to increasing meat processing capacity. It would allow livestock auction market owners to invest in small and regional packing facilities.

This legislation directs the Secretary of Agriculture to amend the Packers & Stockyards Act to allow livestock auction market owners to hold ownership in, finance,

Bills supported by R-CALF USA Meat Packing Special Investigator Act – This legislation would address anticompetitive practices in the meat and poultry industries that hurt consumers and producers, threaten the nation’s food supply and endanger America’s food security. Packer concentration in the beef industry is more consolidated today than it was when the Packers and Stockyards Act was first signed into law over 100 years ago. The Meat Packing Special Investigator Act would create the “Office of the Special Investigator for Competition Matters” within the USDA Packers and Stockyards Division.

The new USDA special investigator would have a team of investigators, with subpoena power, dedicated to preventing and addressing anticompetitive practices in the meat and poultry industries and enforcing our nation’s antitrust laws. They would coordinate and act in consultation with the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to create a new bridge between the USDA and the Department of Homeland Security to protect the continuation of the food supply and increase national security. With a team of dedicated staff, the USDA would have the ability to investigate the tough issues facing producers and hold bad actors accountable.

Protecting America’s Meatpacking Workers Act of 2021 – The Act includes all the important reforms needed to fix the broken cattle market such as mandatory country of origin labeling (MCOOL) for beef, requirement for large packers to buy 50 percent of their cattle in the cash market, a ban on unpriced contracts and a ban on packer ownership of cattle for more than 7 days.

American Beef Labeling Act of 2021 – To restore mandatory country of origin labeling (MCOOL) for beef.

S.949 – A bill to amend the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1946 to foster efficient markets and increase competition and transparency among packers that purchase livestock from producers. This bill requires beef packers with more than 1 plant to purchase at least 50 percent of their cattle in the cash market each week for each plant and requires those cattle to be harvested within 14 days of purchase.

H.R. 7501 – A bill to foster efficient markets and increase competition and transparency among packers that purchase livestock from producers.

New Markets for State-Inspected Meat and Poultry Act of 2021 – This act allows meatpacking plants inspected by state jurisdictions to sell meat in inter-state commerce.

Expanding Markets for State-Inspected Meat Processors Act of 2021 Strengthening Local Processing Act of 2021 – The act would increase the federal share of costs for state inspection programs and Cooperative Interstate Shipment (CIS) facilities to encourage more states to operate state inspection programs and participate in CIS. H.R. 1258 – A bill to amend the Poultry Products Inspection Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act to support small and very small meat and poultry processing establishments.

The PRIME Act (Processing Revival and Intrastate Meat Exemption Act) – This Act repeals the federal ban on the sale of meat from custom slaughterhouses, returning control to the states to permit producers to sell meat processed at a custom slaughterhouse within the state.

The FAIR Meat Packing Act (Feed America by Incentivizing Rural Meat Packing Act) – This bill allows a 25 percent investment tax credit through 2025 and a refundable income tax credit for the startup and organizational expenditures of livestock processing facilities with fewer than 500 employees.

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2022 Fall Marketing Edition or participate in the management or operation of a meat packing entity with a cumulative slaughter capacity of less than 2,000 animals per day or 700,000 animals per year. This cap would exclude investment in the top 10 meat packers.

Livestock auction markets (marketing agencies selling on commission) are not currently able to own, invest in, or participate in the management or operation of a packing plant or meat marketing business because of a Packers and Stockyards Act regulation. In today’s environment, however, where there is increasing packer competition for livestock, most people feel this unnecessary barrier should be removed.

Congresswoman Hartzler said: “For decades, livestock auction markets have played by an outdated and restrictive book of rules which limited capacity and created a system where large meat packer behemoths literally and figuratively slaughtered the competition. The A-PLUS Act would even the playing field and fix these regulations for the benefit of our livestock auctions and small packers--regional packing facilities.”

Congressman Panetta said: “The livestock industry continues to deal with supply chain disruptions. The federal government needs to remove any unnecessary barriers that are hurting our producer’s ability to compete in a global marketplace.

This bipartisan legislation will remove outdated regulations from the early 1900s and better reflect the needs of our modern-day livestock producers. Allowing for livestock auction market investments in regional packing facilities will support small businesses, increase competition, and drive down costs for consumers.”

Livestock Marketing Association President Larry Schnell said the A-PLUS Act would reduce a regulatory barrier that currently prohibits livestock auction owners from investing in much-needed packing capacity expansion. “This bill will spur additional capacity and especially additional packers to increase competition and improve profitability for producers.”

National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s Livestock Market Council Chairman Clint Berry said: “The need for new packing facilities has become a critical issue for the cattle industry. Huge amounts of capital are required to get new facilities up and running. Understanding the need for these new facilities, producers themselves have invested in these efforts but outdated regulations still prevent livestock markets from having ownership in packing facilities. The A-PLUS Act paves the way for the marketing segment of the cattle industry to be included as investors in these facilities, helping reduce dependence on major packers and improving the competitiveness of the live cattle market.”

United States Cattlemen’s Association President Brooke Miller said: “The Packers & Stockyards Act is over one hundred years old – it’s time to modernize parts of this historic legislation that no longer make sense in the modern world.

Today’s livestock auctions are often family-owned and regionally based.

If one of these entities wanted to invest in a local processing facility to increase processing capacity for producers in their area, there shouldn’t be an outdated regulation holding them back from doing so.”

There is also skepticism. Bill

Page 5

Livestock Market Digest Bullard (R-CALF USA) said: “We don’t like the Amplifying Processing of Livestock in the United States (A-PLUS). That measure would allow for the vertical integration of packing plants and auction markets, which we believe will reduce competition.”

CATTLE PRICE DISCOVERY AND TRANSPAENCY ACT – Bullard says his group also does not support the Cattle Price Discovery and Transparency Act of 2022 that would establish pricing mechanisms for live animal purchases. In a statement from R-CALF USA, the group noted it was “strongly opposed to the initial version” of the bill and called for its rejection by the Senate Ag Committee.

This legislation would require the Secretary of Agriculture to establish five to seven regions across the continental U.S. and then establish minimum levels of fed cattle purchases made through approved pricing mechanisms. Approved pricing mechanisms include fed cattle purchases made through negotiated cash, negotiated grid, at a stockyard, and through trading systems that multiple buyers and sellers regularly

can make and accept bids.

Violations of the regulation would result in a maximum penalty of $90,000 for packers that have slaughtered five percent or more of the nation’s harvest over the past five years.

The bill also includes provisions to create a cattle contract library, mandating box beef reporting to ensure transparency, expediting the reporting of cattle carcass weights, and requiring a packer to report the number of cattle scheduled to be delivered for slaughter each day for the next 14 days.

There is support for the bill from the Nebraska Farm Bureau and the Nebraska Famer Union and some other facets of agriculture, but this bill is not supported by everyone in the meat industry.

The North American Meat Institute (NAMI) President and CEO Julie Anna Potts said, “Leading agricultural economists have determined that the Grassley-Fischer bill’s latest draft remains costly to producers, especially producers in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas where the majority of US fed cattle are raised. Due to a shrinking herd

and sustained consumer demand, cattle prices are at seven-year-highs without federal intervention in the market.”

NCBA also opposed the legislation; Vice President of Government Affairs Ethan Lane stated that “despite overwhelming feedback in opposition to a cash mandate, this latest version of the Fischer/ Grassley bill expands the concept to ensure that every single producer in the country selling fat cattle would be subject to a business-altering government edict. This is an indication of just how far the sponsors of this bill have strayed from the wishes of the majority of cattle producers around the country. It is time for the sponsors to finally consider the perspectives of all those who this bill would impact, not just those in their own backyards – and we are ready to have that conversation whenever they are.”

Regarding the new revision, R-CALF USA CEO Bill Bullard said his group “remains deeply disappointed that Congress has not yet taken any meaningful action to address the serious crisis in the cattle industry that is now entering its

eighth year.”

He said R-CALF fears many more ranchers and cattle feeders will leave the business without market reforms, and that the group has asked Congress to take “decisive action” in the past. “While we reserve our opinion regarding the modified compromise bill pending our ongoing analysis, we remain concerned that at its heart, the proposal authorizes the USDA to take up to two more years before it even establishes minimum cash volume requirements; to set those minimum requirements at the same inappropriate level that they’ve been at during the past two years; and then to keep them at that inappropriate level following the required review after the first two years of implementation and periodic reviews after each five-year increment,” Bullard said.

“We were hoping Congress would provide a measured response to this serious crisis and we will continue wading through this complicated proposal to determine if it provides any meaningful reform worthy of America’s independent cattle producers’ support,” he said.

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Page 6

REAL ESTATE GUIDE

SOCOR PLAZA R www.scottlandcompany.com

rms

erTY

ty.com

mitt, TX 79027 Scott - Broker alifying Broker 0am/10:00pm company.com

R SMALL!

uadalupe Co., eded & 519 anch on both g flow daily) mner; wildlife, buyer looking New Mexico

RANCH & FARM REAL ESTATE

+/- w/water & a beautiful 3 bathrooms, etal shop.

116 Plaz PO Box 1 Socorro, NM www.socorroplaz dbrown@socorropla

We need listings on all types of ag properties large or small!

■ HIDDEN GEM – 941 acres +/- in Randall Co. NW of Canyon, Tx. STUNNING VIEWS OVER LOOKING PALO DURO CREEK. Turn key cow/ calf operation w development potential. Property Market includes:Livestock 3/3/3 ranch style home, 4Digest wells, large shop plus shed, enclosed livestock working facility w/hydraulic chute, livestock pens & shed, miles of 5 & 6 barbed wire fence & over 7000’ of pipe fence. YOU WILL NOT WANT TO MISS THIS! Canyon School District.

■ PRICE REDUCED! UNION CO., NM – 2,091.72 ac. (1,771.72 Deeded, 320 ac. -/+ State Lease), well watered w/three wells, two sets of steel pens.

■ COLFAX COUNTY NM GETAWAY – 1,482.90 ac.+/- grassland (1,193.59 ac. +/- Deeded, 289.31 ac. State Lease), great location near all types of mountain recreation.

■ ELK CANYON RANCH#2 – Harding Co., NM – 3,880 ac. -/+, older home, cattle pens, hunting/ cattle ranch. Please call for details!

■ PRICE REDUCED! CEDARVALE, NM – 7,113 acre ranch (5,152 ac. +/- Deeded – 1,961 ac. +/State Lease) well fenced & watered w/good pens, new barn.

521 West St. acres • Portales, NMa 88130 ■ ANGUS, NMSecond – 250 +/with over 1/2 575-226-0672 mile 575-226-0671 of NM 48 frontage.orElevations from 6,800fax to 7,200 feet. Two springs along a creek. Ideal for Buena Vista Realty future development or build your own getaway Qualifying Broker: home.

A.H. (Jack) Merrick 575-760-7521 ■ PRICE REDUCED! LET’S LOOK at these two www.buenavista-nm.com choice 80 acre tracts of dryland located in close proximity one to the other in Wilbarger County near Vernon, Texas.

■ DALLAM CO, TX – 1,216.63 ac. +/- of CRP/ ranchland w/irrigation, re-development potential, 83 acrealready woodin home wells &•pipelines place. with barns, ■ DRIP IRRIGATED – Castro, TX meadows andFARM woods.

FrontsCo.,State 1,715 ac. excellent farm with good water.

Rd.+/-,$545,000 ■ HART IRRIGATED FARM – Castro Co., TX 656 acres, ½ mile pivot, 11 wells. The owner is willing to leaseacre and continue this farm.

• 160 Rangeroperating Eastland Co, ■ PRICE REDUCTION! TURN-KEY RESTAURANT $560,000 READY FOR BUSINESS! One of the best steak houses in the nation just out of Amarillo & Canyon • 270 TX., acrestate-of-the-art Mitchell County, Texas at Umbarger, bldg., w/complete facilities.ranch. Investors dream; excellent

– 980 ac. +/past, land lays de of Hwy. 54. on Co., NM – land w/statey remodeled in very good on pvmt. c. +/- heavily erlisting livestockagent w/ 575-825-1291. ences etc., on sta-nm.com he front gate. nic ac. +/- on d by Lincoln in Pines & red meadow Penasco. This build a legacy

4 ac. irr., on exico, adjoins al.

POTENTIAL exline Special,

505-507-29 505-838-0

Bottari Realty Page 7 Paul Bottari, Broker

Selling residential, farm, ranch, commercial and relocating properties.

Selling residential, farm, COLETTA RAY ranch, commercial and Pioneer Realty 1304 relocating Pile Street, Clovis, NM 88101 properties.

775/752-3040 SOCORRO PLAZA REALTY Nevada Farms On the Plaza

& raNch PrOPerTY Donald Brown

575-799-9600 Direct COLETTA RAY 575.935.9680 Office Pioneer Realty 575.935.9680 1304 Pile Street, Clovis,Fax NM 88101 coletta@plateautel.net 575-799-9600 Direct www.clovisrealestatesales.com 575.935.9680 Office 575.935.9680 Fax coletta@plateautel.net www.clovisrealestatesales.com

Qualifying Broker

505-507-2915 cell www.bottarirealty.com 505-838-0095 fax

116 Plaza PO Box 1903 Socorro, NM 87801 www.socorroplazarealty.com dbrown@socorroplazarealty.com

Advertise to AG LAND LOANS Cattlemen AG LAND LOANS As Low As 3% As LowRanchers!

As 4.5% and OPWKCAP 2.9% OPWKCAP 2.9%

INTEREST RATESAS AS LOW 3% INTEREST RATES LOW ASAS 4.5% Payments Scheduledon on2525 Years Payments Scheduled Years

505-243-9515

for more information

521 West Second St., Portales, NM 88130

575-226-0671 www.buenavista-nm.com

As Low A 198 AC Fanninco, TX OPWKCAP Good Country Rd. Frontage, INTEREST RATES A Rural Water, Electricity, 35 mi NE of Dallas, SO of Bonnam $20,000 Per Acre

SCOTT MCNALLY

521 West Second St. • Portales, NM 88130

www.ranchesnm.com 575-226-0671 or 575-226-0672 fax 575/622-5867 575/420-1237

Buena Vista Realty

Qualifying Broker: Ranch Sales575-760-7521 & Appraisals A.H. (Jack) Merrick www.buenavista-nm.com

AG LAND LOANS As Low As 3.5% OPWKCAP 3.5%

INTEREST RATES AS LOW AS 3.5% Payments Scheduled on 25 Years

A SOURCE FOR PROVEN SUPERIOR Joe Stubblefield & Associates REDWestern ANGUS 13830 St., Amarillo, TX 806/622-3482 • cell 806/674-2062 GENETICS Michael Perez Associates 14298 N. Nara Atkins Rd., Lodi, CA 95240 Visa, NM • 575-403-7970

270 AC Miticelle Co., TX 1 mi off I-20, 6 Elect, Trurans Rock Formation Irrigation Well and Sprinkler. All Bring Case, Modest Home & Barns Price $2.2 million 270 AC Pine Timber & Hunting, Anderson Co., TX Co. Rd. Frontage, Small Lakes $7,250 Per Acre

Joe Priest Real Estate

1-800/671-4548

joepriestre.net • joepriestRE@gmail.com

209/727-3335

MAJOR PRICE REDUCTION – CALL PAUL FOR DETAILS

10 Acres of commercial property, incredible highway visibility and access from either east or west directions on Hwy 60, 3 miles East of Garden Inn Truck Plaza and 4 miles west of Willow Springs.

Natural gas may be available on site. LOCATION PLUS! This property is well suited for many types of businesses (Restaurant, Retail, Motel, Business of any kind!) A MUST SEE PROPERTY. MLS#11402703

Rural Properties around NM or the listing agent Call Buena Vista Realty Portales, at 575-226-0671 Lori Bohm or Melody 1242 NM 480 - Nice575-760-9847, home on 59.7 acres,Sandberg grass 575-825-1291.

Many good pictures on MLS or 427 SRANCH Rrd P 1/2 Large nice home, lots ofwww.buenavista-nm.com barns 694.9 ACRE IN-ROOSEVELT CO NM 1931 S Rrd B24+ has ac total new 5 1694 S Rrd 4, Great home, barns, cattle pens, location wire, steel post, pipe corners etc, pipe corrals, POND, nice ranch house with 2 good 2344 S Rrd K east of Dora, NM, great - Near wind farms water wells, some CRP time remains $665,000 All properties excellent homes & can have horses, etc.

FARM LAND IN ROOSEVELT CO NM 2550 S. Rrd 6 159.8 ac some See these andtoother properties CRP remains, eligible re-inroll if newat www.buenavista-nm.com program $120,000 — See details on www.buenavista-nm.com

See all my listings at: paulmcgilliard.murney.com Paul McGilliard, Broker Associate Residential / Farms/Ranches / Commercial 417-839-5096 or 800-743-0336

521 West Second St. • Portales, NM 88130

575-226-0671 or 575-226-0672 fax

Buena Vista Realty

See these Properties with details at www.buenavista-nm.com or call agent for info

Qualifying Broker: A.H. (Jack) Merrick 575-760-7521 www.buenavista-nm.com

cash flow. Rock formation being crushed and sold; wind turbans, some minerals. Irrigation water developed, crop & cattle, modest improvements. Just off I-20. Price reduced to $1.25 million.

521 West Second St. • Portales, NM 88130

575-226-0671 or 575-226-0672 fax

EIGHT MILE DRAW LAND 740 ± Acres of unimproved native grassland • 840 Immaculate, Hunt Co, TX.

located four miles Ranch. Pastures, 40 tanks,west and of Roswell in the Six Mile Hill area with frontage along U.S. lakes. Beautiful home, barns, Highway 70/380.

This parcel is fenced on three sides and adjoins 120 acres of additional CALIFORNIA RANCH PROPERTY and other Some land thatimprovements. may be purchased.

GreatNORTHERN investment. perwww.ranch-lands.com acre.

31 years in the ranch$600 business - see for videos & brochures

COWBOY DRAW RANCH

DUANE & DIXIE McGARVA RANCH: approx. 985 acres Likely, CA. with about 600+ acre gravity flood irrigated pastures PLUS private 542 AU BLM permit. About 425 acres so of the irrigated are level to flood excellent pastures with balance good flood irrigated pastures. NO PUMPING COST! Dryland is perfect for expansion to pivot irrigated alfalfa if desired. Plus BLM permit for 540 AU is fenced into 4 fields on about 18,000 acres only 7 miles away. REDUCED ASKING PRICE - $3,125,000

Excellent small cattle ranch located in southeastern New Mexico approximately 50 miles northwest of Roswell on the Chaves/ Lincoln countyReal line.Estate 7,455 totalBEAVER acresCREEK with 2,600 deeded with the balance federal BLM Joe Priest RANCH: about 82,000 acres - with 2,700 deeded acres plus contiguous USFS & BLM permits for 450 pair; 580+- acres irrigated alfalfa, pasture, and meadow from Beaver Creek water rights and lease1-800/671-4548 acres. Permitted for 151 animal units yearlong witheachanw/ 250additional animal one irrigation well.

3 homes, 2 hay barns, 4 feedlots ton barns, 2 large 30 reservoirs, can run up units to 500-600 cows YEAR ROUND. REDUCED ASKING PRICE - $5,400,000.

• joepriestre@earthlink.com onjoepriestre.net a temporary nonrenewable basis.

Watered with two wells and several miles of water BEAR CREEK RANCH: Approx. 1,278 acres winter range ground and recreational property. Located on Bear and accessed from South Cow Creek Valley Road. be great hunting for deer, wild turkey, wild to pipeline. Two larger open drawsCreek run through the ranch thatShouldprovide overflow areas pigs, quail & owner states good trout fishing in Bear Creek. Deeded access easement thru neighbor ranches.

No improvements & very private inside the ranch. enhance grazing. The terrain is open andper acre rolling with good turf. The ranch has had good Now only $700 - $894,600 summer rains with no cattle since last The SHASTA ranch is inLAND excellent condition.

BILLspring.

WRIGHT, SERVICES, INC.Call for 530-941-8100 • a brochure and come take a look. Price: $1,350,000 • www.ranch-lands.com

SOLD DRE# 00963490

Scott McNally, Qualifying Broker nch that has been owned and operated Bar M Real Estate, LLC s southeast of Corona, NM in Lincoln M Lease Acres and 2,240 NM State P.O. Box 428,P.O.Roswell, Box 145, Cimarron, NM 8771488202 • 575/376-2341 • Fax: 575/376-2347 NM land@swranches.com • www.swranches.com UYL. Water provided by five wells and Cell: 575-420-1237 corrals. The ranch had a good summerOffice: 575-622-5867 CHICO CREEK RANCH, Colfax County, NM. NEW LISTING. CIMARRON ON THE RIVER, Colfax County, NM. 7.338 +/6,404.26 +/Total Acres, Located approximately 10 miles east of deeded acres with 4.040 acre-feet per annum out of the www.ranchesnm.com for a brochure or view on my website. Website: Springer New Mexico. 3,692.60 +/- deeded acres with balance Maxwell-Clutton Ditch. Custom country-chic 2,094 +/- sq ft

tyR limits of Roswell, NM. Six total acres Eved with a 2, 200 square foot residence,

TEXAS & OKLA. FARMS & RANCHES AG LAND

joes3@suddenlink.net

Joe Stubblefield & Associates 13830 Western St., Amarillo, TX 806/622-3482 • cell 806/674-2062 joes3@suddenlink.net Michael Perez Associates Call Nara Visa, NM • 575/403-7970

TEXAS & OKLA. FARMS & RANCHES

minerals, game galore. All for $1.35 million.

