Charlotte, NC - Idaho cattleman George Swan, the new president of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, faces the job of uniting the organization's 38,000 members behind new beef marketing programs and restoring profitability to an industry that lost $3 billion in 1998.
Cattle prices last year were the lowest in more than a decade, and financial losses have many NCBA members angry that the association is not doing enough to promote beef.
“There is not a single thing that is going to increase the economic situation,” Swan said. “We are no longer an industry that relies on what is happening within our boundaries.”
Struggling overseas economies have hurt beef exports, and imports of meat from Canada and Mexico have increased.
“The next five years will determine if this industry will reverse the current trend and become a more profitable industry or continue to shrink, forcing more producers out of business,” Swan said during a speech here.
Cattle prices have recovered in early 1999, though profits remain scarce, and beef consumption appears to be slowly increasing for the first time since the mid-1970s.
Livestock analysts forecast some profitability on cattle later this year, but huge supplies of beef, pork and poultry will continue to plague the industry.
“It has been a disaster. It has been one of the longest periods of sustained losses,” said Tommy Beall, director of marketing for Continental Grain Co.'s cattle feeding division. “I'm a lot more conservative than some of the (price) forecasts.”
Beall said cattle prices need to be higher than those paid in 1998 if cattle now in Continental's six feedlots are to be profitable.
Beall and other cattlemen here said despite the low cattle prices, most producers remain in business.
Ted Odle, a Brush, Colo., producer, said better management and marketing practices plus help from bankers educated on the cattle business have prevented an exodus from the industry.
However, Odle was critical of NCBA's beef promotion efforts. For each head of cattle Odle and other producers sell, $1 goes toward beef promotion and development programs. Odle and other cattlemen at the convention complained the money needs to be spent on better marketing efforts.
“Beef in my opinion is doing a worse job than most of them,” said Steve Jordan, a producer from Katy, Texas.
New television ads were launched in January touting new quick-to-fix beef items,
Odle said the industry needs to hire famous athletes like baseball stars Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa to promote beef.
The NCBA has developed new marketing programs touting beef's nutritional benefits, developed new quick-to-fix beef items similar to what is already available for pork and poultry and pushed hard to approve irradiation to make meat safer.
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman announced the department's approval of irradiation for red meat at the NCBA convention. Irradiation applies brief doses of gamma rays or electron beams to beef and pork to kill harmful pathogens such as the E.coli 0157:H7 bacteria and listeria.
There has been concern about consumer acceptance of irradiated beef, but Swan was optimistic.
“I think the consumers will accept it,” said Swan. “Pasteurized milk was accepted.”
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