cattle ranch | Johnny Prime

In my effort to educate you dingbats about all-things-beef, I figured this would be a nice little primer on what’s going on in the industry around the Beef Checkoff Program.

In 1985, the Food Security Act, aka the “Farm Bill,” established something called the Beef Checkoff Program. The program, which later became mandatory in 1988, takes $1 per head on the sale of live domestic and imported cattle, in addition to a comparable grab on imported beef and beef products.

The Beef Checkoff logo, which you will see on all things that the program funds.

The dough is collected by state beef councils, which retain up to half the amount collected. The state councils give the other half to the Cattlemen’s Beef Promotion and Research Board, which oversees the national checkoff program, subject to USDA review.

There are 100 members of the Cattlemen’s Beef Board. They’re nominated by fellow beef producers and appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture, and they represent all segments of the beef industry.

Beef Checkoff was designed to get people to sell more beef and motivate consumers to buy more beef. This is accomplished through advertising, marketing partnerships, public relations, education, research and new-product development. The Beef Act defines six program categories: (1) promotion, (2) research, (3) consumer information, (4) industry information, (5) foreign marketing, and (6) producer communications.

You may have heard the slogan “Beef: It’s what’s for dinner” somewhere in your travels. That’s just one example of their success.

But fear not! By law, checkoff funds can’t be used to promote breeds or brands without USDA and Beef Board Executive Committee approval. Furthermore, checkoff funds can’t be used to influence government policy or action (including lobbying). The law also disallows checkoff money to be invested in production research that isn’t aimed at improving beef products.

The main goal of the program is to increase commodity demand, and thus increase economic growth in the industry. Most beef and dairy producers believe that their beef checkoff dollars bring value back to them. Many of my posts are a result of beef checkoff funding, actually. The MBA and Top of the Class programs in which I participated were funded by the checkoff. Do you think that money went to good use? I do!

Should the funding ever increase (to more than $1 per head, for example) the checkoff may consider putting the “Beef: It’s What’s For Dinner” message back on TV, stepping up consumer education, or increasing foreign market development.

What’s this? A new kind of post? Why, yes, it is!

Meet Your Meat posts are a new way for me to introduce my readers to the people responsible for raising and producing our food. Farmers, ranchers, processors, butchers, etc. You get enough chef info in my restaurant reviews, but it’s high time that I start focusing on the people who actually supply restaurants with their delicious beef proteins.

I recently attended “Top of the Class” beef advocacy training at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association in Denver, Colorado. I’ve blogged about the Masters in Beef Advocacy courses that I took a while back, and Top of the Class is like the PhD level for that training.

That experience is the subject of a whole other post, so I won’t get too deep into it here, but the point in mentioning it is to anchor your understanding of why I’m choosing Anne Burkholder to be the first person that I spotlight in this new “Meet Your Meat” endeavor. Anne was an instructor at the Top of the Class, and over the course of the two day training program, I got to know her and was inspired to write about her journey.

Since I and most of my readers are from the NYC metro area, many of us don’t know a lot about farming, or we take it for granted. Most of us are probably still in the dark about what it takes to bring beef to our plates every week. We just don’t get exposed to the process often enough.

Anne represents all of us urbanites and suburbanites. She grew up in urban Palm Beach County, Florida. While anything “Florida” may sound like a sprawling paradise to us NYC folks, urban Palm Beach is certainly not a farming community; it’s a city!

Smart as a whip and with incredible athletic pedigrees in both cross country running and swimming, Anne attended an ivy league college. She met her husband Matt there, and they later moved back to Matt’s home town in Nebraska.

Matt’s family owned and operated a diversified farm business. What is a diversified farm? Essentially it’s when a farm produces a variety of crops or animals, usually both, with the crops feeding the animals that they raise, in an effort to create a self-sustained farm with little waste or reliance upon other operations. You may recall that Walbridge Farm is like this as well, where they grow sunflowers and raise cattle, with the sunflowers being used to produce both sunflower oil and cattle feed.

Okay so back to Anne. Soon after graduating cum laude at Dartmouth, she was putting on boots and blue jeans to work at her and her husband’s cattle feed yard, Will Feed, Inc. This is where cattle get fattened up, so to speak, before going off to market. Check out this short video that explains what she does:

See how much space these animals have? Just goes to show you how bogus those myths are about “factory farming.” But anyway, I digress…

Nearly 20 years have passed since Anne moved out to the country, and she still loves what she does. Apparently the beef community loves what she does as well:

In 2009, she was awarded the Beef Quality Assurance Producer of the Year Award for her volunteer work in beef farmer education concerning animal welfare and food safety. In 2013 she was voted to Vance Publishing’s 40 under 40 in Agriculture, and in 2014 she was awarded Beef Magazine’s Trail Blazer Award. Both awards were given for her work in consumer outreach through her blog, Feed Yard Foodie.

She’s a member of the Tyson Fresh Meats Animal Well-being Committee for Farm Check, the National Beef Quality Assurance Advisory Committee, a Director of the Nebraska State Beef Council, and an avid advocate for the cattle industry. She’s constantly and actively improving cattle welfare and beef safety. She is an irreplaceable asset.

The best part is that Anne’s operation is a family farm, and she loves the personal responsibility that her three daughters learn from taking care of their land and animals. So not only is Anne working to improve all-things-beefy, but she is setting a great example so that the next generation can do so as well.

In addition to running cattle on grass in the spring and summer, Anne is soon to start a new job with Beef Marketing Group and Innovative Livestock Services. Her role will be in communications, and she will also be helping take on various animal welfare projects for four Nebraska feed yards. She’s looking forward to implementing her animal care ideas to impact a larger number of animals.

I encourage you all to follow her blog and check out her insightful posts. She’s a wonderful person and an inspiration.

carnivore connoisseur