Bar M Real Estate

O’NEILL LAND, llc

in state lease. Excellent grass and water. Two plus miles of the Chico Creek meandering through the center of the property.

Additional wells and dirt tanks. Nice historic head quarters privately located with shade trees and excellent views of the prop-

home. Owns both sides of river in places. Horse/cow/chicken/ vegetable garden/greenhouse/orchard set up. Country living at it’s finest, in town, but in a world of your own. Very special on river. Appointment only. $650,000.

O’NEILL Buena Vista Realty LAND, llc P.O. Box 145, Cimarron, NM 87714 • 575/376-2341 • Fax: 575/376-2347 land@swranches.com • www.swranches.com

ELM Qualifying Broker: A.H. (Jack) Merrick 575-760-7521 www.buenavista-nm.com

CAPULIN -SIERRA GRAND VIEW, Union County. NM. 520 +/- deeded acres with HQ 1.5 miles off highway, 3 bedroom 2 bathroom home with landscaped yard and volcanic rock walls, nice outbuildings, 3 registered wells including 1 registered as an irrigation well and an excellent solar well. Close proximity to Des Moines, NM. $898,000 EAGLE NEST ESCAPE, Colfax County NM. 78.42 +/- deeded acres overlooking Eagle Nest Lake, private pond, 3 bedroom 2 bathroom home, large shop garage able to store 2 big RV’s. Improvements almost half mile off highway. $825,000 MAXWELL 45, Excellent irrigated pasture with utilities in back of property, including installed septic system, with private views of mountains. 40 irrigable acres and a domestic water meter installed. Great to put down home and bring horses. $249,000 BAR LAZY 7 RANCH, Colfax County, Moreno Valley 594.38 +/- deeded acres, accessed off blacktop between Eagle Nest and Angel Fire. Historic headquarters.

Currently used as summer grazing, pond and trees accessed off county road on rear of property as well. Presented “ASIS” New Survey, $4,000,000 $3,800,000

UTE PARK RIVER PLACE 6.83 +/ACRES, 450 +/- feet of the Cimarron River TO and more than that of Ute Creek are the SACRAMENTO SALE south and east boundaries of this unique HWY 4 STOCKTON one of a kind water property. 2 bedroom 1 bathroom cabin, year round accessJ17 off MAR IPOSA RD VALLE Hwy 64. $589,000 $570,000 HWY 99 CIMARRON BUSINESS, Frontage HWY 120 opportunity, house, big shop and SALE office ESCALON MANTECA HEADQUARTERS buildings, easy view off Hwy 64.

Formerly known as “The Porch.” $295,000 Facility lo MIAMI 40 ACRES, Colfax County NM, MODESTO 25525 Eas Tree Road private 2 bedroom getaway with elevated TO FRESNO Escalon, C fantastic view, nice porch, little casita, irrigation and pole barn. Extremely private setting. Right below mesa. $450,000 CAPULIN FAMILY COMPOUND, Union County, NM. 40.88 +/- deeded acres 1.5 miles off Hwy. with stunning 3,000 sqft plus main home with attached apartment over large garage. Pinon/juniper, two wells, short gravel drive off blacktop. $725,000 $612,000 COLFAX TAVERN & DINER, Colfax County, NM. Aka “COLD BEER”, turn key legendry regional icon and destination, with anchor staff/team willing to stay on. Prime business on front range. $1,500,000 FARMINGTON

040

Donald B

Qualifying B

#N

ESCALON LIVESTOCK MARKET, I

CONTRACT ING LIVESTOCK PENDSALES 3 days per week on

Monday, Wednesday, & Friday

MONDAY: Beef Cattle WEDNESDAY: Dairy Cattle

NTS IGNME CONS OME! WELC r more Call fo ation inform ning sig on con stock. your

MIGUEL A. MACHADO President Office: 209/838-7011 Mobile: 209/595-2014

FRIDAY: Small Animals Poultry – Butcher Cows

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Ben G. Scott – Broker Krystal M. Nelson – NM QB 800-933-9698 5:00 a.m./10:00 p.m.

TATE GUIDE

alty

2022 Fall Marketing Edition

Livestock Market Digest

JOE VIEIRA Representative Mobile: 209/531-4156 THOMAS BERT 209/605-3866

CJ BRAN Fiel Represen 209/596

www.escalonlivestockmarket.com • escalonlivestockmarket@ya

2022 Fall Marketing Edition

Senators’ New Bill Expands Meat Processing to Auctions

Montana Files Legal Challenge Against Biden Admin Over Plans to Take Land Out of Production

by AGDAILY Reporters, Ag Daily

M

S

enators Joni Ernst (R-IA) and Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM) introduced the Expanding Meat Processing Act of 2022 aimed at allowing livestock auctions to work with small and regional packing plants in early August.

“It should be a no-brainer to cut bureaucratic red-tape, eliminate outdated regulations that are hindering the livestock industry, and increase processing capacity,” said Senator Ernst. “Allowing livestock auction owners to invest in local and regional meat packers will expedite the safe processing of meat, increase competition within the industry, and, ultimately, lower meat costs for consumers.”

The bill revises the Code of Federal Regulation acting as a companion bill to the House’s A-Plus Act, the Amplifying Processing of Livestock in the United States Act. Currently, outdated regulations hinder producers’ ability to increase capacity at livestock processing facilities. The proposed legislation amends the Packers and Stockyards Act, remedying regulations that prohibit livestock market owners from owning and operating meat packing plants.

“Allowing livestock auction owners to invest in local and regional meat packers will expedite the safe processing of meat, increase competition within the industry, and, ultimately, lower meat costs for consumers,” Ernst said.

The senators hope that the bi-partisan bill will be included in the Farm Bill, creating an avenue for increased competition in the packing industry’s marketplace while ultimately lowering meat prices for consumers. Currently, four processing plants control over 85 percent of beef in the United States: Cargill, Tyson Foods, JBS, and National Beef.

Currently, beef packing expansion is surging around the country.

A fifth generation rancher in South Dakota plans to open an 8,000 head per day beef processing facility.

Meanwhile, Amarillo has a new 3,000 head facility slated to break ground next year, Nebraska has been moving forward with a 1,500 head per day processing plant, and Missouri is welcoming a 2,400 head per day plant.

The legislation is supported by a number of outside national and local agriculture groups, including the Iowa Cattlemen’s Association, Livestock Marketing Association, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and U.S. Cattlemen’s Association.

▫

Advertise to Cattleman in the Livestock Market Digest

Page 7

Livestock Market Digest

THE BIDEN ADMIN ABANDONED RANCHERS ‘IN FAVOR OF ELITIST ATTITUDES,’ MONTANA ATTORNEY GENERAL KNUDSEN

by Thomas Catenacci, Fox News ontana filed a legal challenge against the Biden administration August 26, challenging a decision that take large swaths of land out of agricultural production.

The filing, spearheaded by Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, challenges a decision the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) issued in late July approving a request from the American Prairie Reserve (APR), a conservation nonprofit organization, to allow bison grazing across tens of thousands of acres in central Montana. The decision effectively took large swaths of federal land once used for livestock grazing out of production.

“BLM’s final decision ignores what makes Montana’s rural communities unique, prioritizing elitist land management attitudes over economic realities for the generational ranchers who rely on this land,” the challenge stated.

“As the American Prairie Reserve occupies more and more land, it pushes these ranching communities out, threatening the livestock industry and defying the very purpose of the federal laws BLM purports to uphold,” it continued.

The challenge was filed in the Department of the Interior’s Departmental Cases Hearings Division, which serves as the agency’s administrative trial court.

Over the past 20 years, the APR has leased 334,000 acres of public land owned primarily by the federal government in addition to the 118,000 acres of private land it has purchased. The group’s mission is to eventually stitch together about 3.2 million acres of land and create the largest “fully functioning ecosystem” in the continental U.S. as part of a conservation project.

But part of the APR’s mission includes a plan to release wild bison onto its purchased and leased properties in an effort to “re-wild” the land, a proposal the complaint alleged violates the Taylor Grazing Act, a 1934 law that opens public lands up for private livestock grazing. The legislation was passed to ensure adequate food and livestock production across the country.

“Whether APR classifies its bison as conservation animals, non-production animals, or as wildlife, the fact remains that they are not livestock for purposes of the laws that provide for grazing activities,” the state’s challenge stated.

The July 28 decision issued by the BLM green lit bison grazing on an additional 63,500 acres of federal property.

Montana state officials and local

ranchers have argued that the bison grazing proposal would ultimately remove land, which could otherwise be used for cattle grazing, out of production and decrease the amount of land available for ranchers.

“The BLM’s decision ignores the real concerns of rural communities and ranchers who rely on the land in favor of elitist attitudes of those seeking to transform Northeast Montana into a wildlife viewing shed for tourists,” Knudsen told Fox News Digital. “Agriculture is not an easy way of life, but Montana ranch families – including my own – are proud of their history and heritage that is still a part of our state today.”

“As American Prairie Reserve occupies more and more land here, it pushes out ranching communities, threatens our livestock industry, and

will ultimately add to the instability of the world’s food supply,” Knudsen continued.

Montana has a roughly $4.72 billion agriculture industry and its ranchers operate an inventory of 2.2 million cattle.

The BLM didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

▫

Brad DeSpain 520-429-2806 Paul Ramirez 520-241-3333

RANCHES/FARMS 260 Head Cattle Ranch with 4,612 Deeded Acres, Virden, NM – Solid working cattle ranch with excellent water distribution, good mix of grass and browse ranging in elevation from 4,000’ to 5,800’. 14,980+/- ac BLM, 2,860 ac State Leases and 640 ac of adverse grazing. Takes in scenic Vanderbilt Peak, Mount Royal, and stops just short of Steeple Rock. $2.8M *REDUCED* 200-300 Head Cattle Ranch, Marana, AZ – Abundant year-round no cost water makes this ranch a true oasis in the desert, situated along the Santa Cruz River just 20 minutes north of Tucson. 112.8 +/Deeded ac; 150+/- ac of permanent pasture, 3,700+/- ac of desert sub-lease, 14 +/- ac of farm fields, and well improved headquarters with excellent access off a paved road situated on State land with 342+/- ac of lease. Second manufactured home on deeded. Two sets of good steel pipe corrals under covered work areas with squeeze chute, and tub. $1.9M *SOLD* 2,373+/- Acre Farm, Animas, NM – Custom 2560 +/- s.f. home built in 2008.

20-Acre pivot, 40’ x 60’ shop, 40’ x 50’ hay barn, fruit trees, chicken coop, garden area. Pivot produced 9.5 tons/ac of alfalfa in 2020. 300 gpm well. 5 pastures with water piped to 2 storage tanks and drinkers in all

pastures. Historically has run 40 head of cattle yearlong. $1.3M *NEW* 12.7+/- Irrigated Acres, Marana, AZ – Irrigated farmland in the heart of Marana, perfectly suited for development. Currently, planted in Alfalfa and at one time was planted to corn. Fields are fenced, flood irrigated from concrete ditches and gates from the Cortaro Irrigation District.

Great location near Marana Stockyards for those interested in performance horse activities that involve livestock. $825,000 *NEW* 98+/- Deeded Acre Farm, Bonita, AZ – Great little farm in a picture-perfect setting!

Two small pivots with 35 acres of water rights. Nicely improved with a newer 3 BR, 2 BA Shultz doublewide mfg home; 3-sided hay/machine shed, 1,560+/s.f. shop with concrete floor and insulated ceiling, hay shed, Connex box, nice set of guardrail and steel corrals with crowding tub, squeeze and scale. 250 gpm irrigation well with 20 HP motor and 13,500+/- gallons of storage. Raise horses, finish out calves, small cow/calf operation or homestead. Runs about 40 head of cattle. $750,000 *SOLD* 1,578 Acres of Land, McNeal, AZ – Currently used as grazing land for an adjacent ranch. Fenced with 2 wells.

Seller will split. $500 per acre for all or $650 to $700 per acre for smaller parcels. located near the McNeal Farm we have listed above, and could be used as an

SOLD SOLD

additional pasture; purchase for investment or build your own ranchette.

120 +/- Acres of Farm Ground, Willcox, AZ – Located NW of Willcox in a good groundwater area. 2 wells. Center pivot. $468,000 Call Harry Owens HORSE PROPERTIES/LAND *SOLD* 40+/- Acre Last Stand B&B Guest Ranch, Sonoita, AZ – An exceptional property in the grasslands of Sonoita, presently operating as a successful wedding & equestrian event venue. The Territorial, twostory 4 BR, 4.5 BA main home has 4,110 s.f., & custom features throughout. $1,675,000

SOLD

*SOLD* 90+/- Acre HP Bar Ranch, Benson, AZ – Perfect gentlemen’s ranch or private get-away. Backs up to USFS for endless riding possibilities. Fully fenced for cattle. 2 BR, 1 BA home; garage; steel barn w/two horse stalls, tack room & large hay storage; corrals; workshop.

Expansive views. $595,000

SOLD

*SOLD* 20+/- Acre Equestrian Property, Sonoita, AZ – Established horse training and boarding facility on +/-20-acres adjoining BLM land, panoramic mountain v iews. Two mfg homes, 36’ x 160’ horse barn, barn/shop, equipment shed, hay shed, 10 shades/loafing sheds with corrals, +/-70’ x 90’ dressage and 160’ x 170’ fenced arena. There are also RV spaces with septic, a fire pit and a well. $650,000

SOLD

Riding for the brand … is our time-honored tradition StockmensRealty.com I UCstockmensrealty.com *Each United Country Franchise office is independently owned and operated.

Page 8

Texas Cowboy Wes O’Neal Named Working Cowboy Award Recipient

W

es O’Neal, a Texas cowboy who has worked on three of the largest and best-known ranches in the nation, will be the fourth recipient of the Ranching Heritage Association Working Cowboy Award during the 44th Annual National Golden Spur Award dinner October 15 at the Overton Hotel in Lubbock.

“The Working Cowboy Award is designed to recognize an outstanding individual who makes his living primarily horseback caring for livestock on a daily basis,” said Jim Bret Campbell, director of the National Ranching Heritage Center at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. “Wes has spent nearly eight decades working for the W.T. Waggoner Estate, the JA Ranch and the Four Sixes Ranch.”

The Ranching Heritage Association (RHA), a nationwide non-profit membership organization supporting the programs of the center, sponsors the award on an annual basis to honor a working cowboy skilled in all aspects of ranch work and respected by the ranch crew and ranching community.

“Our Board of Directors believes it’s important to recognize those folks who brave all kinds of weather and conditions to ensure that work on a ranch gets done,” Campbell said, noting that award nominations for 88-year-old O’Neal described him as “the real deal” working cowboy who has served for decades as a role model for younger cowboys.

“Wes has left a lasting impression on all of us and left his mark at the Waggoner Estate and everywhere else he has been,” said A.B. (Buck) Wharton III, former owner of the W.T. Waggoner Estate. The Waggoner ranch grew to more than 520,000 acres spread over six Texas counties and was the nation’s largest ranch under one fence before being sold in 2016.

O’Neal worked at the W.T. Waggoner Estate for 58 uninter-

2022 Fall Marketing Edition

Livestock Market Digest

rupted years and served 12 years as Wagon Boss during his 17 years with the cattle operation.

He spent 41 years with the Waggoner horse operation and 25 of those years as horse foreman directing Wes O’Neal, recipient of the 2022 Working Cowboy the breeding of Award, has spent nearly eight decades riding broodmares and horseback for three of the largest and best-known stallions. ranches in the nation. The Working Cowboy Award is “His insight given annually by the Ranching Heritage Association, into breeding a nationwide non-profit organization supporting the horses laid the programs of the National Ranching Heritage Center in Lubbock. (Photo by Peter Robbins) groundwork for the W.T. Waggoner Estate being selected as school in the tenth grade because having the best ranch horses in it was gettin’ in the way of my the country when it received the education,” Wes said, “but truly coveted American Quarter Horse there wasn’t no money, Dad wasn’t Association Best Remuda Award in workin’ and we had younger sib1994,” Wharton said. “He traveled lings at home. The RO Ranch was to Nashville to receive the award the first big bunch of horses we on behalf of the Waggoner Ranch.” broke.”

Wes and Boots broke 20 Before O’Neal began working broncs for the RO for $20 per on the W.T. Waggoner Estate in head, pocketing $200 each (about 1957, he worked at the historic J.A. $2,400 today).

Then Wes went Ranch in the Texas Panhandle for to work for two smaller ranches seven years. Although his cowboy before joining Boots at the JA years have included three large Ranch, which was established in ranches with thousands of cattle, 1875 as the first ranch in the cowboying began for him on small spreads breaking broncs when he Texas Panhandle. Wes eventually became Wagon Boss for the was only 13 years old.

“I was born in Clarendon JA before working for the W.T. (Texas) on November 30, 1933, Waggoner Estate until it sold. right smack dab in the middle Today he lives in Holliday, Texas, of the Great Depression,” O’Neal and day works for the Four Sixes said. “There was no jobs and no Ranch near Guthrie, Texas.

“If you’re gonna cowboy,” Wes money.” His father worked on said, “you accept the fact that you the Mel B. Davis Ranch in the ain’t gonna ever be rich and you’re Panhandle but quit ranching for a gonna get injured from time to higher paying job. Later when his time, but the trade-off is worth father was sick and their house it to me.

You’re not punchin’ no burned to the ground without the eightto-five-time clock, and you family saving anything, Wes and get to see some beautiful sunrises his brother Boots put up hay one sittin’ on your horse.

As Buster summer pulling the machines with Welch says, ‘That’s the best seat in horse teams and then began breakthe house.’” ing broncs for area ranchers.

“I tell everybody that I left

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Climate News – September 2022

by Alan Moran A review and commentary on topical matters concerning the science, economics, and governance associated with climate change developments.

DEVELOPMENTS IN THE POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE

I

ndia says it plans to be net zero by 2070 and has introduced legislation that includes seeking 45 percent of electricity from non-fossil fuels and a form of carbon trading. For its part, China has scrapped all cooperation to reach “net neutral” following Pelosi’s Taiwan visit. This formalises a position under which only the EU, UK, Japan, Korea and North America, collectively representing just a third of global CO emissions, have real action plans.

EU energy prices were up 41 percent in June 2022.

All over Europe, energy intensive aluminium and zinc smelters are closing and factory output in general is declining. Poland has shut its gas dependent fertilizer production.

Nicola Sturgeon celebrates Scotland’s “definitive end of coal power in a transition that the rest of the world needs to accelerate for the sake of the planet and future generations”. Not unrelated, the UK price cap (the annual price for the average household) was £1000 in winter 2020/21 will rise to £4,650 in January 2023 and is forecast to be £6,552 next April.

2

CIRCUIT BREAK Day-ahead wholesale electricity prices have surged to a record, nearly 10 times their 2012 to 2020 average.

These prices make the fuel costs of EV’s more expensive than those of petrol/diesel models. They have prompted likely UK PM, Liz Truss to announce a change of mind – she will now accelerate the release of new gas and oil exploration leases and will overturn the ban on fracking.

German gas costs have risen from one per cent to 8.4 percent of GDP. Italian bars and restaurant are displaying their energy bills to explain cost increases saying, “With increases in energy costs of 300 percent, we are working with a gun to our heads.”

Having created an energy crisis, climate activists are moving to the next stage of controls. German greens are calling for requiring air conditioned temperatures not to be set below 27°C and a 19°C maximum heating temperature, provisions that are already in place in Spain.

Meanwhile, reprising Nero-Fiddles-While Rome-Burns, the EU is calling on members to intensify the emission control measures that have caused the energy price crisis.

In Australia, the market manager, recognising that energy policies are forcing closure of reliable coal supplies and threaten blackouts, is calling for accelerated building of renewables and more transmission. In other words, the failed UK solution! The cost of batteries to firm up renewables in the absence of coal would be $500-$700 billion a year, or over one-quarter of GDP each year. Then there is the cost of the additional transmission and the wind/solar units themselves!

But, noting that Australia’s greenhouse emissions have reduced by 21.6 per cent since 2005, about half of the government’s 2030 target, Climate Change Minister, Chris Bowen, said the nation needs more ambitious climate change policies.

Japan is re-opening its nuclear plants, bringing back 17 out of a total 33 operable units, and planning new ones. Germany’s (Greens Party) Economy Minister Robert Habeck still wants to close the last three nuclear plants, which supply 6 percent of national output but coal plants continue to reopen. What date will Germany commit to building new nuclear or coal?

In the US, Congress passed the deceptively titled Inflation Reduction Act. It allocates $740 billion for subsidies to wind/solar and electric vehicles plus a vast increase in tax collectors; in a triumph of hope over experience this is claimed to bring lower costs. It involved less funding than the $3.5 trillion originally proposed (and which 17 Noble Prize winners said would not be inflationary!)

Included is some $3.2 billion in tax credits for carbon capture and sequestration, a technology that, after 15 years, has no commercially successful projects. Back in 2018, Al Gore blasted CCS, calling it an “extremely improbable solution.” Robert Bryce estimates that, aside from the extraction costs, to eliminate one half of US CO emissions by CCS would require underground locations equal to the contents of 41 oil supertankers each day, 365 days a year.

For Sterling Burnett, “As implausible as the inflation reduction staging of the Democrats’ pork-filled bill of special-interest fodder is, the claims being made about its effect on greenhouse gas emissions are pure fantasy.” According to Anthony Watts, based on Lomborg’s estimates, we get between 0.028 and 0.0009°F reduction in temperature by 2100 for about 400 billion dollars in the US Climate Act. To achieve the 1.5°C reduction in temperature would cost half the global annual economy.

