If you want to present the public with a positive portrayal of modern livestock production, you can’t do any better than letting some real farmers and ranchers tell their stories. For that reason, producers comprised a sizable portion of the list of presenters at a conference last week hosted by Colorado State University and the Colorado Beef Council.
The conference, titled “Beef + Transparency = Trust,” targeted influencers such as consumer media, food writers, nutritionists and food-business executives, intending to provide objective, honest and factual information about modern beef-production practices and the reasons behind them.
Passion for cattle and beef production was evident as three producers described their family operations and explained how they raise and care for their cattle. The group included Colorado rancher Sara Shields, Gary Teague, a cattle feeder, rancher and farmer also from Colorado and Anne Burkholder, who operates a feedyard in Nebraska.
Sara Shields and her family operate the San Isabel Ranch in the mountains of southern Colorado. “You need to understand the heart of the rancher to understand the industry,” she told the audience. She described how her great grandfather started the ranch in 1872, initially raising sheep. Her father shifted the ranch to purebred Hereford breeding, and today the operation has evolved to specialize in bred heifers along with commercial calves and commercial hay production.
Using photographs, Shields described how the family cares for cattle, trading all-night shifts during calving season, using a tractor to plow paths through the snow to deliver feed after storms and tending cattle on Christmas Eve when weather demands it.
She ran though a long list of “position titles” for ranch staff members, including general manager, financial specialist, marketing director, equipment specialist, irrigation technician, hay farmer, range manager, cattle foreman and several others. But while the list of titles is long, the staff includes just Sara and her husband Mike, who share the duties.
The ranch has won prestigious conservation awards, and Shields outlined how the family continues a multi-generational tradition of protecting open spaces, water quality, wildlife habitat and quality of life within their community and region. The future of ranching, she says, “will still be about wise use of resources and still be about family.”
Gary Teague and his wife Laura exemplify entrepreneurship in agriculture. They began Teague Diversified Inc. in 1994 while still in graduate school, leasing and operating a small feedlot in eastern Colorado. Today the family operation has grown to include a 25,000-head feedyard, ranches in Colorado, Texas and Nebraska, crop farming and a swine operation.
Teague began by explaining that in agriculture, unlike many professions, if you fail to do things right in terms of managing livestock or crops, if you cut corners, your financial returns are directly and immediately reduced. The family focuses on the “three pillars of sustainability,” which include environmental stewardship, economic viability and social awareness. The family strives to protect air and water quality, such as by drilling test wells around the feedyard for groundwater monitoring.
Teague outlined the complementary nature of different ag enterprises, describing how composted manure from the feedyard fertilizes crops, some of which then go to feedyard rations. Cows graze the stubble fields after harvest, recycling spilled corn and plant residues into beef while also returning nutrients to the soil.
He addressed the issue of “corporate” versus “family” farms, explaining that Teague Diversified is incorporated for financial reasons, but is family owned and operated, as are most farms.
Finally Teague discussed the issue of technology in agriculture, noting that his family, like most producers, uses products such as antibiotics in beef production. They improve animal health and welfare. The key is to use the proper drug, only as needed, at the proper dose, the proper location and with the proper withdrawal time. He also touched on the issue of genetically modified (GMO) crops, saying that this year brought one of the worst droughts in U.S. history, and yet farmers produced a corn crop, largely due to advancements in plant genetics including GMO crops.
Anne Burkholder was the third producer on the panel. Anne grew up in South Florida and married into a Nebraska farm family. She now manages Will Feed Inc. feedyard near Cozad, Nebraska. She has learned the cattle business from the perspective of a mother and a consumer, and has become an outspoken advocate for beef quality assurance and animal husbandry.
She spent time describing how she and her family work to acclimate cattle as they arrive in the feedyard using low-stress handling methods. As cattle learn to trust their handlers, she said, they stay healthier. And when they do become sick, they show signs of illness rather than hide them, allowing earlier, more successful treatment. She tells her staff that in everything they do with cattle, to pretend there is a second-grader watching. If you couldn’t explain it to them, don’t do it.
Burkholder maintains a popular blog titled “Feedyard Foodie,” in which she writes about the cattle business and her life on the feedyard. Most of the blog’s followers are non-ag people, consumers who want to learn about beef production. Writing the blog, she says, has helped her learn how to articulate everything that is done in the feedyard and explain why things are done.
The blog contains numerous pictures of activities at the feedyard, and videos showing cattle-handling methods. During her presentation, Burkholder showed a tremendous video of her 10-year-old daughter emptying a pen of cattle using low-stress handling techniques, and making it look easy.
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