HOT BARN REPORT: R-CalfUSA Friday with Karina Jones

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HOT BARN REPORT: R-CalfUSA Friday with Karina Jones

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Welcome to the Friday edition of the HOT BARN REPORT
Heard ONLY on American radio stations across the nation and online at hotbarnreport.com!

Karina Jones, Field Director for R-Calf USA joins us each Friday from her ranch in the heart of Nebraska covering what’s new and important to the family farm and ranch.

Dancing Around the Elephant in the Room! Welcome to this Friday edition of Hot Barn Report.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture made a really, really big announcement this week. The USDA has announced details of a framework to transform the food system to benefit consumers, producers and rural communities by providing more options, increasing access, and creating new, more, and better markets for small and mid-size producers. There are so many multi-million dollar investments being funneled in different directions, I was spinning in circles once I was adding into the multi billions!

But as I parsed the announcement, I was left confounded. The title indicated that this initiative was going to create better markets for small and mid-size producers, people like me. But, I couldn’t find much of that at all. $200 million for Food Safety Certification for Specialty Crops Program. Deployment of up to $375 million in support for independent meat and poultry processing plant projects. How many times have we heard, in the last two years, that the government has money to give away to small meat processors? My state doesn’t even have state meat inspection and has a very small capacity of USDA inspected small lockers, for being coined “the beef state.” Or how about up to $300 million in a new Organic Transition Initiative to provide comprehensive support for farmers to transition to organic production. Has anyone at the USDA every priced organic hay to feed a few hundred cows? And where am I going to get all my organic cattle processed this year, remember, my state doesn’t even have state meat inspection?

What about the elephant in the room??? I mean the elephant does take up 85% of the room. Very little of this announcement, even remotely, will affect me or the cattle market that I sell into. How does our government continue to ignore that we have an oligopolistic market that will prey up small and midsized processors and while continuing to hold the majority of the independent American cattle industry as hostage to their profiteering structure? Or that we have a market that is stolen from the American producer by an atrocious amount of foreign beef that is being passed off as domestic product. Someone has got to address the elephant in the room and a multibillion-dollar band aid just makes us all dancers on the perimeter. So, the American tax payer will be on the hook for this initiative when enforcing the Packers & Stockyards Act, Clayton & Sherman Acts, as well as reinstating Mandatory Country of Origin on beef would benefit consumers and producers and NOT be a huge, wasteful tax liability. How do we continue to miss the simple target?

Regular cattle sale today at Crawford Livestock with feeders and pairs. Monte will be back on Monday to give you the action at the hottest barns in the nation. Presho Livestock, Lemmon Livestock, North Platte Stockyards, Stockmans in Yankton, Creighton Livestock, Mobridge Livestock, Bassett Livestock, and Platte Livestock. Catch them all on cattleusa.com.

Enter our Cattlemen’s Beef Month Giveaway and win prizes like:

A BLACKSTONE Grill from Rick’s Seasoning Salt and his famous season all, a beef bundle from Hy-Vee, EXCLUSIVE concert tickets to COLE SWINDELL Aug 6th hosted by Agtegra, 50# bags of POET Dakota Gold feed pellets, Ben’s Brewing Company beer and seltzer, a Sioux Steel Company mineral feeder, Bottles of MultiMin90 and Brute cooler, gift cards to Young’s Western Wear and BEEF MONTH grilling tools and swag… and more!

Sponsored by: Cattlemen’s Beef Board, Premier Equipment, Jan Busse Ford, Steier Ag, Hy-Vee, CattleUSA.com, The 9 Sale Barns of the the HOT BARN REPORT and the Sandhills Ranch Expo.