Roger Pielke shows the Biden administration’s proposed massive decarbonisation increase.

Juliet Samuel writes, oil exploration is halved as governments and corporate governance busybodies 2

2022 Fall Marketing Edition

Border Patrol Busts Hundreds of Adult Migrants Posing as Minors to Dodge Deportation Source: Judicial Watch

A

s if the crisis along the southern border were not bad enough, adult illegal immigrants are posing as minors to enter—and stay in—the U.S. since typically those under 18 are welcomed with open arms. The government refers to them as Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) and hundreds of thousands have entered the country in the last few years. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is charged with caring for illegal aliens under the age of 18 and the agency spends millions of dollars annually to house, medically treat, entertain, and school UAC who come mainly from Central America.

Undoubtedly, illegal immigrant minors are almost always allowed to remain in the U.S. and quickly disbursed to a government-funded shelter upon arrival at the border.

The special treatment has led

around 2014-16, decided that the trashing “big oil” (and so on) was costless, popular and green. The upshot is that, “the market is broken and it is governments and do-gooders who broke it. They broke it wantonly, recklessly, touting their saintly intentions,” In fighting back against “Environment Social Governance” (ESG) diktats, West Virginia has boycotted U.S. Bancorp, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo from doing government business because of their role in pushing ESG anti-coal agendas.

Texas already has bans and Florida plans a similar move. Sustainable funds took in $8.9 billion during the first seven months of the year, a sharp drop from the $45.1 billion they attracted during the same period in 2021.

Richard Lindzen, William Happer and the CO Coalition submitted comments to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on climate-related financial risk, saying real science demonstrates there is no climate emergency and there are no climate-related financial or other risks caused by fossil fuels and CO .

To assist in ESG credibility, ANZ bank and the Australian government’s Clean Energy Financing Commission have teamed up to offer $200 million of discounted financing to business customers to invest in activities designed to cut their carbon emissions.

2

2

DEVELOPMENTS IN THE ECONOMICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE Francis Menton destroys the fraudulent claims, like those below put out by the UN International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), that renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels.

IRENA’S renewables costs equate the output to the capacity, which is available only a quarter of the time. Renewables also require lots more transmission. Their true costs are 5-10-fold those stated.

With respect to transmission, Thunder Said Energy estimates the global power grid will require four times the costs of present systems even to accommodate a 25 percent share of renewables.

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to even more criminal behavior by those already breaking the law entering the U.S. illegally. In El Paso alone, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) confirms that more than 655 adult migrants posing as minors have been busted in fiscal year 2022. Recently the agency announced that the El Paso Sector has recently seen an unusual amount of activity involving adults posing as minors to dodge deportation.

In one of the incidents agents identified 10 adults posting as UAC while in custody. CBP has a limited time to transfer UAC to HHS custody once the illegal border crossers are vetted and there begins the journey to stay in the U.S. Bigger criminal enterprises are behind the imposter plots, according to federal authorities.

“Transnational Criminal Organizations exploit migrants con-

vincing them to pose as minors in order to be processed as such” said El Paso Sector Border Patrol Chief Gloria I. Chavez. “Identity fraud is a common tactic used by TCOs to take advantage of migrants who do not know the legal consequences of their actions as they attempt to deceive authorities.”

The frontline Homeland Security agency says three adults posing as minors were also discovered recently using counterfeit documentation at the El Paso Sector Central Processing Center in Texas. The illegal immigrants, a 21-year-old female, 22-year-old female and 22-year-old male, are from Guatemala and were part of a group of 13 apprehended by federal agents in the area.

“The three were encountered, along with nine unaccompanied children from Guatemala and one adult,” CBP writes in a statement.

“These individuals pose as minors in order to avoid expulsion.” In a separate incident this month three males from Guatemala, ages 18, 25 and 26, intentionally posed as minors to remain in the U.S. Federal agents detected discrepancies between their stories and documentation present-

ed in their failed attempt to pass as minors.

In yet another incident made public this month, CBP officers at El Paso’s Ysleta Station, which is responsible for 16.7 miles of international boundary along the Rio Grande River, discovered a group of what appeared to be eight minors later determined to be from Guatemala crossing the border illegally. Two of the illegal immigrants pretending to be underage turned out to be imposters, according to the feds. One was a 22-year-old male and the other a 19-year-old female.

As in the other cases, agents, though overwhelmed with an onslaught of illegal immigration, detected discrepancies during interviews. CBP warns that individuals who attempt to pose as unaccompanied children may face charges under American laws that prohibit false statements to federal agents and conspiracy to defraud the U.S. The last thing the country’s disastrous immigration system needs is more UAC. American taxpayers already spend a fortune to accommodate them through HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR),

which funds and oversees dozens of state-licensed care facilities to house the young migrants when they arrive in the U.S. In fiscal year 2021 ORR housed an unprecedented 122,731 UAC, according to government figures, and this year’s budget is a whopping $8.76 billion. HHS projects that in 2022 it will accommodate approximately 149,000 and between 500 and 600 daily for the remainder of the fiscal year, which ends in September.

Last year the overwhelming majority of illegal immigrant minors in U.S. custody, approximately 72 percent, were over 14 years of age and 66 percent were male. Nearly half (47 percent) of the underage migrants came from Guatemala, 32 percent from Honduras, 13 percent from El Salvador and 8 percent from other countries.

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Page 10

USDA Announces Up to $550 Million in American Rescue Plan Funding for Projects Benefiting Underserved Producers and Minority Serving Institutions that Create Career Development Opportunities for Next Generation Leaders Source: USDA

T

he U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has announced up to $550 million in funding to support projects that enable underserved producers to access land, capital, and markets, and train the next, diverse generation of agricultural professionals.

These investments are made through funding provided in the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) Section 1006, as amended by Section 22007 of the Inflation Reduction Act. These provisions fund and direct USDA to take action to help ensure underserved producers have the resources, tools, programs, and technical support they need to succeed.

“These funding opportunities are historic and part of USDA’s unwavering commitment to advancing equity for all, including people who have been underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality. When we address longstanding inequities, our entire country bene-

2022 Fall Marketing Edition

Livestock Market Digest fits,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “Land access, heirs’ property, affordable credit and access to reliable markets – along with consistent access to help from well-trained experts – are essential to strengthening our communities. USDA is equally committed to partnering with minority-serving institutions to establish exciting and fulfilling pathways for Next Generation leaders to have careers in agriculture, nutrition, food, development, and in the federal government.”

To date, USDA has implemented provisions within Section 1006 of the American Rescue Plan Act, including standing up an independent Equity Commission. USDA also has provided $75 million for partnership agreements with 20 organizations that will deliver technical assistance and support for underserved producers, including veterans, limited resources producers, beginning farmers and ranchers, and/or producers living in high poverty areas on topics ranging from business development to heirs’ property. USDA also received applications for at least another $25 million in partnership agreements for technical assistance and will announce awardees by fall.

Today, USDA is taking additional steps to implement Section 1006 of the ARPA, as amended by Section 22007 of the Inflation Reduction Act. Specifically, the Department is announcing: Up to $300 million for “Increasing Land, Capital and Market Access” Projects Aimed at Helping Underserved Producers.

This Notice of Funding Opportunity is seeking partner organizations for projects that increase access to land, capital, and markets. Projects should be innovative and help move underserved producers from surviving to thriving. Projects must focus on strengthening land access with at least one of the following related areas of concern: capital access concerns that affect the ability to access land; market access concerns that affect the ability to access land; or a combination of one or more of land, capital, and market access concerns. The deadline for applications is October 28, 2022. The notice of funding opportunity will be available at grants.gov in the coming days. $250 million for the “From Learning to Leading: Cultivating the Next Generation of Diverse Food and Agriculture Professionals” program to Create Career Development Opportunities for Next Gen Scholars at MinorityServing Institutions. USDA is committed to not only hiring, developing, and advancing a workforce that truly reflects America’s rich and diverse characteristics, but also to creating a workplace environment that is inclusive so that everyone can rise to their highest potential and flourish in supporting our mission. The need for growing the next generation of professionals is timely and important. This competitive funding opportunity is aimed at attracting, inspiring, and retaining diverse and talented students at eligible minority-serving institutions for careers in food, agriculture, and

related disciplines, with an emphasis on federal government sector employment. Eligible applicants are 1890 land-grant institutions, 1994 land-grant institutions, Alaska Native-serving institutions, Native Hawaiian-serving institutions, certified Hispanic-serving institutions and Insular Area institutions of higher education located in the U.S. territories. The deadline for applications is October 25, 2022. See the request for applications for full details.

In February, USDA released its Equity Action Plan (PDF, 500 KB), a framework for reckoning with USDA’s history of challenges with underserved communities, including Black, Hispanic, Native American, Asian American and other farmers of color. USDA is committed to ensuring equity across all of its activities, which includes improving access to programs and services for all stakeholders and communities, especially underserved producers.

Today’s announcement is the latest in a series of announcements building momentum around USDA’s historic commitment to root out generations of systemic racism; center equity in decision-making and policymaking; have a diverse, modern and inclusive workforce; lower barriers to access; and ensure USDA programming is inclusive of all employees and all customers.

Learn more at www.usda.gov/ equity

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No Debt Relief for Certain Farmers & Ranchers

by Dr. Bart Fischer and Tiffany Dowell Lashmet for Southern Ag Today

O

n March 11, 2021, President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act of 2021 into law. Section 1005 of the act required the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary to make payments to socially disadvantaged farmers or ranchers “in an amount up to 120 percent of the outstanding indebtedness” of eligible producers for both direct and guaranteed loans administered by various USDA agencies.[1] While USDA immediately went to work implementing the provisions, multiple lawsuits were filed – alleging that the provision was unconstitutional because it violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment – and 3 courts have issued injunctions prohibiting USDA from issuing any payments, loan assistance, or debt relief pursuant to Section 1005.[2] According to USDA, the injunctions “do not prohibit FSA from completing administrative actions leading up to payments, including providing payment notifications to potentially eligible borrowers.”[3] At the time of passage, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated the provision would cost $3.98 billion over the next 10 years.[4] In the meantime, the Build Back Better Act (BBB) of 2021 – which passed the House on November 19, 2021 – sought to remedy the concerns raised about Section 1005 in the American Rescue Plan. Specifically, Section 12101 of the BBB amends Section 1005 of ARP, in part, by changing the focus of the debt relief to “economically distressed borrowers” with eligibility tied to eight (8) broad criteria ranging from debt delinquency metrics to whether the farm or ranch was headquartered in a county with a poverty rate of 20 percent or greater.[5] With the presumably expanded list of eligible borrowers, CBO estimated that the provision would cost $6.647 billion over the next 10 years.[6] Due, in part, to the price tag of the overall bill, the BBB has languished in the Senate for the last several months.

In early August Senators Schumer and Manchin announced a joint agreement to add various provisions from the BBB – via the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 – to the FY2022 Budget Reconciliation Bill.[7] In our review of the draft legislation, it does not appear that debt relief for farmers and ranchers of color was included.

While Congressional leaders may have plans for including debt relief in another legislative vehicle, unless and until they do – or unless and until the courts rule on the pending cases or lift the existing injunctions – potentially eligible farmers and ranchers will have to keep waiting.

[1] www.congress.gov/117/plaws/publ2/PLAW-117publ2.pdf [2] See Holman v. Vilsack, 21-1085-STA-jay, Order Granting Motion for Preliminary Injunction (July 8, 2021); Miller v. Vilsack, 4:21-cv-00595-O, Order (July 1, 2021); Wynn v. Vilsack, 3:21-cv-00514-MMH-JRK, Order (June 23, 2021).

[3] www.farmers.gov/loans/american-rescue-plan [4] www.cbo.gov/system/files/2021-03/Estimated_Budgetary_Effects_of_hr1319_detailed_tables.xlsx [5] www.congress.gov/congressional-record/volume-167/issue-201/house-section/article/H6375-4 [6] www.cbo.gov/system/files/2021-11/hr5376_title_I_Agriculture.xlsx [7] www.democrats.senate.gov/inflation-reduction-act-of-2022

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Colorado’s Largest Wild Horse Roundup in History

by Jennifer Brown, The Colorado Sun

T

he third large-scale helicopter roundup of Colorado mustangs within a year ended recently in dusty sagebrush country on the far western edge of the state, part of a massive effort by federal land managers to thin the wild horse population across the West.

Wranglers and a helicopter pilot herded and trapped 864 stallions, mares and foals during the past few weeks, with a plan to permanently remove about 750 horses from the rangeland near the Utah border.

That will bring the number of wild horses removed from Colorado since last summer to about 2,000.

The end of the roundup closes the latest tumultuous chapter of a decades-old battle between wild horse advocates and federal land managers. This one included attempted interventions by the governor and a Colorado congressman, as well as accusations that young fillies and colts were stampeded in the heat, and that wranglers accidentally ran horses into a dilapidated barbed wire fence hidden in thick sagebrush.

A mustang advocacy group’s photography captured a horse, hooves up, tumbling over the fence. A BLM spokesman told The Colorado Sun that while those hazards are typically found and flagged before the helicopter flies, this 40-foot section of fence was missed in the brush. A veterinarian treated the horse’s cuts, but the animal was not seriously injured.

Six horses were euthanized during the roundup, all because of chronic conditions and not from the helicopter chase, according to federal officials.

The event was the largest wild horse gather in Colorado history and there were “no critical incidents,” said Eric Coulter, a BLM public affairs specialist.

Of the 864 horses captured, federal officials and a local horse volunteer group called the Piceance Mustangs selected 41 stallions to return to the wild. They were selected based on bloodlines, color and markings, and body shape.

Wranglers also kept 53 mares corralled in a temporary holding pen on the Piceance-East Douglas range.

They will receive a fertility-control vaccine injection, and a follow-up shot in about 30 days, before they are released back to the rugged hills and valleys west of Meeker.

Federal officials plan to keep the herd, which had grown to about 1,400, to about 250 or fewer horses with continued fertility-control treatments. They hope to avoid future helicopter roundups, Coulter said.

“This gather is a big step to the future,” he said. “Our goal is to get to the point where it’s manageable.”

The last time the BLM captured horses via helicopter roundup in Piceance was in 2011, and the herd has grown by hundreds since then.

Typically, population increases about 20 percent each year when there is no fertility management.

Wild horse advocacy groups have repeatedly called for an end to the gather, citing extreme heat and its

2022 Fall Marketing Edition

Beef Markets Continue to Hold, but Change is Coming

A Mustangs in the Piceance-East Doulgas rangeland in western Colorado.

(Provided by WilsonAxpe Photography via the American Wild Horse Campaign)

proximity to the spring foaling season. For years, they have tried to persuade the federal agency to stop helicopter roundups and instead control the horse population by making bigger investments in fertility vaccine operations. The American Wild Horse Campaign even ran television ads in the Denver market opposing the roundup.

Governor Jared Polis and his husband, Marlon Reis, who is an animal rights advocate, also called for an end to the roundup, as did U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, from Lafayette. At the governor’s request, a state veterinarian was allowed to attend the gather and check in on horses’ well-being throughout the operation.

The governor’s office called some of the incidents, including photos of a pregnant mare running across the prairie and two horses running into the hidden fence, “troubling” and an example of why Polis is “motivated to work toward better longer-term systems that avoid these types of roundups in the future.”

While horse groups accused the BLM of stampeding horses in extreme heat, federal officials said they stayed within their temperature policy, which allows operations up to 95 degrees. The hottest temperature recorded by the BLM during the roundup was 92, Coulter said, and federal officials on site took the temperature every hour with a Kestrel weather device.

Kathy DeGonia, who is president of the Piceance Mustangs, helped federal officials choose which stallions to release back to the wild.

One of the goals of the group, which is a “friends of the BLM” group and often not on the same side as national mustang advocacy organizations, was to keep as much color in the herd as possible — stallions that are gray, sorrel, bay and black.

“I’m sad our horses had to go but I know that it’s the best thing for them and for the range,” she said. “Our goal is healthy horses on a healthy range.”

DeGonia and many of the other 55 members of the group, which was founded in 2018, have for years been hauling water tanks on trucks and installing solar-powered water

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Livestock Market Digest

wells to draw water from natural springs to help the thirsty horses. The latest accomplishment was converting a well to solar on the brutally named Dead Horse Ridge.

The group also repairs and removes old fences, using the barbed wire to make wreaths that the Piceance Mustangs sell at fundraising events. Some in the group are trained to shoot darts with the fertility vaccine, which requires good aim and getting within about 50 yards of a wild mare.

During last summer’s heat and drought, the group hauled water from July 4 through November, DeGonia said. The winter was harsh, too, she said, noting that some of the horses “looked the worst I’ve ever seen” in the spring.

DeGonia noted that there were far fewer yearlings rounded up during the helicopter gather than she was expecting, making her wonder how many didn’t survive the winter.

Her favorite animal of all, a palomino stud named Buttermilk Biscuit, is among the horses that have wandered off the designated rangeland. He escaped the roundup, and she hopes he will return to the range, especially if the reduction in horses greens up the land.

Wild horses at the East Cañon Correctional Complex on October 13, 2021, in Cañon City. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun) “We knew it had to be done,” she said. “We knew it was coming and we knew it was for the best.”

The Piceance roundup comes after two large roundups last summer and fall — in the Sand Wash Basin and in West Douglas, both in western Colorado.

This spring, 145 horses captured from the West Douglas range died from equine flu in holding pens at a state prison complex in Cañon City. The horses had not been vaccinated against the flu despite arriving at the holding pens seven months earlier.

The horses from East Douglas were sent to a holding facility in Utah but many are expected to return to Colorado when they are put up for adoption this fall.

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ccording to the latest beef report by Rabobank, the global beef market remains strong. Most beef retail prices (in domestic currencies) continued their upward trend in Q2 or remained steady, with most sitting between five percent and eleven percent higher than Q2 2021.

The question is: Will prices be trimmed?

Evidence of declining consumer confidence in the face of slowing economies and rising inflation is building. In general, beef markets are resilient to changes in economic conditions. “However, we see movement within supply channels and price points that tend to favor cheaper options, such as ground beef and quick-service restaurants, over more expensive cuts and consumption channels,” explains Angus Gidley-Baird, Senior Analyst – Animal Protein at Rabobank.

Trimmings demand to lift as consumers trade down Tight global beef supplies and strong consumer demand pushed global beef prices to record highs over the past year. However, the spillover effects from the easing of Covid restrictions – rampant inflation and slowing economic growth – are starting to impact consumers’ spending habits.

“We expect consumption volumes of trimmings to remain strong and potentially to increase in 2H 2022, as consumers are expected to trade down to lower-value beef cuts and cheaper proteins,” concludes Gidley-Baird.

Cattle markets remain tight, supporting prices Meanwhile, cattle markets remain favorable, supported by either seasonal conditions or by strong demand. Cattle prices in some coun-

tries experienced a decline despite the support provided by many of these countries’ currencies depreciating against the US dollar over the same time period. Among the major producing and exporting countries, growth is expected to see a slight rise through Q3 and into Q4 2022,

as higher production in the US and Brazil dominate the market.

To read the full report, visit: https:// mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/ FMfcgzGqQJldQWCDX CvzngxqnMJvbVjq

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Sandbox Programs Promote Innovation & Consumer Welfare

by Kent Lassman, President & CEO, Competitive Enterprise Institute

C

ompanies should regularly test new, innovative products and services that benefit consumers and investors. Innovation is critical to maintaining a globally-competitive economy. Yet governments seem intent on imposing cumbersome regulations that deter businesses from launching new products and services.

What if instead government found ways to encourage innovation?

Regulatory “sandbox” programs allow companies to test new products and services under a modified and lightened regulatory framework for a limited period of time, as CEI research fellow Ryan Nabil details in a new report. These programs help regulators become more familiar with technological innovation and give companies a safe space to experiment.

Federal agencies and state regulators can run separate sandbox programs. As of now, states are taking the lead. At least 11 states have established regulatory sandboxes recently.

Some states are doing it better than others. As Nabil highlights, there are several steps states can take in order to design the most effective sandbox programs. These include: ❚❚ Target specific types of products to test with under a sandbox program. ❚❚ Allow greater flexibility to attract companies from out-of-state instead of requiring applicants to establish a physical presence in the state. ❚❚ Don’t use a rigid definition of innovation for selecting sandbox participants. ❚❚ Allow eligible firms of different sizes and from various sectors to apply to participate in a sandbox program. ❚❚ Adopt a liberal entry criterion including removing any caps on the total number of firms that are allowed to participate in a given sandbox program.

Lawmakers and regulators must stay out of the way of entrepreneurship, not squelch it. CEI has long fought for a more flexible, innovation-friendly approach to the nation’s regulatory structure, and state-level regulatory sandbox programs are a novel and exciting application of our work that is changing America for the better. New technologies pose distinct opportunities and challenges in different industries, so a codified and one-size-fits-all regulatory approach is unlikely to harness the benefits of technological innovation across sectors.

CEI remains committed to identifying and promoting policy solutions that benefit modernization and improve consumer welfare.

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A helicopter rounds up horses in the Piceance-East Douglas herd management area in western Colorado. (Provided by WilsonAxpe Photography via the American Wild Horse Campaign)

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2022 Fall Marketing Edition

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Booming Beef Industry Has Urban Cowboys Lining Up to Buy Cattle in Uruguay People who know nothing about ranching can become registered owners for as little as $15,000 — and get their own brands.

by Ken Parks, Bloomberg

O

ver 23 years, Pablo Carrasco’s Uruguayan cattle management company built a $100 million herd. Along the way, he’s turned a generation of city slickers into profitable ranchers.

Carrasco’s company, Conexión Ganadera, manages about 120,000 cows on behalf of some 1,400 individual investors, most of them Uruguayan urbanites. Now he faces an enviable problem: He has a $30 million waiting list to buy cows, but no land for them to graze on. So his company is pitching pastures to prospective investors. “Our problem isn’t investors,” says co-founder Carrasco in an interview at his Montevideo office, adorned with cowhide rugs. “It’s finding places to put the cattle.”

The retail money flowing into cattle is a bet that bovines will continue to be a valuable asset, even as cow-produced methane comes under growing scrutiny by activists, consumers, and governments.

In a country with more than three cows for every person, cattle are deeply entwined with Uruguay’s history and identity. The rugged Iberian cows the Spanish introduced in the early 17th century gave way to Angus, Hereford, and other English breeds in the late 19th century.

And the advent of refrigerated cargo ships contributed to a world-class meatpacking industry.

Uruguay consistently ranks among the top 10 global beef exporters, with its meatpacking plants shipping a record 423,390 metric tons (466,708 tons), worth more than $2.4 billion, in 2021.

Although most of their beef ends up in European, US, and especially Chinese kitchens—two-thirds by volume goes to China—Uruguayans are also among the world’s largest beef eaters, with per capita consumption of 46 kilograms (101 pounds) last year. By comparison, Americans ate a little less than 60 pounds per person in 2021.

Today, roughly 11.8 million cows are fattened on pastureland that covers more than half of the South American country, which is about the size of Missouri.

Carrasco, 65, is an agronomist and something of a local celebrity, thanks to his frequent stints on a radio program where he and other guests debate current events.

He founded Conexión Ganadera with his wife, Ana Iewdiukow, and another couple in 1999. Months earlier, thousands of angry farmers and ranchers had marched on Montevideo under the slogan “Profitability or death.”

At the time, China wasn’t the dominant buyer it is today. Uruguay’s heavily indebted ranchers were also struggling with an overvalued currency and limited access to bank capital. Carrasco and his partners saw an opportunity to modernize the industry and make money by channeling novice investors into ranching.

Uruguay has a tradition dating back at least a century in which small-scale cattle buyers entrust the care of their animals to friends or acquaintances in the ranching business, splitting the proceeds 50-50, often with only a gentlemen’s agreement. “That led to the end of many friendships,” Carrasco says, “because the cattle that died were always the investors’.”

Carrasco, a third-generation rancher, adopted this practice with stronger investor safeguards, and he made it scalable. Conexión Ganadera buys calves, steers, and breeding cows in the name of investors. It then rents the animals to a ranch, which pays the investor-owners a fixed annual income of 7 percent for calves and as much as 11 percent for breeding cows.

At the end of the contract, generally between 6 and 24 months, investors get back their initial capital. Minimum investments run from $15,000 to $50,000, depending on the number and type of cattle. So someone who knows nothing about ranching can become a registered cattle owner for as little as $15,000.

Investors receive a government-assigned symbol, which is hot-branded onto their animals.

A 250-kilogram steer purchased today for about $700 could grow to 450 kilograms in a year and sell for $1,250. Of that, $756 would go to the owner and $454 to the rancher, with Conexión Ganadera getting a

fee of $40 per head, Carrasco says.

And if one or more cows die?

The cattle leases allow Conexión Ganadera to take some of the proceeds that would have gone to the rancher from the sale of other animals on the same ranch. This redistribution mechanism gives ranchers a financial incentive to take good care of their owners’ assets. That, plus the rapid appreciation in a cow’s value, means no investor has lost money since the company was founded, though Carrasco says a major die-off at a ranch could lead to losses.

Think of it as owning stock in stock: An investor purchases an asset, cows, whose price is set in the local cattle market. The care of those animals is entrusted to Conexión Ganadera, which is akin to corporate management. Except the investment performs more like a certificate of deposit, paying a fixed rate of return to investors, who get their capital back after a defined period. Carrasco eschews the term “interest rate” to avoid regulatory scrutiny.

Turns out, the cattle investments that Conexión Ganadera and its competitors pitched became so popular—and the marketing tactics of some companies so aggressive—that the Central Bank of Uruguay about three years ago began investigating whether they were offering unauthorized financial services. In February it even warned the public that companies advertising cattle and farm investments weren’t subject to its oversight.

The central bank wrapped up its probe of Conexión Ganadera in July without taking any action, according to a document viewed by Bloomberg. Without commenting on Conexión Ganadera in particular, the central bank says it found no wrongdoing in two cases, ordered two companies to cease advertising their products, and continues to investigate five other companies.

But an even bigger threat looms.

The world’s livestock industry produces about 14.5 percent of annual global greenhouse gas emissions related to human activity, with about two-thirds of that coming from cows, according to the most recent data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Each year, a single cow will belch about 220 pounds of methane, according to researchers at the University of California at Davis.

Flatulence accounts for a small portion of a cow’s emissions, whereas

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Cattle grazing at La Pituca ranch in the northern province of Tacuarembó. Source: Conexión Ganadera

2022 Fall Marketing Edition the rest—about 95 percent—comes out as burps.

As a global warming agent, methane is about 80 times more potent in its first two decades in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, leading a UN panel to warn that global methane emissions must be reduced by a third by 2030 to slow the planet’s warming. That goal has given environmentalists powerful fodder in their campaign to persuade people to shun beef in favor of more plant-based diets.

The beef industry needs to lower its greenhouse gas emissions, especially methane, as soon as possible, says Katie Anderson, a director at the Environmental Defense Fund.

“We need to be able to feed the world without warming the planet,” says Anderson, who urges investors to demand that the companies they invest with set science-based targets to reduce emissions and establish milestones to get there.

Carrasco bristles at what he considers the unfair vilification of cattle for their contribution to global warming. He’s convinced scientific studies eventually will prove that grass-fed livestock systems such as Uruguay’s actually sequester more greenhouse gases than they emit.

“Conexión Ganadera’s program to fight climate change is to have ever more cows,” he says.

Uruguayan authorities are starting to take the global warming threat to the country’s top export industry seriously. The government has set up a task force to reduce greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of meat by restoring degraded pasturelands that soak up carbon and boosting cattle birthrates to produce more meat from the same herd.

Access to grazing land is key if Conexión Ganadera is to increase the number of cows under management. The company has already purchased about 2,000 hectares, paying more than $5 million for land on behalf of clients since it started offering land as an investment in June.

The land is leased to a ranching company, owned by Carrasco and Iewdiukow. Investors get an annual return of 3 percent with potential upside from the sale of carbon credits and price appreciation. At the end of the 10-year contract, the land will be sold.

Carrasco says land prices are at a temporary plateau before notching their next upward movement.

The average price per hectare rose 6 percent, to almost $3,500, in 2021, according to data compiled by the agriculture ministry. That’s still below the record $3,934 set in 2014.

He’s also bullish on the outlook for meat demand, with the UN forecasting protein consumption rising 70 percent through 2050. Carrasco even welcomes the emergence of new food technologies such as cell-cultured meat that will compete with slaughtered beef.

“Give us a hand, because we aren’t going to be able to keep up with demand in the future,” he says.

▫

Page 13

Livestock Market Digest

Biden, Bison & Big Brother BIDEN’S FLOOD

P

resident Biden and his crew recently toured flood-ravaged Kentucky and used the occasion to push their climate change agenda. The President’s spokesman said, “The floods in Kentucky and extreme weather all around the country are yet another reminder of the intensifying and accelerating impact of climate change…”

It occurred to me that if this was indeed something unique or unprecedented in Kentucky, then perhaps it could be blamed on the environment. However, if you look up the history of flooding in Kentucky you will find something quite different.

In 1927, a Kentucky newspaper reported a massive flood that killed 16 people “Homes are destroyed, livestock and poultry drowned, and

whole farms practically ruined,” the story said. “The fury of the flood far exceeded anything that has ever hit this area in its history.”

In January-February of 1937 there was flooding on the Ohio River with Louisville being 70 percent covered by water, forcing 175,000 persons from their homes.

Governor Keen Johnson said, “The worst catastrophe in the history of Kentucky has fallen upon our people in the valleys of the rivers and streams of Kentucky and the Ohio River.”

In a 1939 flooding incident, A USGS report said in one creek the water rose 20 feet in 10 minutes.

Residents said it was “a 15-foot wall of water crashing down the valley.”

And so it goes throughout Kentucky history.

It appears to be quite a stretch to assert a direct link between temperatures and the most recent flooding incident. A stretch the enviros and Biden are willing to take in order to get their programs approved and funded.

BISON PRESERVE Over 250,000 acres have been

purchased by an outfit named American Prairie to establish a Bison Preserve in Montana. Their goal is to acquire 3.2 million acres. If completed, the preserve will be “be roughly the size of Connecticut and 25 percent larger than Yellowstone.”

The leader of a local property rights group, United Property Owners of Montana, says the wealthy donors to the project are only interested in having a tax-deductible donation and don’t care about production agriculture.

Well, that’s in Montana so it doesn’t affect me you say You may believe you are not a target. If so, listen to Pete Geddes with American Prairie. When asked why they chose this area for the project, he said because there was a declining population and “perhaps there’s greater potential for less conflict over conservation in this part of the world.”

If you live in a rural area with a declining population, then you may at some time become a target. And this is the official policy of our government, The predator is subsidized in pursuing its prey.

Also note this admits there is a conflict between people and conser-

vation. Yet when the feds acquire lands, they claim to do so to allow public access to the area, when in fact they do just the opposite. They exclude people. all in the name of conservation.

Recall that American Prairie is the same outfit that filed for a permit to graze bison on BLM land.

Montana’s Attorney General says this would be illegal “This is federal land that is specifically — by the Taylor Grazing Act, by federal law — set aside for livestock grazing.

Bison are not livestock, even under federal law.”

Apparently, that was of no interest to the BLM who have just issued a permit to American Prairie to graze sheep on over 60,000 acres of federal land.

Let me close by saying thank you for the well wishes received while I’ve gone through a series of health issues. And a special thanks to Chris Allison and Joe Delk for their timely help.

Until next time, be a nuisance to the devil and don’t forget to check that cinch.

▫

ARIZONA CATTLE INDUSTRY Research and Education Foundation ARIZONA CATTLE INDUSTRY PO Box 2619 Research and Education Foundation Mesa AZ 85214-2619 PO Box 2619 Mesa AZ 85214-2619

Statement of the Arizona Cattle Industry Research and Education Foundation: Statement of the Arizona Cattle Industry Research and Education Foundation: Clay and Karen Parsons & Marana Stockyard Clay and Karen Parsons & Marana Stockyard The Arizona Cattle Industry Research and Education Foundation (“Foundation”), founded in 1982, is a charitable, educational and and scientific support organization for the benefit of the The Arizona Cattle Industry Research Education Foundation (“Foundation”), founded in Arizona Cattle Growers Association (“ACGA”).

The Foundation supports Arizona’s cattle 1982, is a charitable, educational and scientific support organization for the benefit of the industry by carrying out Association exclusively scientific, and educational the Arizona Cattle Growers (“ACGA”).charitable The Foundation supports activities Arizona’sfor cattle benefit of and in connection with the ACGA. The ACGA and the Foundation are related, but industry by carrying out exclusively scientific, charitable and educational activities for the separate Both entities work independently toward thethecommon goalare of related, protecting, benefit ofentities. and in connection with the ACGA. The ACGA and Foundation but promoting, and sustaining Arizona cattle ranching fortoward presentthe andcommon future generations. separate entities.

Both entities work independently goal of protecting,

promoting, and sustaining Arizona cattle ranching for present and future generations.

The Foundation is aware of a report and display boards prepared by Wesley Dutton (the “Dutton Materials”) that, of beginning 2020, wereboards disseminated the industry.

The The Foundation is aware a reportinand display preparedwithin

by Wesley Dutton (the Foundation also is aware that the Dutton Materials are alleged to contain negative statements “Dutton Materials”) that, beginning in 2020, were disseminated within the industry. The about a number peoplethat andthe entities, and Karen Parsonsnegative and their business Foundation also of is aware Duttonincluding MaterialsClay are alleged to contain statements Marana Stockyard.

The Foundation that and its former Board President, Suzanne about a number of people and entities,understands including Clay Karen Parsons and their business Menges, and others have been accused of assisting Dutton in the preparation and dissemination Marana Stockyard. The Foundation understands that its former Board President, Suzanne of the Dutton Materials.

Theaccused Foundation states unequivocally that any such actions were Menges, and others have been of assisting Dutton in the preparation and dissemination without its knowledge or consent, and it disclaims any of the statements about theactions Parsonswere and of the Dutton Materials.

The Foundation states unequivocally that any such Marana Stockyard in the Dutton Materials.

Such activities are unrelated to any proper function without its knowledge or consent, and it disclaims any of the statements about the Parsons and or the mission of the Marana Stockyard in Foundation. the Dutton Materials. Such activities are unrelated to any proper function or the mission of the Foundation.

In the Foundation’s opinion, the negative statements in the Dutton Materials about the Parsons and Stockyard are false.

To the statements best of theinFoundation's knowledge, diligent In theMarana Foundation’s opinion, the negative the Dutton Materials aboutafter the Parsons consideration, the Parsons and Marana Stockyard have never engaged in cattle theft, have no and Marana Stockyard are false. To the best of the Foundation's knowledge, after diligent connections to the criminal organizations, do nothave participate in political corruption.

In fact, consideration, Parsons and Marana and Stockyard never engaged in cattle theft, have no the Foundation understands that investigations by the Arizona Department of Agriculture, the connections to criminal organizations, and do not participate in political corruption. In fact, Arizona Department of Public and the by Cochise CountyDepartment Sheriff have the Foundation understands thatSafety investigations the Arizona of determined Agriculture,that the Wesley Dutton and the arethe unreliable contain unsubstantiated claims.

Arizona Department ofDutton Public Materials Safety and Cochise and County Sheriff have determined that Wesley Dutton and the Dutton Materials are unreliable and contain unsubstantiated claims.

The Foundation makes known here its full support of and belief in the integrity of the Parsons and Stockyard.

The Board of full Trustees of of theand Foundation acknowledges andParsons thanks The Marana Foundation makes known here its support belief in the integrity of the Clay and Karen Parsons The and Board their business, Marana Stockyard, for acknowledges their service, support and and Marana Stockyard. of Trustees of the Foundation and thanks contributions to the Foundation.

For nearly 25 years, the Parsons and Marana Stockyard have Clay and Karen Parsons and their business, Marana Stockyard, for their service, support and generously tirelessly contributed their time the andParsons resources to the Stockyard Foundationhave by contributionsand to the Foundation.

For nearly 25 years, and Marana participating in fund-raising activities that have netted hundreds of thousands of dollars to generously and tirelessly contributed their time and resources to the Foundation by support the Foundation’s mission.

Thethat Arizona hasofbeen well served by the participating in fund-raising activities have cattle nettedindustry hundreds thousands of dollars to integrity withFoundation’s which the Parsons conduct the business Marana has Stockyard. support the mission.

The Arizona cattleofindustry been well served by the integrity with which the Parsons conduct the business of Marana Stockyard.

A non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation organized to carry out the scientific, charitable and educational purposes of the Arizona Cattle Industry.

A non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation organized to carry out the scientific, charitable and educational purposes of the Arizona Cattle Industry.

Page 14

The Extraordinary Challenges Texas Ranchers are Facing

by Allan Stein, Epoch Times

S

2022 Fall Marketing Edition

Livestock Market Digest

heila Payne Blackburn always believed that cowgirls were a special breed that never quit when things got tough.

Now she knows even the sturdiest of them have their limits.

When her father died of COVID19 in early 2021, Blackburn found herself alone to continue the farm and ranch that had been in her family for 150 years. The business she inherited was $250,000 in debt with aging machinery needing costly repairs.

The cowgirl in her told her to press on for her family’s sake.

“I was raised never to back down,

never give up, get back in the saddle, cowgirls don’t cry, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, hang tough, and every other cowboy expression you can think of,” Blackburn said in a letter she posted on Facebook.

“I have watched my great-grandparents, grandparents, and my parents die young. Their bodies run down and weak, their minds overwhelmed with stress, and their bank accounts empty. They gave everything they had for our way of life.”

Blackburn admits she is emotionally exhausted.

She doesn’t want to sell her children’s legacy to a real estate developer or solar farm company. But today, at 53, her pride and spirit are broken. Her strength and passion

are gone. Her money is gone. And soon, her cherished way of life may be gone, barring some miracle.

“People have come back and said to sell the farm and walk away,” Blackburn told The Epoch Times.

“What they don’t realize is it’s a whole different heart for us. The land is a piece of you. It’s a piece of your heritage. It’s what God told us to do—to take care of the land and the animals.

“If I walk away and sell everything, every day I pass this [land], I’ll see it split up and sold to other people in the city who have good jobs and can afford it.”

Blackburn looked out at her drought-stricken property through her picture window, and the tears

Cattleman Kyle Foster points to the low water level in one of many watering holes on his 5,000-acre ranch in Cross Plains, Texas, on Aug. 10, 2022. Small ranch owners across the state face losing their livelihoods during the worst drought in over a decade. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)

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began to flow. After all, cowgirls are only human.

“What did [my parents] work for—wind turbines? I couldn’t do it. I don’t think I could do it. Sorry.”

Blackburn believes her father did everything he could to make the farm work after “putting up everything he had.” But there were forces beyond his control—inflation driving up the cost of everything: fuel, engine oil, fertilizer, hay, and feed to manage a 2,000-acre farm with 100 head of cattle.

The crippling drought came after her father passed.

“The diesel prices are outrageous,” Blackburn said. “Anywhere you try to repair your equipment, it’s going to take you forever to get [parts]—or it’s triple the price now.

“My tractor’s broken down. My shredder fell apart. I can’t fix it. A used tractor that’s about 15 years old is going to cost $120,000. I can’t afford it. Then the drought came.

I had two places run out of water.

I had to sell 40 head of momma cows.”

Blackburn said she can expect to receive $800 or $900 per head of cattle if she decides to sell her ranch and move on.

However, if she chooses not to sell, she would need thousands to purchase feed, vaccines, and fertilizer to plant wheat—her only cash crop. It costs about $700 to produce one acre of wheat at today’s prices— more than double last season.

Her son offered to work on the ranch to help ease her burden; Blackburn can’t afford to pay him.

She feels relief that her father isn’t around to see her struggle, and now has set her hopes on a small side business selling packaged beef in Cross Plains.

“Today, I am tired of the heat, the wind, the drought. Today I know it is only me, and no one will probably take over [the ranch]. Today I wonder what I’m fighting for. Today I am weak. Today I think I am through,” Blackburn said in her letter.

Other small ranch owners in Cross Plains, a rural agricultural town of 982 residents near Abilene in Callahan County, aren’t faring much better during the state’s worst drought in more than a decade.

Kyle Foster has been raising cattle on a 5,000-acre family ranch in Cross Plains since he was a boy.

His grandfather’s burial plot is just across the hill on rolling amber grassland as far as the eye can see.

His parents and their parents taught him early on that prosperity comes to those who keep their faith and work hard. And for many years, it did, rain or dry spell.

But this time, it’s different. This time, standing in the middle of a dying hay field in 90-plus degree heat, Foster knows the killer drought of 2022 could destroy everything he

worked for all these years.

“It’s extremely tough right now.

We’ve been through lots of droughts before, but this one is unprecedented. You always get little showers off and on. But we haven’t had any showers to speak of at all. That’s the difference with this one.”

“Before, you got a couple of inches of rain a month. You just haven’t had anything—zero rain,” Foster told The Epoch Times.

The grasshoppers infesting his hay fields compound his problems as they swarm up in front of him, walking through the dry, brittle grass.

“They just fly up like crazy and eat up the dry grass, whatever is left [to feed] the cows,” he said. “When it gets dry, grasshoppers thrive on any food source left.”

Foster said if the drought doesn’t finish off his hay fields, the grasshoppers will if he doesn’t keep spraying with insecticide.

All that’s left to feed his cattle are the still edible patches of grass and rolled hay bails stored up just in case.

“Dad always taught us that in the cattle business, you keep a two-year supply,” Foster said.

Foster said the key to survival in the cattle business is to diversify.

While agriculture is an option, it’s becoming less so as the wheat fields on his property wither from thirst.

His small oil operation yields about a barrel a day to provide supplemental income.

“This is your livelihood. You walk around the cattle every day.

You see them, raise them from babies, now you’ve got to sell them because of the drought. They’re like family—they are your family.”

“We’ll continue to cull down [cattle] until we run out of hay. With the beef, we can sell out and buy back [cattle]. You want to survive and not have to buy back.”

He said that the financial stress in his line of work can be as devastating as any drought, so it’s best to roll with it.

“I’m 50 years old. Mental stress can eat you alive. There’s a high suicide rate [among ranchers]—especially in the dairy business where I came from,” Foster said.

“I know three that took their lives. You go into debt so much that the stress will eat you alive.”

Many ranchers have been forced to sell their cattle on the open market or risk losing everything in the continuing drought.

Emory Livestock Auction, a cattle sale barn located 60 miles east of Dallas, reported on its website on July 9 that 527 sellers had sold 3,495 cattle—up substantially compared to previous months in 2021.

On August 6, 2022, nearly 400 sellers sold 2,201 heads of cattle.

According to the U.S. Drought

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Cattle rancher Kyle Foster of Cross Plains examines a young foal on Aug. 9, 2022. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)

2022 Fall Marketing Edition Monitor, 92 percent of the state of Texas remains in a drought. Thirty percent of the state is in extreme drought, and 10 percent is in exceptional drought, including Callahan County.

The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) notes that only 14 percent of the United States experienced severe to extreme drought between 1895 and 2010.

While the Dust Bowl of the 1930s stands out as the most significant drought event of the past century, regional droughts have plagued several parts of the United States since 2000.

The NIDIS said that by 2012, the regional droughts had combined into a “national-scale event” not seen in decades.

Two-thirds of the lower 48 states were in drought by September 2012.

“Many began to speculate that it was as severe as the drought episodes of the 1930s and 1950s.”

Foster has seen some of his water tanks (watering holes) go completely dry in the current drought. Though fortunate to have a well-water backup system, other local ranchers “don’t have that luxury. It makes it tough for them.”

“They’ll last through a drought, but not this one. The problem is you can survive a drought most of the time. Then you throw in the high fuel prices and the issue of trying to get parts. The labor force in farming isn’t there anymore. It’s not an easy job,” Foster said.

At Jean’s Feedbarn restaurant in Cross Plains, cattle ranchers Brent Key, Ricky Carouth, and Michael Franke were having breakfast together and talking politics.

“I don’t have anything right now.

I sold them all. No rain. No grass.

No water,” said Carouth, who liquidated 171 heads of cattle because of drought and inflation.

Next to driving a truck hauling rock, “ranching was my second job,” Carouth told The Epoch Times.

“Same with everything else; it’s all downhill.”

With 200 cows and calves in his operation, Franke said he’s concerned about the money and time invested in the business.

“I’m the fourth generation on the same land. We wanted to retire here and run cattle. My kids want to do it. But I’m not sure it’s going to be a viable opportunity” because of inflation and a bad economy, Franke told The Epoch Times.

“If the small farmer goes away, everything becomes industrialized and commercialized.

“Corporations and big farms take over. Food prices become more concerning because the small farmer is gone.”

Page 15

Livestock Market Digest 95 heads of cattle facing a difficult decision: whether to sell or hold on.

“Right now, it’s the lack of rainfall. The rain just quit and stayed that way,” Taff, 67, said. “When it’s super-hot out here, I don’t even work the cattle.

“Feed is dramatically up. The cost of hay has risen dramatically.

Last year I could get it delivered at $60 to $65 a roll,” Taff told The Epoch Times.

“This year, it’s $165 to $170 a roll. I’ve seen some go for around $200, so it’s tripled. It’s not available here. A lot of your grass hays are coming from Louisiana and Mississippi. The transportation cost is a killer. I’m working on last year’s hay right now.”

Without rain, his oat crops and rye-grass have died. Money, time and effort gone to waste.

“Everything I’ve planted has

pretty much died,” he said. “If I don’t find some hay pretty fast, I’m going to be forced to sell [cattle] because I can’t feed them.”

‘OUR PONDS ARE GOING DRY’ In Canton, Texas, population 4,229, about 218 miles east of Cross Plains, Police Chief Brad Allison runs a small cattle ranch with a dozen heifer cows.

He sold 60 cows last year after he saw the “writing on the wall.”

“That’s what they’re doing— [small ranchers] are selling out. I saw the writing on the wall late last year. I knew something was coming because we were due a drought.

“I sold 60 momma cows. I [normally] run about 60 heads in three pastures. I thought you know what?

The price is fair right now. Then I bought a dozen heifers. That’s all

Cattleman Kyle Foster rides a Kawasaki all-terrain vehicle to get around his 5,000-acre Texas property and leans against a rolled hay bale on Aug. 9, 2022. Foster said he normally keeps a two-year supply of hay in case of unforeseen circumstances, including drought. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)

Sheila Payne Blackburn sits on her front porch overlooking her 2,000acre ranch in Cross Plains, Texas, on Aug. 9, 2022. After losing her father to COVID-19, Blackburn is now facing financial hardship due to extreme drought gripping much of the state. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)

Allison said the challenges for the small rancher in Canton are the same as in other drought-ravaged parts of Texas.

“We haven’t had rain in a monthand-a-half. Our ponds are going dry.

There’s no grass. You’ve got hay gougers asking $120 or $140 a roll when it’s [usually] $40 a roll.”

Allison expressed his frustration with the price of hay in a recent Facebook post. He lamented that 10,000 head of cattle had been sold in three counties in three weeks as small cattle ranches were “drowning.”

“The cattlemen don’t have a chance. We are getting priced out of existence. Pray for your ranchers to be able to hang in there.”

Allison believes that if the small cattle rancher goes under, there won’t be enough full-time ranchers to meet the demand for beef.

At the same time, the slaughterhouses are making considerable profits in the current buyer’s market, he said.

“It’ll rebound—it always does— some people will be cut out,” Allison told The Epoch Times.

“People are getting out now who won’t get back in it. Some of these people that own cattle are going to lease out.”

“The only people making any money are the slaughterhouses.

REASON TO HOPE Still, Franke feels optimistic that the market will eventually rebound.

“If you can hold onto your cows, I think the market will strengthen. It comes back to supply and demand.

But it will take a lot of money to hold onto what we have.

“You’re buying hay, you’re buying feed, and if it doesn’t rain and you run out of water, you can’t run enough water to the cows to hold onto them.”

“There’s not a lot of [profit] in a cow and calf operation. With fuel going up and with feed going up, there’s not much margin in it.”

George Taff of Cross Plains is another small ranch owner with I’m running right now.”

We’re not the ones making money.

We’re spending it.”

As small ranchers leave the business in larger numbers, other industries are moving in to fill the vacuum, he said.

“What’s buying up our land right now are solar companies, making solar farms. Acres and acres and acres of them,” Allison said.

Foster views his business through the lens of his Christian faith and the traditional values instilled in him growing up. He doubts he’ll ever sell his property, no matter what happens.

Raising cattle is in his family’s blood and soul.

“The biggest blessing I’ve got out here since I’ve worked on a farm is my Dad taught me a work ethic that his Dad taught him,” Foster said.

“Whether we survive on the farm or not, I’m not worried about it.

There are more important things than the farm, cattle, and legacy.”

Foster said what matters to him most is what comes after this life.

To lose one’s livelihood will hurt only for a short time. “But eternity is an eternity.”

Editor’s Note: At last at least some of the media are reporting on the real world.

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Page 16

Colorado County Thought Solar Panels Were a Baaaaad Idea. But What if There Were 1,000 Sheep Grazing Under Them?

by Mark Jaffe, Colorado Sun

T

2022 Fall Marketing Edition

Livestock Market Digest

he question before the Delta County, Colorado Commission was whether 1,000 sheep can forge a path for dozens of solar panels — after the commissioners rejected a solar project citing concerns about losing farmland.

In March, the commission, on a 2-1 vote, rejected an 80-megawatt solar project covering 475 acres just outside of Delta, proposed by the Denver-based Guzman Energy Group. The project would have provided electricity to the local rural electric cooperative.

The two commissioners opposing the plan, Wendell Koontz and Mike Lane, said they were concerned about the loss of agricultural land in the county.

Guzman Energy has revised its Garnet Mesa project to “specifically address the agricultural and irrigation concerns raised by the community and commissioners,” Amy Messenger, a company spokeswoman, said in an email.

The site will now include “a robust irrigation system” of sprinklers, gated pipes and drip tubes, recommended by Montrose-based Morales Engineering and Consulting, and some 1,000 sheep from a local grower will graze on the fields.

The Delta County Planning Commission has already approved the revised project and the county commissioners are set to vote on it Aug. 16.

“Guzman has made an effort to show this will work,” said Natasha Leger, executive director of Paoniabased environmental group Citizens for a Healthy Community. “No other project in the county has been given the same amount of scrutiny and required the same levels of conditions.”

The Delta-Montrose Electric

Association, the local co-op, was helped by Guzman, a wholesale power provider, in financing its $136.5 million exit from the TriState Generation and Transmission Association. Tri-State required the co-op to buy 95 percent of its electricity from the association.

Guzman received a 12-year contract to provide DMEA with power and the Garnet Mesa project would be the first major development in their partnership and enable the co-op to reach 20 percent local generation.

“We believe the Garnet Mesa solar project is a meaningful project for our members that will produce local and affordable renewable energy and millions of dollars of tax base revenue,” Kent Blackwell, DMEA’s chief technology officer, said in an email.

DMEA estimates that the installation will pay $13 million in property taxes over the next 15 years.

To address the concerns of Koontz, a former coal industry geologist, and Lane, a former oil field services company employee, about lost farmland, Guzman has contracted with Sperry Livestock Corp. in Delta to manage the farm operations and grazing.

“We expect more than 1,000 sheep to graze on the irrigated fields,” Messenger said.

The Garnet Mesa project accounts for a little more than one-thousandth of the 26,846 acres of Delta County’s farmland in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s last assessment in 2017.

Koontz, in an email, declined to comment since the project is before the commission. Lane did not reply to an email request for comment.

Sheep grazing among solar panels is nothing new. There were more than three dozen solar grazing operations in the U.S. in 2020, mainly in the east, according to the American

Solar Grazing Association.

“Sheep are naturally suited to the job of solar grazing,” according to the association’s website. “They enjoy the shade of the solar panels on hot days, napping and grazing where humans would struggle to reach.”

Agrivoltaics — combining solar fields not only with sheep, but also with crops — is a growing trend in the U.S. as large-scale solar projects arrive in rural areas, according to Jordan Macknick, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

For the past six years, Macknick has been overseeing a project experimenting with various agricultural activities on 25 solar sites around the country.

“We are seeing pushback in some rural communities,” Macknick said.

“The desire for keeping land in agriculture can be an argument against solar projects.”

Showing that the projects can provide electricity and agriculture opportunities “gives them the social license to operate,” Macknick said.

The NREL research has also shown that pairing agriculture and solar panels can yield a dual payoff.

At the Arizona test site, growing tomatoes in the shade of the solar panels reduced water consumption 30 percent and doubled the crop yield. At the same time, all the vegetation under the arrays created a “microclimate” that was 9 degrees Celsius cooler, helping to boost solar production by 2 percent.

Sheep grazing turns out to be a more cost effective and safer way of managing landscaping and weed control than bringing motorized machinery that could damage panels by kicking up rocks or colliding with installations, Macknick said.

Sheep are also set to graze at Lightsource bp’s 300-MW Bighorn Solar Project in Pueblo, Macknick said. The project is on 1,800 acres on the Evraz Rocky Mountain Steel property. The project will provide electricity to the steel mill.

Joe Sperry would be providing the sheep and the management of the animals and property at Garnet

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Mesa. “I haven’t done anything like this before, but it’s been done in lots of places,” Sperry said.

Sperry said he will likely be rotating the sheep around set areas. “The main thing is to get this designed properly,” he said.

As for Garnet Mesa’s location, Sperry said, “the area is not ideal farming land; it is good for grazing and that’s about it.”

The proposal isn’t just a way of getting a solar project built, Sperry

said. ”It works both ways. Ag needs to step up and realize things are changing. If this isn’t ag land it goes to houses and that’s worse,” he said.

“This will keep ag on the land, water on the land.”

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To Solve the Climate Crisis, We Must Rein in the Wasteful Wealthy

by Damien Gayle, The Guardian

“E

ating just one billionaire would do more to prevent climate change than going vegan or never driving a car for the rest of your life.” So proclaimed a post on Extinction Rebellion’s Instagram recently.

XR has not previously been known for its class analysis (nor even now: “This is obviously a joke,” the group’s caption averred). And yet it hit home: the post has been liked 40,000 times, about as much as XR’s previous 11 posts combined.

The image was a meme of Lisa Simpson before an auditorium, crafted by an account called the Ragged Trousered Philanderer. But it encapsulates a serious developing shift in the narrative of climate activism: we can’t solve the climate crisis without solving the problem of inequality.

For decades, climate change has been understood by the public as a crisis in which we are all implicated. Environmental campaigns exhorted us all to turn off our lights, buy more fuel efficient cars, recycle as much as possible – our consumption had to be adapted to minimize our impact on the planet.

But it is becoming increasingly clear that such efforts, while by no means unnecessary, are less than a drop in the ocean. Nothing drove this home more this summer than another Instagram post: Kylie Jenner’s picture of her and partner Travis Scott standing in front of two private jets, captioned: “you wanna take mine or yours?”

It was posted days after Jenner, it subsequently emerged, took her private jet on a flight that lasted just 17 minutes. That might not sound like much, but it was estimated to have belched a ton of carbon into the atmosphere – about a quarter of the annual carbon footprint of the average person globally.

Jenner’s conspicuous carbon consumption became a catalyst for a wave of reporting on the use of private jets by the rich. And not just the super-rich.

In the Guardian we reported on Disney’s marketing of a $110,000 roundthe-world package holiday with a carbon price tag of 6.2 tons for each of its 75 paying guests. That’s about 20 times more than the 0.3 ton average of someone in a low-income country, according to the World Bank.

Flying is without a doubt the most egregious example of carbon profligacy by the rich, according to Andreas Malm, professor of human ecology at Lund University, Sweden, and author of influential polemic How To Blow Up A Pipeline.

“If you as an individual consumer want to burn as much carbon as possible, emit as much CO as possible, what you do is go on a flying binge,” Malm says. “That’s the most CO intensive act of consumption you can engage in. It exceeds everything else, driving and meat eating and whatever – particularly since these are emissions that don’t fulfill any legitimate purpose and don’t serve any human need.”

Consumption like this has made the richest 1 percent of the world’s population responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the poorest 50 percent – 3.1 billion people – in the last 25 years, according to Oxfam. And as inequality continues to grow, so will their disproportionate impact. By 2030, Oxfam predicts, the carbon footprints of the world’s richest 1 percent will be 30 times greater than the level compatible with the 1.5C goal of the Paris Agreement.

And yet that is not even half the story, since the impact of the world’s wealthiest people is not only their consumption, but in the realm of production, from where the super-rich obtain their wealth, says Matthew Huber, professor of geography at Syracuse university in New York.

In a new book, Climate Change as Class War, Huber sets out how the fossil fuel system is inextricably tied to an economic system that continually leads to greater concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. Yes, it’s true that Jenner, or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk and others, are contributing to climate meltdown with their superyachts and private jets and the like – but what, Huber asks, about the people who sold them the fuel in the first place?

If there are lessons here for activists – and for anyone who is interested in tackling the climate crisis – Huber and Malm say change must start with the wealthiest and most powerful. But, says Malm, we cannot expect governments to do the work for us.

“All the governments I know of are beholden to these people, their taskmasters, if you like; the classes that they have to coddle the most,” Malm says. “That makes it extremely hard to envision any government moving against precisely these people, because that’s the people that are closest to.”

“If governments can’t do attack the most egregious instances of luxury emissions, then ordinary people will have to,” he adds. “I think the next step for that kind of activism to go after private jets and super yachts and other monstrous machines for luxury emissions. It’s not that we’re done with SUVs. That campaign just needs to multiply and spread further and intensify.

But there are more targets than SUVs.” And so, it seems, that if we are serious about a future on a livable planet, eating billionaires might not be such a joke after all.

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2022 Fall Marketing Edition

2022 Women in Agribusiness Excellence Awards Announced

Judge Permanently Blocks Biden Oil and Gas Leasing Pause in 13 States

by Allen Zhong, The Epoch Times by 210 jobs, reduced personal income by $13 million, and cost $4 million in oil and gas taxes in Montana in 2021, he said citing a December 2020 study conducted by the University of Wyoming.

BIGGEST OFFSHORE OIL, GAS LEASE SALE REVIVED Days before the permanent injunction, a lease known as Lease Sale 257, which is also under dispute in the multiple-state lawsuit, was revived by Biden through the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. The Inflation Reduction Act includes provisions that direct spending, tax credits, and loans to bolster technologies such as solar panels and equipment to cut pollution at coal- and gas-powered power plants.

But the legislation also contains a provision that reinstates the previously halted Lease Sale 257, which was sold at auction for $192 million in March 2019, the biggest offshore

oil and gas lease in U.S. history, spanning nearly 81 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) indicated its intention to rescind the lease sale in February 2021, citing Executive Order 14008. The lease sale was later revived by the government.

However, it was then challenged by environmental activist groups and halted by Judge Rudolph Contreras of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia.

Contreras ruled in January that the decision to proceed with the lease sale was “arbitrary and capricious.”

The ruling de facto blocked Lease Sale 257 because the Biden administration didn’t appeal.

Tom Ozimek contributed to the report.

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T

hree exceptional women have been named recipients of the 2022 Women in Agribusiness (WIA) Demeter Award of Excellence – Diane Allemang of FMC Corporation, Kendall Jones of ProAg and Karen LeVert of Pappas Capital and AgTechInventures.

The trio will be recognized next month at the 11th annual Women in Agribusiness Summit, which will be held in Dallas, September 26 to 28, at the Hyatt Regency Dallas.

First introduced in 2013, the Women in Agribusiness Demeter Award of Excellence, so named for Demeter, the goddess of the harvest from ancient Greek mythology, recognizes those who have achieved excellence in their field and/or who have demonstrated an outstanding contribution to the agribusiness industry. Thus far, more than two dozen exceptional individuals in the ag and food sector have received the award, along with five notable companies.

DIANE ALLEMANG OF FMC CORPORATION Diane Allemang is executive vice president and chief marketing officer for FMC Corporation, which is an agricultural sciences company based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Allemang is recognized for being – throughout her nearly four decades in the industry – a “passionate advocate for safe and effective crop protection technologies and a relentless champion of women at every level in the industry.”

FMC President and CEO Mark Douglas, who nominated Allemang, noted that whether she is advocating for science-based regulatory decision-making, or bringing the latest crop protection innovations to market, “her career has always been rooted in making sure farmers have access to exceptional technology that is more effective and sustainable than previous generation products.”

continued on page 19

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n August 13, 2022 a federal judge issued a permanent injunction against the Biden administration’s pause of new oil and gas leasing in federal lands.

The injunction applies to the 13 states that sued the Biden administration over the moratorium in March 2021, including Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia.

Terry Doughty, the U.S. district judge for the Western District of Louisiana, ruled that the White House overreached in the ban.

President Joe Biden signed Executive Order 14008 on Jan. 27, 2021, banning all new oil and natural gas leases on federal lands and offshore waters. The order didn’t cancel existing leases on federal lands and offshore waters. Leases on private lands were also not affected.

Thirteen states led by Louisiana sued the Biden administration, saying the lease ban violated the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA), which governs offshore oil and gas leases, and the Mineral Leasing Act (MLA), which governs onshore land leases on federal lands.

Doughty issued a temporary injunction back in June 2022 in this case. The injunction was overthrown by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Doughty’s permanent injunction came a day after the circuit court’s ruling.

In the permanent injunction, Doughty ruled that the executive branch has no authority to change both laws.

“Both statutes require Government Defendants’ agencies to sell oil and gas leases. The OCSLA has a Five-Year Plan in effect that requires eligible leases to be sold. Government Defendants’ agencies have no authority to make significant revisions in the OCSLA Five-Year Plan without going through the procedure mandated

by Congress. The MLA requires the DOI to hold lease sales, where eligible lands are available at least quarterly,” he wrote in the ruling.

“By stopping the process, the agencies are in effect amending two Congressional statutes. Neither the OCSLA nor the MLA gives the Government Defendants’ agencies the authority to implement a Stop of lease sales.”

The Epoch Times reached out to the Interior Department and the White House for comments.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (C) and Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen announce a lawsuit against President Joe Biden’s administration, in Edinburgh, Texas, on Jan. 28, 2022. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times) Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen applauded the permanent injunction.

“President Biden’s executive order to choke off energy development didn’t just increase prices and hurt American families—it was flatly illegal. This decision is a victory for the rule of law and the workers and the rural communities who depend on the energy industry,” he said in a statement.

An ongoing lease moratorium would have lowered employment

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Livestock Market Digest

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Importance of Low-Stress Stockmanship: Bud Williams’ Legacy

by Heather Smith Thomas PART ONE: WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT?

N

ow and then someone comes along with innovative ideas or astute observations that change how people do things. Bud Williams was that kind of person, and his unique methods of handling cattle are becoming well-known and adopted by many dairy and beef producers. Bud’s way of doing things is easier on the animals and on the people handling them, and also saves/makes money for the producer. Reducing stress on cattle helps decrease illness, minimizes shrink (when selling them) and improves performance.

Bud is gone now (he died in 2012) but his family and other folks continue to put on schools and clinics to teach people his methods.

His wife, Eunice, lives in Missouri and is still part of this continuing legacy with the family company: Bud Williams Stockmanship. In 2005, Bud’s daughter Tina and son-inlaw Richard McConnell—with their Hand ‘n Hand Livestock Solutions-began teaching clinics and stockmanship schools around the country.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN Bud was born in 1932 on a farm in southern Oregon, where his family had work horses, dairy and beef cattle, sheep, hogs and poultry and raised grain and hay. Eunice met him at a country square dance and they were married in 1952.

“We worked at first on cattle and sheep ranches in northern California. When we went on our first job at a big ranch in the mountains, Bud was horrified at the way they handled the stock. He told me there was no way that he was going to work stock that way!” Eunice said. He started figuring better ways to do it.

“The main things that enabled him to perfect his method of handling livestock were his great powers of observation and pure stubbornness,” she said. He was able to rotationally graze pastures without fences, taking any type of livestock (including weaned calves) onto unfenced ranges, and teaching them to stay as a herd.

“After our daughters left home, Bud and I started traveling more, taking jobs that were difficult and interesting. We had excellent results working beef and dairy cattle,

2022 Fall Marketing Edition

Livestock Market Digest

sheep, goats, elk, fallow deer, reindeer, bison, and hogs. We gathered reindeer above the Arctic Circle in Alaska and wild cattle in Mexico and the Aleutian Islands and had remarkable increases in production in dairy herds,” she said. In 1989, after urging from many of the people he’d helped, Bud began teaching his methods to more people.

“For the eleven years ending in 2000, we headquartered at Vee Tee Feeders Ltd. near Lloydminster, Alberta–one of the most northern feedlots on the continent. Since most of the incoming cattle were freshly weaned calves and weather conditions far from ideal, Bud felt the information he gathered there had real significance to help reduce stress and illness,” Eunice said.

When they first started helping at that feedlot, death losses were high. “We worked with those calves to settle and calm them, to reduce their stress, and taught the crew how to handle them. The attitude of the people is important. If any of the crew were in a bad mood, we wouldn’t let them go into any of the calf pens. They were assigned to fixing fence or some other task. If they had a flat tire on their way to work or had been in a fight with their wife or girlfriend, we told them to stay out of the calf pens,” Eunice said.

Bud also improved the facilities. Many people in the livestock industry have heard of or used a Bud Box–a term coined in the early 1970s by Rich Hunt (of Eureka, California) to describe the small pen Bud designed for bringing cattle to the working chute or for any kind of sorting/loading.

INCREASES IN PRODUCTION Soon other outfits were asking him to help solve problems and teach their crews better ways to handle cattle. “Years ago we consulted with a dairy that milked 1000 cows had a hydraulic gate to move cows from the holding pen—which held about 120 head and had a wash pen—into the milking parlor. The hydraulic gate kept shoving them closer to the entrance into the parlor. If a cow slipped and the hydraulic gate was still moving, it injured the cow. An employee had been killed by this hydraulic gate because the fellow handling the controls by the milk parlor couldn’t see the back end. The dairy wanted Bud to show them how to get the cows to go

into the parlor in a timely manner without having to use that power gate,” Eunice said.

“We went there to help them, and were in and out of that dairy for 6 weeks. We held some schools in the area, and while we were off giving schools, one of our students stayed at the dairy and helped teach the crew how to handle cattle.

During that 6 weeks, milk production went up 14 percent.” This is what gets people’s attention. Low-stress handling is not only better for the cows, but also for production and profit.

Reduction in disease was another benefit. “When we arrived, they had 40 cows going through the mastitis pen, where cows were kept when they couldn’t use their milk. When we left six weeks later, only seven cows had developed mastitis.”

Beef cattle producers usually don’t have any idea how much production they are losing, but with a dairy you know within 24 hours if something is working or not, because milk production is closely measured.

Beef ranchers have been slower to adopt low-stress methods because of traditional ways they’ve been handling cattle. It’s often a situation where friends and neighbors help gather and work cattle, and it can easily become a rodeo. “At branding time, especially, when people are roping calves, it often becomes a big party. Bud used to compare this to a grocery store owner inviting all his friends and neighbors and turning them loose to do the jobs; they might forget to stock the shelves while they are partying!”

BASIC STOCKMANSHIP Bud’s method of working livestock simply consists of learning to “read” what the animal is telling you, and changing your position so she wants to go where you want her to go. It is important that the animals do not consider you a threat. If you want cattle to move away from you, the worst place you can be is right behind them. That’s their blind spot; they want to turn around and keep an eye on you.

It’s important to put the pressure on cattle from the side at an angle

Bud Williams explaining stockmanship techniques

rather than from behind. “You take an angle that makes the cow realize that if she doesn’t move up you will bumping into her, and she will hurry to get past you. But you don’t want to give a shove from behind as she goes past, or her attention will immediately turn back on you instead of going forward,” Eunice explains.

“The only thing that makes stockmanship difficult is that our instincts are wrong for the proper way to handle cattle.” We have to keep reminding ourselves to be patient and not try to force cattle to do something, but it doesn’t mean no pressure.

“Bud put more pressure on cattle than just about anybody, but he applied pressure in the right place.

That makes all the difference. He expected cattle to move right out; he didn’t baby them. But if you are in the wrong place, this is very counterproductive and the cattle don’t trust you,” she said.

Trust and confidence are a huge aspect. “If you truly believe that the cattle are doing exactly what you are telling them to do (and you are projecting that feeling to them and in the right place) it will work. If you are in the wrong spot, you are telling them the wrong thing--like wanting someone to turn right but you are telling them to go left, and then getting mad at them for going to the left. If they are not doing what you want them to do, you need to change your message!” It’s your fault, not the cow.

The customary way is to try to make the animal do what you want, but Bud’s way is to let the animal do what you want. Rather than blaming the animal for going the wrong way, we need to ask ourselves what we did to cause the animal to react that way.

The traditional method of driving livestock is to chase the animals from where they were, to where the people want them to go, but using fear and force to move animals is very stressful to them.

Bud explained that proper position on your part (and nothing more) is enough pressure to allow you to move livestock to any place they are physically able to go. If you are in the proper position, the animals will want to move in the desired direction, but excessive pressure will cause them to panic.

As pressure is applied to move the animals, some of it must be released when they move, either by you stepping back, or by the fact that they moved ahead. Constant pressure with no let-up, or excessive pressure, is what panics animals.

“Bud said that you can walk behind livestock and not cause prob-

lems as long as you aren’t pressuring them. There is always a correct position, and this spot moves as the animal moves. The angle you move– in relation to the animal–determines if you will maintain proper position.

The speed you move is important, but not as important as the angle,” Eunice said.

“The ranchers who have adopted this way of handling stock don’t need a big crew anymore. They say that the only downside is that they have to sneak around and get their cattle worked without the neighbors knowing, or the neighbors will be miffed because they weren’t invited!” she said.

John Smith (Plateau Cattle Company, Nanton, Alberta) is a 3rd generation rancher who feels that using Bud’s methods on his ranch has greatly improved every aspect of their cattle handling. “At our place we have a Bud Box where we load trucks. This has changed our truckers’ methods, even though they only work with our cattle once a year,” John says.

“They don’t use a prod anymore.

They have prods, because they are truckers, but they don’t use them on our cattle. They see how smooth it goes, and I’ve noticed that even when I am out in the back getting in another group of cattle–and the truckers have to load the Bud Box themselves–they know how to do it and they understand it.

“They’ve watched how I do it, and have seen the difference compared to places that don’t have it.

There are a lot of places in our area, however, that do have Bud Boxes,” John says. “When we were going to Bud’s schools 25 years ago, quite a few people from Nanton went to those courses. Many of those principles have been implemented here.”

It’s mainly a matter of changing the way people look at things. “There is so much to be gained. Even if you think you’ve been working cows forever, there’s more to learn. I’ve worked with cattle my whole life, and especially at feedlots, working with thousands of head every year, but you can never be done learning.

Some folks my age think they know it all because they’ve chased cows all their life, but it’s not quite that way!” The cows keep teaching us, too, if we have an open mind.

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2022 Fall Marketing Edition

Page 19

Livestock Market Digest

Scientists & Professionals From Across the World Declare: “There is No Climate Emergency”

by Matthew Roscoe, euroweeklynews.com

H

undreds of scientists and professionals from across the world, led by the Norwegian physics Nobel Prize laureate Professor Ivar Giaever, declared that “there is no climate emergency.”

On August 18, an article by the World Climate Declaration (WCD) proclaiming that “there is no climate emergency” – which appears to have been scrubbed from the internet – was retrieved by the Wayback Machine and began gaining traction on social media.

The WCD article, which was published on May 27, said that “climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific.”

It added: “In particular, scientists should emphasise that their modelling output is not the result of magic: computer models are human-made. What comes out is fully dependent on what theoreticians and programmers have put in: hypotheses, assumptions, relationships, parameterisations, stability constraints, etc.

“Unfortunately, in mainstream climate science, most of this input is undeclared.”

“To believe the outcome of a climate model is to believe what the model makers have put in,” it continued.

“This is precisely the problem of today’s climate discussion to which climate models are central. Climate science has degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs, not on sound self-critical science.

“We should free ourselves from the naïve belief in immature climate models.

“In future, climate research must give significantly more emphasis to empirical science.”

Under the heading, “there is no climate emergency” the article continued to touch upon its opening points.

“Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures,” the group said.

The group said that the “planet has existed with natural cold and warm phases” and that there is “no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.”

They also suggested that warming is far slower than predicted and that “we are far from understanding climate change.”

“Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as global policy tools,” the WCD added.

“They blow up the effect of greenhouse gases such as CO . In addition, they ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO is beneficial.”

They then said that “CO is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth” and that “photosynthesis is a blessing.”

It added “More CO is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth: additional CO in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.”

Speaking about global warming, the group said that there is “no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods,

droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent.

“However, there is ample evidence that CO -mitigation measures are as damaging as they are costly.”

In conclusion, the World Climate Declaration (WCD), which will function as “Global Climate Intelligence Group” in the future, said that “there is no climate emergency.”

It added: “Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO policy proposed for 2050.

“If better approaches emerge, and they certainly will, we have ample time to reflect and re-adapt.

The aim of global policy should be ‘prosperity for all’ by providing reliable and affordable energy at all times.”

“In a prosperous society men and women are well educated, birthrates are low and people care about their environment,” it concluded.

Leader of the UK Reform Party, Richard Tice, took to Twitter following the article’s reemergence to write: “1,200 Scientists & Professionals sign World Climate Declaration & say: “There is No Climate Emergency”. Eco zealots will squeal and go nuts. Rest of us know climate change has existed naturally over millions of years & always will continue.”

Another wrote: “I’m inclined to agree with them..”

However, some people question the WCD’s article and the group itself.

“I guess you didn’t do your background research on this organization? You really shouldn’t take everything you read at face value!” one person said.

And another person said: “Er…. how many say otherwise in their various papers? 1200 isn’t very many.”

“More CO is beneficial for nature.. right you are. Not,” wrote another.

Recently, climate activist icon Greta Thunberg faced some backlash from fellow climate activists who said they were sick of her, even going as far as saying a “de-Gretaisation” was beginning to take place.

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WOMEN

cont. from page 17

Allemang was the first female to chair CropLife America’s Board of Directors in the association’s 80-year history, and the first female to chair CropLife International’s Crop Protection Strategy Council.

She is involved in FMC’s Women’s Initiative Network and is executive sponsor for SPECTRUM, FMC’s employee resource group focused on increasing visibility of LGBTQ+ issues. She also serves on the executive sponsor team for FMC’s Social Justice and Race Equity Task Force.

KENDALL JONES OF PROAG Kendall Jones, who is based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has served as the president and CEO of ProAg since July 2017 and previously served as EVP and COO for eight years. Jones’ leadership has been instrumental in multiple acquisitions and in growing the company’s innovative risk management services.

She is recognized for her laser focus on customer service, which has made ProAg a strong, prominent player in the crop insurance market, and also helped ProAg grow to three-quarters of a billion-dollar annual premium company.

Her nominator, Richard Stinson

Not Just the IRS ANOTHER AGENCY IS SUPERSIZED IN BIDEN’S PENDING BILL

by Jack McEvoy, Daily Caller News Foundation

T

he Democrats’ massive climate spending package, which President Joe Biden signed into law in mid-August, will give over $40 billion to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), just as the bill allocates almost $80 billion to expand the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

The bill, dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act, includes $369 billion in total climate spending, and will give the EPA more than $40 billion in the current fiscal year to combat climate change, enforce environmental standards and secure “environmental justice,” according to a Congressional Research Service report. The EPA’s enacted budget for 2022’s fiscal year was about $9.5 billion, according to the agency figures, meaning the bill will more than quadruple the EPA’s current

– ProAg’s national communications and media manager – said, “Kendall is passionate about growing not only the company she leads but also the crop insurance industry and the people around her. She is a selfless, inspirational leader…. Kendall’s drive to challenge the status quo allows ProAg to bring innovation to an industry that is ripe to change.”

Thomas P. Zacharias, president of National Crop Insurance Services, where Jones is chair of the board of directors, added, “Kendall is one of the most highly respected individuals in the crop insurance industry.

Her professional demeanor and pursuit of inclusivity are unparalleled.”

Additionally, Jones serves on the board of directors for the Producers Ag Insurance Company.

Karen LeVert is a venture partner of Pappas Capital based in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and co-founder of AgTechInventures, LLC. After a successful IT, financial and executive career in corporate America, LeVert became an entrepreneur and has now come full circle with her mission to advance dis-

ruptive technologies in agriculture.

LeVert launched two accelerators to commercialize early-stage technologies from university research labs through the co-founding of Southeast TechInventures (optoelectronics applications) and later Ag TechInventures. She then joined venture firm Pappas Capital to invest in companies with the potential to transform the agtech industry.

Said her nominator, Michelle VonCannon of North Carolina Biotechnology Center, “Karen has placed key emphasis on supporting women in their entrepreneurial pursuits…. she recognizes the hurdles women can face and has made it a mission to spotlight these amazing women and their technologies to further revolutionize agriculture.”

LeVert is a recipient of the Council for Entrepreneurial Development’s Outstanding Service.

She also has been named to the WRAL TechWire Hall of Fame.

Additionally, LeVert is a member of the North Carolina (NC) Ag Tech Council, NC Biotechnology Center Board, Economic Development Partnership Board of NC, and NC State University Agriculture and Life Sciences Foundation Board.

annual spending.

The IRS will use its $80 billion in new funding to hire 87,000 new agents as well as ramp up auditing and other enforcement mechanisms. Democrats claim that these measures will raise $124 billion in revenues from increased taxpayer compliance, according to their summary of the bill.

The bill will give the EPA $27 billion in accordance with the Clean Air Act to start a ‘Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund’ that will finance competitive grants to fund national and regional “green banks,” which will use the money to fund initiatives and projects aimed at reducing carbon emissions, according to the bill’s text. Renewable energy initiatives funded by the “green banks” are intended to help underprivileged and low-income communities; the agency will also only have 180 days to allocate these funds to “green banks.”

Democrats are allocating a further $8 billion in total to reduce air pollution at ports and fund general pollution reduction grants. The bill also allots $3 billion for EPA

“environmental and climate justice block grants” that will help facilitate political “engagement in disadvantaged communities” through advisory groups, rulemakings and workshops.

The agency will also receive $1.55 billion to pay for its methane emissions reduction program to offer financial incentives to oil and gas producers who reduce their methane emissions, according to the bill. Additionally, the EPA will get $906 million in total to finance programs that address air pollution in schools, report corporate emissions and help declare “environmental products” as well as various other initiatives.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan touted the bill’s passage through the Senate in a statement.

The Democrats’ huge spending bill will help accelerate EPA regulatory efforts and other operations in order to further the Biden administration’s aggressive climate agenda.

The White House and EPA did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

KAREN LEVERT OF PAPPAS CAPITAL AND AGTECHINVENTURES

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Page 20

2022 Fall Marketing Edition

Livestock Market Digest

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What seems to be missing are the non-partisan politicians that voted in favor of the comFROM THE BACK SIDE mon good. This used to be an America where most of our elected officials were for the people, not against them.

It was an America that promoted good ideas, but we didn’t force have noticed that those in power those ideas on you. It was your no longer want you to think for choice which ideas you wanted to yourself. They just want you to use and which ones you did not.

We did not make very many buy into their narrative because laws as we didn’t need them. I’ll they are arrogant enough to think never say that we did not have our that they know better than you do troubles, but more people were in about running your life. agreement on how to fix them.

For instance, stop and think of Remember God, Family, the amount of propaganda it took Country?

This is still an allegedly to convince people that cattle are a threat to our world. Yes, cow gas is Christian nation with 76 percent just terrible according to scientists claiming to be Christian. Just a few short years ago that figure was at 86 paid by leftists.

That is the first thing that came percent and we seem to be declining to my mind when I was walking on fast into a secular nation.

I think there are many factors the back streets of a city in Malaysia including the decline in the integwhere they still dump human excrerity of many churches, no strong ment out the second story window leaders in clergy, no more consisteninto an open trough below. cy in churches, a Communist style At the time my mind immediately Catholic Pope, churches that bow went to my alleged “evil cattle” grazdown to popular opinion instead of ing peacefully in our pasture back being steadfast in their tenets. home. I knew right then and there Let’s re-examine the lack of that if I went home and slaughprayer in schools, the lack of discitered all my cattle, then people pline in schools, and the lack of the in Malaysia would magically have “Pledge Of Allegiance” in schools. improved sanitation. The sad part Couple that with the teacher’s union is that there are a number of people and the advancement of “woke” in this world that are brain dead education. enough to actually believe what I Common sense will tell you that just told you.

I

Do Colorado Concentrated Feeding Operations Need Tighter Regulation?

Environmental groups team with DU law school demanding a new permitting system they say will better protect clean water

by Michael Booth, Colorado Sun

C

olorado may not have the reputation of some states for hosting massive “factory farms,” the way Iowa and North Carolina are associated with hogs, or Wisconsin is seen as a dairy assembly line.

But “concentrated animal feeding operations,” an industry-preferred term, do dot the Rocky Mountain landscape, from beef feedlots to big hog operations to sprawling poultry sheds. And a confrontation looms on whether they need more regulation to ensure water quality in rural Colorado.

Two environmental nonprofits successful in demanding tougher water quality regulation for big agriculture want Colorado courts to force state regulators into a new permitting system for large concentrations of animals. Colorado allows nearly a hundred mass operations to proceed under a general Clean Water Act permit that opponents say leaves loopholes, and fails to factor in how each farm operates or require enough water testing.

Though it’s not decided yet whether the protest will move forward in state administrative court or a state district court, the legal challenge is formally on, with a hearing scheduled for Halloween.

The Center for Biological Diversity and Food & Water Watch want Colorado regulators to write individual permits for each big farm, accounting for local conditions and

requiring monitoring wells to make sure groundwater isn’t tainted by runoff of manure or chemicals. The nonprofits have teamed up for the legal action with the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law. “Colorado can’t continue to pick and choose which industries get a pass for their unlawful pollution,” said Center for Biological Diversity senior attorney Hannah Connor.

“They aggregate such significant amounts of animal waste and other pathogens and pollutants, and then have to dispose of those in ways that are really potentially harmful to environmental quality, water quality, and public and ecosystem health,” Connor said in an interview.

Colorado has already recognized that big farms pose big threats and back in the 1990s, separated out large hog operations for individual permitting, Connor said. Colorado’s other large farm operations, including feedlots where cattle are fattened before market and large dairy operations, deserve more Clean Water Act scrutiny, she said.

The Colorado Livestock Association rejects calls for a permit overhaul as an intervenor on behalf of large farm operators, saying Colorado’s general permit is much tougher than all other states called out by environmental groups.

Large Colorado farms also dismiss the “factory farm” label, saying they should be referred to as “concentrated” operations, according to Colorado Livestock Association CEO Zach Riley.

Each operation must get the permit, so it is in effect an individual requirement Riley said. Colorado already includes water monitoring and testing in the general permit, he added. The operators have also offered to settle the dispute with permit language even more protective of water sources, but the environmental advocates nixed that idea, Riley said.

Individually crafted permits would raise expenses and overlap

there is nothing more damaging to a young child than having to learn about the oddities of sex before they are ready for it. They should be learning how to read and write in school. I can see no reason for anyone in America to send any child to a public school.

This degradation continues with another of our great institutions, professional sports. What a laughingstock they have become since they became activists instead of athletes.

Let’s talk about men competing in women’s sports at the collegiate level. How sick is that? This country used to stand for fairness. There is nothing fair about any of this.

Last, but not least the Federal Bureau of Investigations used to protect the public from America’s worst criminals. Now it seems that the criminals are using the FBI and the Justice Department to control the outcome of the next election, by raiding the home of their future opponent.

In our 246-year existence this has never happened, but since it has, this may be the end of our great Republic. If they can do this to a former President of The United States, then they can do it to you. Beware, as this is becoming a very dangerous and unagricultural America that we are living in.

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existing rules, and the effort is just an extension of ongoing advocacy attacks on big animal operations, Riley said.

“It’s death by a thousand cuts,” he said.

Nor is he a fan of environmental groups based elsewhere employing “the hometown university” to handle their case.

“Colorado has the best system out there,” Riley said. The existing permit already includes detailed rules on how much animal waste can be spread, and how often, for example, Riley said. “Our permit is very strict.”

The nonprofit advocacy groups said they won a victory in a similar case in Idaho last year. The federal EPA runs Idaho’s general permit program, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Idaho’s system didn’t guarantee enough water testing. States that do their own permitting are now watching to see how the EPA writes more detailed water quality rules for Idaho, said Tyler Lobdell, a staff attorney in Idaho for Food and Water Watch.

“You have these fields that are receiving the manure, and what we’re demanding and what’s legally required is groundwater monitoring, specifically at the production area, where the animals are confined,” Lobdell said. That could include, Lobdell added, a required series of groundwater monitoring wells above the waste areas as a control test, and more wells below areas where contaminants are spread.

“That’s the pollution the facility has contributed in that area,” he said.

State water quality officials did not offer comments on the details of the permitting challenge, but said, “The permit we issued complies with all federal requirements established in the Clean Water Act and add additional groundwater protections established in state specific rules,” according to Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment spokeswoman Gabi Johnston.

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2022 Fall Marketing Edition

Minnie Lou Bradley to be Honored OSU HONORS DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI AWARD RECIPIENTS

T

he Oklahoma State University Alumni Association is honoring Minnie Lou Bradley and five others as Distinguished Alumni Award recipients.

This year’s honorees will be recognized at a public reception at the ConocoPhillips OSU Alumni Center on Friday, September 9. They will also be honored on field during the Arizona State vs. OSU football game on September 10 at Boone Pickens Stadium.

Minnie Lou Bradley graduated from OSU (then Oklahoma A&M) in 1953 with a bachelor’s degree in animal husbandry. When she enrolled in 1949, she was the first female to enroll in animal husbandry in the university’s history.

During her time on campus, she was the first female to compete on the Oklahoma A&M Livestock Judging Team and became one of the most successful livestock judges at the college.

After graduation, Bradley worked for the Texas Angus Association as an assistant to the executive secretary and a fieldman. She would also work for Angus Valley Farms in Tulsa in 1954. The following year, Bradley married her husband, Bill, and the couple purchased a ranch in Childress County, Texas. They started Bradley 3 Ranch with 20 cows and 3,300 acres.

In 1986, the Bradleys started B3R Country Meats, Inc. The beef processing facility allowed them to produce high-quality beef while providing ranchers with a values-based system. It was one of the first facilities to produce beef for the Certified Angus Beef brand Natural. The same year, the Bradley 3 Ranch created a system for collecting ultrasound and carcass data to develop more predictable genetic packages.

Bradley has been honored many times throughout her life. She was named a Graduate of Distinction by the OSU Department of Animal Science in 1988 and was presented the Master Breeder Award by the department in 2010. Bradley was presented with the DASNR Distinguished Alumni Award in 2015.

In addition to honors from her alma mater, Bradley was also the second woman inducted into the Saddle and Sirloin Portrait Gallery in 2014. She has been named a Top 40 Cattleman by Beef Magazine and was inducted into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame. She has also received the Seedstock Commitment Award.

Bradley currently resides in Memphis, Texas. She and her husband, Bill, have one daughter, Mary Lou. Bradley is a member of the OSU Alumni Association.

Page 21

Livestock Market Digest

Gib Yardley, Beaver, Utah, Receives World SimmentalFleckvieh Federation Golden Book Award

G

ib Yardley, Beaver, Utah, is a recipient of the 2022 World Simmental-Fleckvieh Federation Golden Book Award, which is the American Simmental Association’s (ASA) highest honor.

Selected by the ASA Board of Trustees, recipients of this award are lifelong promoters of the Simmental breed. Yarldey was recognized during ASA’s Fall Focus event, on Saturday, August 27, in Roanoke, Virginia.

Gilbert “Gib” Yardley traces his ranching operation back to 1856, when his great-grandfather and 13 other men settled in the Beaver River Valley of south-central Utah and focused on making a living with cattle of mixed breeding. Over the years, various breeds have been used. In 1920 and again in the late 1930s and ’40s, Herefords were brought to the area from Kansas and Colorado. A few years later,

Angus bulls were introduced in a crossbreeding scenario.

Then in the late 1960s, when Simmentals and other European breeds were first brought to North America, Yardley took a trip across the Canadian border to check them out and liked what he saw. In fact, he liked them so much that he promptly introduced Simmental and Maine Anjou bulls, providing beneficial heterosis.

Older cows are required to winter on open range without hay, must calve on their own, and bring in a profitable calf. Cows that cannot hold their own under those conditions are rigidly culled. This past spring, Yardley held his 49th Annual Sale. As usual, cattle sold to repeat buyers from several states throughout the West and beyond.

He is a strong believer in promotion through attendance at major livestock events, maintaining

a presence at such events as the National Western in Denver; the Cow Palace in San Francisco; the Royal in Kansas City; the North American in Louisville; and the Pacific International in Portland. In 2006, he was singled out for honors during the National Western’s 100th anniversary celebration.

He has built a reputation as a keeper of his faith, his family, his cattle, and his land. Though a confirmed bachelor for many years, shortly after being trampled by a rank cow while ear-tagging her calf, Gib asked Denise Evans to marry him, even while he was being patched up in the emergency room.

Gib and Denise are parents to seven girls and one boy. Not surprisingly, his kids can brand a calf and know how to read a pedigree.

In a joint statement, Gib’s children were effusive in their praise.

“All of us grew up working right beside Dad and we think we learned from the best. Yardley Cattle Company is a family operation where family values are core to our business success. Dad has believed as much in raising solid children as he does in producing solid cattle.”

Gib Yardley

Founded in 1968, the American Simmental Association is headquartered in Bozeman, MT. ASA is committed to leveraging technology, education and collaboration to accelerate genetic profitability for the beef industry. In keeping with its commitment, ASA, along with its partners, formed International Genetic Solutions — the world’s largest genetic evaluation of beef cattle.

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R-CALF USA works on various issues that affect the continued profitability and viability of independent U.S. cattle producers, such as mandatory country of origin labeling (MCOOL), checkoff reform, animal identification, livestock price reporting, animal health concerns, captive supplies, and packer ownership of livestock, as well as various trade agreements.

R-CALF USA works on your behalf, keeps you informed, and gives you the tools to influence beneficial outcomes. Your vote and voice direct what issues R-CALF USA fights for on each proposed policy resolution.

Join or renew your membership today.

Member benefits include: the quarterly True Grit magazine, the bimonthly Cattlemen’s Newsletter, text and email alerts, a voice: all cattle-owning members have the opportunity to vote on proposed R-CALF USA policies (one-member/onevote), representation from the largest national organization exclusively representing independent U.S. cattle producers in Washington, D.C., and toll-free recorded updates 1-877-99-RCALF (72253).

To learn more, scan the code below or visit www.r-calfusa.com.

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www.r-calfusa.com (406) 252-2516 r-calfusa@r-calfusa.com PO Box 30715 Billings, MT 59107

Page 22

2022 Fall Marketing Edition

Livestock Market Digest

Illegal Immigration Keeps Arizona Cattle Ranchers Armed, Awake at Night on the Border

by Allan Stein

C

attle ranchers Joe and Patty Scelso didn’t always feel the need to carry sidearms walking on their property near Palominas, Arizona.

Twenty-eight years ago, the Rockin JP Ranch was their dream of a country homestead come true— 103 acres of lush grassland, towering cypress, and low-slung mesquite framed with distant green mountain peaks.

It was a quiet place—perfect for raising a small herd of cattle and staging rodeos.

Today, their dream has gone south as illegal migrants continue

marching north through the unfinished border wall fence with Mexico just two miles from their property in Palominas, Arizona.

The illegals use their land with abandon as a way station waiting for cars—even taxis—to come and pick them up.

They come at “all hours,” Joe Scelso said, sitting on his front porch, watching ominous thunderclouds gather on the horizon.

At least for now, the monsoon rains have stemmed the constant flow of illegals onto their land.

“They were coming in here— one, two, three at a time,” he said.

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A step ladder straddles an electrified fence near the border wall fence in Hereford, Ariz., to usher illegal immigrants across private property on Aug. 24. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)

“People will come out of the bushes, pick them up, and drive them out of here.

“I finally put up that gate to keep them [out], but they keep coming through the gate.”

The trash the illegals leave behind includes used feminine hygiene products, diapers, toilet paper, and human feces—“you name it,” Scelso told The Epoch Times.

“Whatever they don’t need or want, they throw on the ground.

Now, they all wear camouflage.

They never used to.”

“It’s just gotten worse and worse and worse. Better under Trump? Oh, yes,” he said.

Down by the river lies the unfinished border wall fence.

While the wall doesn’t stop every illegal, Scelso said, “it slows it down considerably.”

The Scelsos say they don’t fear for their lives since they’re armed constantly and have big dogs for safety.

Even so, they’re watchful—and prepared for anything.

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ment’s current open border policy and with law enforcement in short supply.

The solution to illegal immigration, Joe Scelso says, is to “seal the border.”

“Finish that wall,” his wife added.

Absent a strict border policy from Washington, Arizona’s Governor Doug Ducey recently signed an order directing the Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs to plug the gaps in the Yuma border wall with shipping containers.

The project, expected to cost $6 million, has sparked criticism that the measure falls short of an actual border wall that works.

“Arizona has had enough. We can’t wait any longer,” said Ducey in a recent statement.

He added that President Joe Biden’s “lack of urgency on border security is a dereliction of duty.”

“For the last two years, Arizona has made every attempt to work with Washington to address the crisis on our border. Time and time again, we’ve stepped in to clean their mess.”

On June 30, Ducey signed the “most meaningful border security legislation in Arizona history,” earmarking $564 million to secure the border with a physical barrier and other improvements.

The legislation includes $15 million for a Department of Public Safety southern border coordinated response center and $30 million to combat drug trafficking, human smuggling, illegal immigration, and other border-related crimes.

It also seeks to resolve critical public safety staff shortages and equip law enforcement with surveillance technology to target border crime and illegal immigration.

In Cochise County, population 125,500, on the southeastern corner of Arizona, Sheriff Mark Dannels lauded Ducey’s order as a step forward to securing the border.

“When the southern border is secure, Cochise County and the entire state are safer,” Dannels said in a statement. “Lax border policies from the federal government and U.S. Congress are putting Arizonans in danger.”

All that sounds well and good, the Scelsos say, but doesn’t yet address illegal immigration on their land.

The couple says their rancher neighbors are just as upset over the worsening situation with migrant trespassers.

One time Joe Scelso said he

encountered a woman and her boyfriend on his property and identified them as humanitarians helping the illegals.

“I know why you’re here. Don’t come back again. You’ll be sorry the next time,” he told them.

The woman came back a year later, he said.

“Since the open border policy started, it’s gotten worse,” said Scelso, a retired San Diego police officer. “We had one night where three vehicles [arrived] together.

They were honking their horns.

Thirty minutes later, three more vehicles came in.”

Scelso said he called the Border Patrol, the Highway Patrol, and the county sheriff’s department—but “nobody showed up.”

“I don’t care who answers the phone. I want somebody here to help us,” Scelso said.

Patty Scelso said law enforcement officers “really try” to be helpful, “but they tell me they’re stretched thin. They’ll tell me on the phone.”

One time an illegal tried to steal the Scelso’s all-terrain vehicle but pushed the kill switch by accident, rendering the ATV inoperable.

“Otherwise, it would have been gone,” Joe Scelso said.

“They come through here and turn on our water faucets. They fill their water bottles and leave [the faucets] running; they come across the river from the property behind us. They have the combination of our fences.

“Look out there. Do you see how thick that brush is? This [area] used to be like that. I cleared all that out.

When the brush was like that, they’d come right up a short distance from the house,” Scelso said.

Patty Scelso remembered when she nearly stepped on an illegal alien asleep in a gulley in thick bushes.

“There were a lot of bushes you couldn’t see,” she said. “My horse almost stepped on them.”

The Scelsos say their neighbors feel the same way—”pretty well perturbed.”

“The only thing that’s going to solve this problem is if they seal the border again and start screening who comes in,” Joe Scelso said.

One thing is sure—he won’t let anyone drive him off his property.

“They’re not going to chase me out of here. This is my place,” Scelso said.

Allan Stein is an Epoch Times reporter who covers the state of Arizona.

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2022 Fall Marketing Edition

Page 23

Livestock Market Digest

FSA Adjusting to Fit the Situation Facing Livestock Producers

by Zach Ducheneaux, Administrator, Farm Service Agency

A

s a former rancher myself, I know the tremendous investments—in time, sweat, and thought—that producers make even before their calves hit the ground.

My experiences lead me to firmly believe that, here at the Farm Service Agency (FSA), we must find flexibilities where possible to help our farmers and ranchers best meet the challenges of the day.

In recent meetings with Senator John Hoeven, FSA North Dakota State Executive Director Marcy Svenningsen, and livestock producers in North Dakota impacted by catastrophic 2021 winter storms, it became apparent that our Livestock Indemnity Program (LIP) payment rates were not reflective of the true market value for non-adult beef, beefalo, bison, and dairy animals. It was time for us to pivot.

The Livestock Indemnity Program provides benefits to livestock owners and some contract growers for livestock deaths exceeding normal mortality from eligible adverse weather events, certain predation losses and reduced sales prices due to injury from an eligible loss.

Indemnity payments are made at a rate of 75 percent of the market value of the livestock on the day before the date of death. I don’t mind saying that, under our previous payment rates, cutting a LIP check to a rancher for $150 for a calf in today’s market came nowhere near covering the yearlong investment in carrying the cow through pregnancy and carrying the calf from birth to sale.

To better capture ranchers’ investments in their animals, we recently announced increased LIP payment rates for beef, beefalo, bison, and dairy animals less than 250 pounds. These now-updated payment rates are reflective of the substantial increased cost of these non-adult livestock in 2022: The updated LIP payment rates are effective immediately and will be applied retroactively starting January 1, 2022, for all eligible causes of loss including excessive heat, tornado, winter storms, and other qualifying natural disasters. Producers who have already received LIP payments for 2022 will receive an additional payment, if applicable, commensurate with these updated rates. For details on eligibility and payment rates, you can review our LIP fact sheet.

OTHER PROGRAM IMPROVEMENTS These LIP policy changes complement enhancements we recently made to our Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honey Bees and Farm-Raised Fish Program (ELAP) – changes that also were derived from the direct input and feedback of producers and the livestock groups.

In addition to paying above normal costs for hauling water to drought-stricken livestock, we also added compensation for hauling feed to livestock and livestock to forage or other grazing acres. And, in 2021, we added fish raised for food as an ELAP-eligible commodity because producers and industry leaders expressed the need.

By continually evaluating how we

can deliver our programs in a manner that is meaningful to the farmers and ranchers we serve, we demonstrate our ongoing commitment to stakeholder engagement and our dedication to improving programs for livestock producers first signaled by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack during a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing earlier this year.

It has been said actions speak louder than words, but when it comes to FSA programs that directly affect producers’ livelihoods and way of life and ultimately impact food security for all Americans, I believe the two are not mutually exclusive. Rest assured that when producers and producer groups speak, FSA and I, to the extent possible, will do whatever is within our power to turn those words into actions.

FSA Administrator Zach Ducheneaux at home on his family’s ranching operation on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. (Photo Credit: Kate Bradley Byers, Western Horseman Magazine)

Zach Ducheneaux is the Administrator of USDA’s Farm Service Agency. He can be reached at zach.ducheneaux@ usda.gov

▫

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Ranch Location 1818 Arabela Road Arabela , NM

Page 24

Low-Stress Stockmanship PART TWO – PASSING ON THE KNOWLEDGE

by Heather Smith Thomas

B

ud Williams revolutionized livestock handling during the 60 years that he and his wife Eunice worked for various ranches and feedlots. During those years he had many students who learned his methods. While he and Eunice were working at Vee Tee Feeders in Alberta, other feedlots and ranchers sent some of their employees there to learn. Later, Bud was talked into putting on presentations to give more people a chance to learn his techniques.

Whit Hibbard–a fourth generation cattle and sheep rancher whose family owns Sieben Cattle in north central Montana says the term low stress livestock handling is synonymous with Bud Williams. “Bud developed the methods, and Allan Nation (who edited and published The Stockman Grass Farmer until his death a few years ago) coined the term. In 1990 I talked to Allan about this, and also asked Eunice Williams about it, wondering where the term came from. Allan admitted coming up with it, to describe the unique livestock handling that Bud was doing,” said Hibbard.

Bud never liked that term, however. Most people don’t fully understand what low stress should be, and their perception is usually wrong.

“Many people immediately jump to the conclusion that it means not putting any pressure on cattle. They

2022 Fall Marketing Edition

Livestock Market Digest

equate low stress with no stress, but that doesn’t work. Bud astounded a lot of people by how much pressure he put on animals, if the situation called for it. He put on whatever pressure was necessary, and it might be a lot, but it was proper pressure.

It was at the right angle, the right amount, the right timing, the right release. He clearly conveyed to the animals what he wanted, and then it was over–and that’s what made it low stress,” Hibbard said.

To understand how this works, it helps if you can see someone doing it correctly. One of the misconceptions people have is that they think it takes too much time, but the opposite is true if it’s done properly. It saves a lot of time.

The whole purpose is efficiency and getting the job done as quickly as possible without much stress on the animals. “If you do it properly you are not making the mistakes that conventional handlers do; they get the cattle upset, uncooperative and resistant, wanting to go back, losing their trust. Then a person has to try to fix those mistakes, which takes more time,” he said.

In his clinics he focuses on fundamentals of low-stress livestock handling and the importance of proper mindset and attitude—and working with our animals and preparing them for future production events. Most people would never try to take an untrained horse to work cattle, or a young, inexperienced

stock dog. They give those animals some training first before they have to do the job. It should be the same with cattle.

“There are 12 basic principles that are inherent in Bud’s methods, and 10 techniques, so at a clinic we go over those, with a lot of supportive videos. These are very short, averaging about 15 seconds in length. During the morning clinic, people see at least 100 videos, so they can see what we are talking about,” he says.

“Then in the afternoon we focus on practical applications–typical production events, such as how to properly drive cattle, and how to drive cows and calves. We spend a lot of time talking about corral work and everything involved–such as emptying pens, alleyways, and sorting–how to use whatever crowd pen you have, whether it’s a wedge, tub or Bud Box. We talk about how to work a lead-up, how to work a squeeze chute properly, scale loading, and loading a trailer or semi. We address specialty topics if there is time (generally in a two-day clinic),” Hibbard explains.

These topics include fence-line weaning, riding for health, range management, and sometimes other topics, depending on the group.

These might include pasture doctoring, low-stress bison handling, predation mitigation, feedlot animal health, receiving and destressing, working with wild and feral animals, loading an animal into a trailer out in big range pastures with no corral, etc.

These techniques are safer for the animals and the people handling them and also saves/makes money for the rancher. “It blows people’s minds on the amount of shrink we cause when we handle animals improperly. For example, at our stocker operation we save about $38,000 in shrink every time we load out 500 yearlings.” That’s the difference between how much the cattle shrunk before these techniques were used, compared to afterward.

Paul Kernaleguen is a dairyman who is part of a small company (Kattle Squared Services) in Saskatchewan that before the COVID pandemic hosted educational clinics, and stockmanship was always one of the topics. “We’d bring people in to do the clinics, like the Williams family, or one of their students like Dawn Hnatow and Whit Hibbard,” Paul says.

“The work that Bud and Eunice have done has made a big difference

in how a lot of folks handle cattle now. I have a friend who knew Bud and rode with him at Vee Tee Feeders at Lloydminster. He is a veterinarian and attended talks by Temple Grandin. He was able to meet her and told her he had met Bud. She took him aside and they talked for 2 hours. He later said that if the cattle industry could even capture 10 percent of what Bud did, it would totally change the industry,” Paul says. There’s no shortage of things to learn, and figuring out all the things you can do with your animals once you understand them–and work with them instead of against them.

Dawn Hnatow grew up in Alberta on a mixed cattle and grain operation. “I was working at Vee Tee Feeders in Lloydminster, and this is when I first met Bud. I spent 10 years working with him there, learning his way of handling livestock and appreciated how much better it was for the livestock and for the people,” she says.

When Bud and Eunice moved back to the U.S., Dawn continued working for Vee Tee Feeders. “Then I ended up moving to Texas and became the livestock manager on the ranch they were living on. I spent 10 years at that ranch and then moved to Sulfur Springs to manage an operation for a lady from West Texas. I am currently leasing that ranch and another ranch–and do consulting and teaching as well,” she explains.

“I feel I need to share what I was blessed to be able to learn. Not many people have the kind of access to Bud that we did, at Vee Tee and after. Now that he’s gone, Whit and Paul and I are very committed to preserving his legacy and his knowledge to the best of our ability and recollection. It’s a very important message for ranchers, hobby farmers, and anyone who handles livestock,” Dawn says.

“Whit has been traveling all over the world teaching these methods fulltime for the past several years.

Paul and I are still running our own businesses so we travel less, but I intend to do more,” she says.

“It’s a big paradigm shift when you switch from making animals do things rather than letting them do something (working with them instead of against them). This whole revolution came first in the horse industry with Tom Dorrance and Ray Hunt.”

Those horsemen broke trail for this movement. “There’s a lot of similarity between that way of think-

ing and the way Bud taught. With cattle you are dealing with multiple animals rather than training a horse, but the concept is the same,” Dawn says. Many people still don’t understand, however, that cattle are just as trainable as horses and a person needs to use some of those same methods to get the proper response from cattle.

“But not many people actually consider working with their livestock to prepare them for what we need them to do. This is what was so revolutionary about what Bud had to say,” she says.

This was the missing piece, and makes so much sense, but no one had really done it, prior to Bud. Most people who handled cattle did it with a “cowboy” mentality, pitting themselves against the animal, rather than realizing that the cow is an individual (like a horse) with a personality and can be influenced by how you handle her.

When Whit Hibbard teaches clinics, he talks about his own background and the struggles he went through. “I resisted low-stress methods for 20 years before I finally surrendered to trying them and now I consider those 20 years wasted.

When I did embrace this, I went at it wholeheartedly but it took about five years of diligent work to rewrite my livestock-handling software and replace conventional methods with low-stress. Every time I worked livestock I had to consciously make that decision that I was going to work on this, and had to constantly suppress old habits,” he says.

Most people who grow up with cattle have to do this, in order to change. Ever since there have been cows and cowboys, there have been a few who figured out better ways to handle cattle. Some developed more wisdom and patience–and observed the nature of cattle and how to handle them more efficiently and safely.

“They’d been in enough wrecks, over time, to try to figure out a way to do it better!” Whit says. But it took someone like Bud Williams, who was a contrary thinker–to come up with the ideal ways to work cattle.

“He was a contrarian to the core, and embodied five important personal characteristics. When studying livestock handling and asking the basic question of how to work the animals better, first of all Bud was a true genius. Second, he had phenomenal observation skills. Third, he was a workaholic and all he did was work livestock–seven days a week for many years–with total

Bud explaining stockmanship with a herd of reindeer

2022 Fall Marketing Edition focus and commitment. Fourth, he had a photographic memory and could recall every cattle-handling incident, with details. Fifth, he questioned everything. Whatever everybody else was doing, he’d do the opposite.” And if anyone said that something couldn’t be done, he’d find a way to do it.

GIVING THE CATTLE INDUSTRY A BETTER IMAGE – This is a quiet revolution that needs to happen. The cattle industry is under pressure from animal rights groups, environmentalists, and people who want to do away with cattle on public lands or animal agriculture altogether. “Anything we can do to mitigate the negative image those folks are trying to portray of us, is a good thing,” says Dawn.

“Sadly, we do have some things to answer for in the cattle industry.

If we can step up and try to correct those problems ourselves, we will have a better image. I don’t relish the idea of celebrities directing policy on how livestock should be handled! Those are the people with the voice and the money and the power (and a lot of influence) but they are not the people who know how to fix it,” she explains.

John Smith (Plateau Cattle Company, Nanton, Alberta) is a third generation rancher who has been interested in low-stress stockmanship for a long time. “When I was a kid in the early 1990s I worked awhile in a feedlot, checking pens and working cattle and that’s when I first heard about Bud Williams. The owner of the feedlot I worked for sent the crew to Vee Tee Feeders at Lloydminster for a 3-day course that Bud taught. That was my first exposure to his method of handling cattle and it was incredible,” John says.

“This changed a lot of what we did at the feedlot where I worked, and how we worked cattle and viewed working cattle. It was a great experience for me.”

It’s good for the cattle industry to be able to show that ranchers do a good job of handling cattle humanely. “There are many people who don’t understand how or why things happen on ranches. If we can get show the public a good image, it will be better for the industry–with the facilities and methods Temple Grandin has developed, and the techniques Bud Williams developed.

We can show people that there is a reason why we do these things, because we don’t want to hurt our livestock. We are always under the microscope,” John says.

Ranchers are essentially fighting for existence because there are people who think there should be no animal agriculture. “They keep trying to find any reason to get after us–whether it’s blaming cattle for climate change or for animal welfare issues.” Low-stress stockmanship is a win-win because it is better for the animals and the people caring for them; it makes ranching easier and also more profitable.

“My dad was pretty good, but there wasn’t much thought given to corral design or ‘feeling’ or ‘reading’ the cattle. It was more a matter of getting behind them and chasing them where you are going. There was no thought given to working with the cow’s mind,” John says.

Cows were considered dumb animals that had to be forced to do what you wanted, rather than realizing that cattle have a thought process you can work with.

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Page 25

Livestock Market Digest

Diversification is the Key to Success

“W

e want to balance maternal traits and have a mother cow at home that’ll keep us in business.

Just because you have an incredible animal that will do well in the feedyard, if we don’t have a mother cow that will work for us out on the ranch, then we haven’t accomplished anything.”

That’s how Chad Ledbetter looks at the beef business. Ledbetter and his wife, Stephanie, are the third generation to ranch in northeastern Oklahoma near Okmulgee, south of Tulsa, on an outfit his grandfather started in 1950. His grandma Joan still helps by delivering meals to the fields and pastures. His parents, Chris and Gayla, are still active in the business and their son Cayden, 19, and daughter Callie, 16, are the fourth generation on the land.

“They’re as good as it gets,” he brags about his children’s abilities as ranch hands. “They’ve been a blessing to my wife and I.” But then again, hearing Ledbetter brag on his kids isn’t surprising. As passionate as he is about his cattle and the land, and make no mistake about that, he’s even more passionate about his family. “If you’ve got your family around you and the freedoms we enjoy in this country and the blessings…it really all gets down to God, faith, and family.”

Ledbetter is pretty proud of his cattle, too. “We’re a multi-faceted operation,” he says. “We farm and ranch.” The family runs around 800 cows, has a small feedlot on the ranch, and farms corn, wheat, and soybeans, much of which is feed for the cattle. Ledbetter also custom feeds some of his calves in a feedlot in Iowa.

The cattle side of the operation is both commercial and purebred.

“Our deal is red-hided cattle,” he says. “We have purebred Hereford and purebred Red Angus on our registered side.” They’ll develop around 200 bulls a year as well as around 400 heifers that they market as commercial replacements.

CATTLE DEVELOPMENT What’s more, he’s developing a couple lines of composite red-hided cattle. For cattle in more southern climates, he’s developing a red, heat tolerant composite of Red Angus with a touch of Senepol or Brahman or both. “And then a Fleckvieh-Red Angus composite, a component we use for maternal heterosis as well as some added yield and performance in the feedyard,” he says.

Ledbetter is passionate about developing cattle for the real world.

“Big bodied, high volume females that are stout and wedge-shaped and low input, low maintenance kind of females that have a thickness and a little punch to them.” He develops his cattle on a forage-based system that allows them to express their genetic potential in the same environment they’ll need to produce in when his customers take the bulls and heifers home.

“We have found that what works for us is maternal first. It’s all about the mother cow. We feed cattle, we finish cattle. So yes, feedlot performance and carcass quality are important. But without that factory at home, without that mother cow that’s extremely efficient and does her job the very best, none of us are going to stay in business. So number

one, it’s all about the mother cow.”

With the family’s emphasis on maternal genetics, some might wonder if feedyard performance and carcass traits get shorted. A look at Ledbetter’s fed cattle closeouts tells the tale.

The closeouts show fed cattle grading around 90 percent Choice and Prime and mainly Yield Grade 2. “And on the gain, depending on the conditions, they’ll be high 3’s,” he says. “Might hit 4 every now and again. But that’s extremely dependent on weather conditions and time of year.”

Beyond that, the family has developed their own brand of locker beef from cattle they finish at home.

They’ll sell everything from sides of beef to individual packages off the farm.

“We feel most of the folks who tried it are now staying with it,” he says. “They see the difference and they really like having a locally grown product that they know where the cattle come from and they know where most of the feed is grown that’s going through the cattle (as well as knowing the family that raised the cattle). So it’s a nice little addition to the business.”

NUTRITION + GENETICS = WOW One of the fundamental truths about cattle production is that the best genetics in the world can’t be revealed without an adequate source of nutrition. “And that’s certainly an area where Riomax® has definitely helped us,” he says.

Ledbetter says they’ve seen the benefits that the orange tubs bring to the table in every segment of their operation, “whether it’s cows grazing in range conditions or cattle that

we’re growing and developing for breeding stock, or in the feedyard.

No matter what stage of life the animal is at, we’re seeing the benefits of Riomax®.”

However, he was very skeptical at first. “When I heard what the product costs, that’ll make anybody skeptical who’s trying to make a living.” But he got over the sticker shock and gave it a try.

“I have to admit, once we tried the product and quit looking at the cost per tub and started looking at it as a cost per day per animal, that opened up a whole new avenue.

The added performance, the added health benefits that we saw and are seeing, have just been tremendous,” he says.

“When you break it down, the tub is not costing us money, we feel it’s making us money. So that’s been a real eye opener.”

The cattle had been on the product for not quite a year as this was written, so he didn’t have many hard numbers. But his eye tells him everything he needs to know.

SPENDING MONEY TO MAKE MONEY “I think there are several different ways that I would break it down to look at it,” he says when challenged on his statement that the tubs don’t cost money, they make money. “You’ve got to look at your input costs for feed and supplements and your grazing season, and you’ve got to look at added conception rate on your cows—the cows that are breeding back in the first heat cycle and tightening that calving window closer to 45 days.”

Added weaning weight is another area that goes along with a tight calving season, which adds value two different ways. “One is the calf is performing so much better out there beside the cow, getting what they need (from the Riomax® tub).

But we also know for every 21-day

heat cycle, we can add close to 60 pounds to that calf.” The more calves born in the first month of calving season adds dollars at sale time.

Ledbetter feels he got around 50 pounds more weaning weight on his calves that were conceived before the cows were on Riomax®, but were on the tubs from the day they were born. He expects that number to be higher for his first calf crop weaned from cows that had been on Riomax® year around.

“And thirdly, I would mention the added health benefits. The cattle have just been so much healthier; much less sickness, less cattle needing treatment for foot rot, pinkeye, pneumonia. The cattle really are staying healthier and we’re cutting antibiotic costs and getting added performance.”

In fact, Ledbetter is so impressed with his results that he’s now a Riomax® dealer. “If folks are on the fence about whether or not to try the product, you can sure take it from me,” he says. “I was extremely skeptical because I was concerned about input costs. But at this point in time, outside of some of the things we’ve done on our genetics, I think it’s probably one of the better things that we have found since we’ve been raising livestock,” he claims.

“I don’t want folks to think it’s fairy dust or that it takes the place of good management or good animal husbandry. But it certainly adds a whole new dimension to what you’re able to achieve with the genetics you have and the environment you’re in.”

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Page 26

High ESG Scores Foreshadow Economic Decline AGRICULTURE WORLD WIDE IN THE CROSSHAIRS

by Gabriella Hoffman, Opinion townhall.com

W

ith the recent passage of the costly, yet deceptively named, Inflation Reduction Act in the Senate, the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) movement will be further emboldened. The IRA prioritizes funding for environmental justice, clean energy investments, and achieving net zero emissions, among its climate provisions. The bill’s passage, however, exposes the public to its shortcomings and harmful economic footprint.

ESG’s most troubling aspect— its reporting regime—is facing immense scrutiny because rankings allow companies and governments to project a “good” social responsibility image. But do they hold water? Given their subjective nature and unaccountability stemming from self-reporting, ESG rankings are flawed.

Scores correspond to each of the three prongs—ESG—but the “E” prong measuring an individual country’s carbon and methane emissions doesn’t paint an accurate picture. The World Economics Index scores environmental impact from 0 (high environmental impact) to 100 (low environmental impact) scale.

Unfortunately for ESG boosters, high “E” scores haven’t shielded three nations in the news—Ghana, the Netherlands, and Sri Lanka— from experiencing economic turmoil.

The African nation of Ghana should first be examined. It currently scores a 97.7 out of 100 on the ESG Index. The Ghanaian government was the first in the continent to raise $5 billion from international capital through Green, Social and

2022 Fall Marketing Edition

Livestock Market Digest

Sustainability (GSS) Bonds. GSS bonds fund projects with supposed environmental and social outcomes.

In May 2022, the World Bank called GSS bonds a “new frontier for Africa that will help the continent build a deeper, resilient, and sustainable financing, according to policymakers, regulators, and peer sovereign issuers from across West Africa.”

But instead of the promised “new frontier,” Ghana experienced high consumer inflation and higher cost of living which prompted protests in the capital, Accra. Earlier this year, Moody’s warned global sustainable bond issuance would be “flat” in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—which is down 28 percent from Q1 2021. The Ghanaian government didn’t do itself any favors after imposing a tax on electronic payments at the same time. Now the nation, on the brink of economic collapse, is in talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a bailout.

The Netherlands, the European Union’s largest meat exporter, has also fallen prey to ESG policies.

Scoring a 90.7 rating, the Dutch government last year approved a 13-year $21 billion plan to cut ammonia and nitrogen emissions 50 percent by 2030. The proposal also mandated the number of livestock be reduced by 30 percent to achieve this goal. That would be a disaster for the country’s 54,000 agribusinesses.

Dutch farmers rightfully perceived this as an attack on their industry and livelihoods by organizing countrywide protests.

Unsurprisingly, the Dutch government dismissed their concerns and confessed their goal is to destroy industry jobs, noting, “The honest message ... is that not all farmers can

continue their business.”

It gets worse for the Netherlands.

Last March, Holland adopted a new continent-wide Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) to “improve transparency in the market for sustainable investment products, to prevent greenwashing and to increase transparency around sustainability claims made by financial market participants.”

While the European nation hasn’t collapsed yet, the fertilizer reduction use plan may invite problems later since Dutch inflation rate now stands at 8.6 percent—one of the highest in Western Europe.

Undoubtedly, Sri Lanka’s dalliance with ESG has been a clarion call to the world. Following its president’s resignation, the South Asian nation is basically on the verge of collapse.

How did a country with a 98.1 out of 100 “E” score end up like this? Naturally, the nation rushed to become the first 100 percent organic farming nation in the world.

In April 2021, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa proposed the country ban chemical fertilizer use in farming—a position he ran on during his 2019 presidential run. A group of 30 scientists warned him not to proceed, citing concerns from potential product yield drops.

After the fertilizer ban was adopted, the price of rice reportedly surged 30 percent. By August, the country plunged into an economic crisis. When January rolled around, the country pulled the plug and announced one million rice farmers would be compensated a sum total of $200 million following the botched implementation of the program.

Sri Lanka was praised as a model ESG candidate for committing to carbon neutrality by 2050 and halving its nitrogen use. Today, it’s experiencing 54.6 percent runaway inflation.

The aforementioned Ghana, the Netherlands, and Sri Lanka case studies prove ESG policies have

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ruinous effects on political stability, economic growth, and inflation rates. And these won’t be the last countries with high scores to experience turmoil.

Canada, our neighbor to the north and holder of a 79.5 “E” score, has similarly proposed gutting fertilizer use by 30 percent.

Naturally, this isn’t sitting well with Canadian farmers. And it shouldn’t.

Developing and developed nations need not rely on ESG metrics to measure success. Hinging

economic performance on these subjective scores will incur harm and have no measurable positive impact on the environment.

Gabriella Hoffman is a senior fellow at Independent Women’s Forum and the host of the District of Conservation podcast.

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Whole Foods Sued Over ‘No Antibiotics, Ever’ Claim in Beef

A

by Susan Kelly, meatingplace.com class action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in California accuses Whole Foods of deceiving consumers with a promotional message that all animals in its supply chain are raised without antibiotics.

Whole Foods’ claim to adhere to a standard of “No antibiotics, EVER! across its meat products has been posted on the retailer’s website for a decade and includes not only fresh and frozen meat but all meat used in its prepared foods and store brand products.

The complaint, filed by three consumers and nonprofit Farm Forward, focuses on Whole Foods’ beef products, noting the slogan can be found at retail stores, online and on product packaging.

Independent testing has shown the antibiotic-free beef claim is false, the plaintiffs assert in the complaint. Farm Forward, which states its mission is to end factory farming, said it found that beef sold by Whole Foods contained antibiotic and other pharmaceutical residue.

“The presence of this residue demonstrates the cattle were treated with antibiotics or other pharmaceuticals while being raised,” the complaint said.

The suit contends that consumers overpaid for beef products due to the misleading promotion, including paying a 28 percent markup over traditional retailers for beef tenderloin steak filet mignon. The plaintiffs seek monetary damages and an injunction to stop Whole Foods from using the “misleading” claim to sell beef.

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FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program ACP: WHAT IT IS & HOW IT WORKS

T

he Affordable Connectivity Program is an FCC benefit program that helps ensure that households can afford the broadband they need for work, school, healthcare and more.

The benefit provides a discount of up to $30 per month toward internet service for eligible households and up to $75 per month for households on qualifying Tribal lands. Eligible households can also receive a one-time discount of up to $100 to purchase a laptop, desktop computer, or tablet from participating providers if they contribute more than $10 and less than $50 toward the purchase price.

The Affordable Connectivity Program is limited to one monthly service discount and one device discount per household.

Who Is Eligible for the Affordable Connectivity Program?

A household is eligible for the Affordable Connectivity Program if the household income is at or below 200 percent of the Federal Poverty Guidelines, or if a member of the household meets at least one of the criteria below: ❚❚ Received a Federal Pell Grant during the current award year; ❚❚ Meets the eligibility crite-

ria for a participating provider’s existing low-income internet program; ❚❚ Participates in one of these assistance programs: ❚❚ Free and Reduced-Price School Lunch Program or School Breakfast Program, including at U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Community Eligibility Provision schools. ❚❚ SNAP ❚❚ Medicaid ❚❚ Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Program (Section 8 Vouchers) ❚❚ Project-Based Rental Assistance (PBRA)/202/811 ❚❚ Public Housing ❚❚ Supplemental Income (SSI)

Security

❚❚ WIC ❚❚ Veterans Pension Survivor Benefits

or

❚❚ or Lifeline; ❚❚ Participates in one of these assistance programs and lives on Qualifying Tribal lands: ❚❚ Bureau of Indian Affairs General Assistance ❚❚ Tribal TANF ❚❚ Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations ❚❚ Tribal Head Start (income based) ❚❚ Affordable Housing Programs for American Indians, Alaska Natives or Native Hawaiians If you need to talk to someone about your eligibility or application status, call the ACP Support Center at (877) 384-2575.

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2022 Fall Marketing Edition

Walmart, Ranchers Team Up on BeefProcessing Plant to Ensure Supply

by Patrick Thomas, Wall Street Journal

W

almart Inc. is pushing deeper into the beef business, taking a stake in a planned Nebraska processing plant to help stock its meat sections and increase processing capacity in the beef industry.

On August 31, the retailer acquired a minority stake in Sustainable Beef LLC as part of Walmart’s push to develop a network of meat-processing plants providing Angus beef products for its stores. The deal also provides Walmart and its customers better visibility into the food supply, the company said.

Financial terms of Walmart’s investment weren’t disclosed.

Walmart said it would have a seat on Sustainable Beef’s board.

The partnership between Walmart and the North Platte, Nebraska, beef venture comes as some food retailers move to take greater control of the commodity-processing portion of their supply chains. Costco Wholesale Corp., for example, built its own poultry-pro-

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Page 27

Livestock Market Digest

cessing plant in recent years to help provide the chain’s signature $4.99 rotisserie chickens.

Walmart in 2018 opened its own milk-processing plant in Indiana, supplying more than 600 stores, and in 2020 the company opened a beef-processing plant in Georgia operated by FPL Food, supplying stores in the southeastern U.S. Prices for food and consumer products have been rising across grocery aisles. Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, meatpacking companies said they couldn’t process as many head of cattle as usual because their plants were shortstaffed. That limited meat supplies and pushed prices higher while consumer demand grew, they said.

“One of the things that we saw in the course of the last two years is, quite frankly, capacity is tight,” said Tyler Lehr, a Walmart senior vice president. He said many U.S. grocers struggled to secure meat in 2020 after Covid-19 cases among plant workers cut into production and raised fears of shortages.

Walmart will buy most of the beef produced by Sustainable Beef’s facility, Sustainable Beef was founded by a group of cattle ranchers who have said their processing plant will boost competition—and livestock prices—in one of the country’s top

beef-producing regions by giving local producers another place to sell their cattle.

Ranchers, upset by years of low cattle prices despite the rise of wholesale beef prices over the course of the pandemic, have pushed along with the Biden administration to increase antitrust scrutiny on the beef industry. Four meatpackers process around 85 percent of U.S. cattle, according to the White House, which has promised funding for smaller, regional meat-processing plants, such as Sustainable Beef.

The plant is expected to employ about 800 people and could slaughter 1,500 head of cattle a day, according to its founders. Walmart said that with the help of its investment, Sustainable Beef plans to break ground next month and begin operations by late 2024.

Meatpacking industry executives and analysts have said building and staffing more large-scale processing plants will be difficult given the shortage of labor and rising building costs. Executives of meat companies have said that a heavy reliance on a network of small processors would increase meat prices and further complicate supply chains.

Walmart’s investment in the beef venture gives the project the benefit of a reliable customer for its beef, said Sustainable Beef Chief Executive David Briggs. “It’s a huge plus,” he said.

Write to Patrick Thomas at patrick.thomas@wsj.com

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Utah Sues Biden Over Restored National Monument Boundaries

by Rachel Frazin, The Hill

T

he state of Utah is suing the Biden administration over its decision to restore the size of two national monuments that were shrunk by then-President Trump.

The size of the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears monuments, both located in Utah, were cut by nearly half and about 85 percent, respectively, during the Trump administration.

These monuments were initially designated under the Clinton and Obama administrations.

In deciding to restore the monuments’ original sizes, Biden invoked tribal rights, calling Bears Ears “a place of healing … a place of reverence, a sacred homeland to hundreds of generations of native peoples.”

But, the state of Utah and two of its counties argued in court that the monuments are too big, and a violation of the Antiquities Act, which gives presidents the right to protect historic landmarks and other areas of significance.

They specifically argued that Biden’s move was not compatible with the part of the law that says parcels put aside for protections “shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”

And they said that Biden’s move would “stifle local economic activity, impact local culture and tradition, lock up potentially critical minerals, destroy jobs, and impose exasperating and costly burdens on local and state governments.”

“The vast size of the new monuments draws unmanageable visitation levels without providing the tools necessary to adequately conserve and protect them,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) said in a Twitter thread supporting the suit.

The White House and Interior Department declined to comment, and a Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to The Hill’s request for comment.

But, groups allied with the administration argue that Utah is wrong, and that the landscapes need to be preserved.

“By filing a lawsuit against the federal government over these monuments, the State of Utah is wasting taxpayer money trying to undermine something that is evident to anyone who spends time in these remarkable landscapes—that Bears Ears and Grand Staircase deserve protection,” Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, said in a written statement.

“Both legal and historical precedent support the creation of these landscape-scale monuments,” Rokala added.

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