Consumers increasingly want to know where their beef comes from and that it was sustainably produced. This is why Walmart recently opened a case-ready beef plant in Georgia, as WLJ reported in its Feb. 24 issue. The wider beef industry has made strides to offer such assurances, no more so than a program involving dozens of feedlots.
The program is run by Progressive Beef, which offers a unique cattle management and sustainability system for feedyard operators. The program, originally designed in 2000, has now hit a new milestone. Record growth over the past year means that more than 2 million cattle have been certified through the program and nearly 4 million cattle will be cared for at certified Progressive Beef feedyards this year.
This is double the number of cattle certified through the program in the past year and nearly triples the number of feedyards joining the program. The number of feedyards entering the program has jumped from approximately 21 in 2018 to nearly 60 as of Jan. 31. The feedyards are primarily located in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest.
Progressive Beef, LLC, based in Great Bend, KS, developed and manages the Progressive Beef program. The program has grown into a quality management systems approach to beef production with the goal of bringing transparency and verification to consumers, it says. The program is the largest ever cattle management and sustainability program for feedyard operators. The program focuses on three main pillars: cattle care, food safety and sustainability. Through a rigorous verification process, Progressive Beef increases transparency and helps give consumers assurances about the beef they purchase, it says.
Tyson Foods in August 2018 became the first beef processor to license the program. Hamburger chain Wendy’s in December that year became the first end user of U.S. beef to partner with the program. It is moving toward a majority of beef supplied by Progressive Beef-certified feedyards by 2021.
Today’s consumers want to know where their beef comes from and that the cattle were raised with care, says John Butler, CEO of Progressive Beef, LLC. Progressive Beef certifies that participating feedyards meet strict standards for cattle care, environmental sustainability and process control. Progressive Beef is excited about the program’s growth and the opportunity it creates to deliver more beef to retail and foodservice operators that exceed consumers’ expectations of how their food was raised, he says.
Receiving certification is a stringent process that can take several months. To receive certification, feedyards must train operators on critical areas that include cattle care, water usage and energy usage. Many other feedyards follow such standards already, so the number of yards in the program should continue to grow rapidly.
Meanwhile, the cow-calf sector of the U.S. beef industry has had very little consolidation in the past three decades despite consolidation in other agricultural sectors. In addition, farms and ranches got smaller. But other livestock sectors such as dairy, broilers and cattle feeding have shown dramatic or substantial consolidation. These points come in an article “Examining consolidation in U.S. agriculture” in USDA’s publication Amber Waves.
The program focuses on three main pillars: cattle care, food safety and sustainability.
Agricultural production in the three decades continued to move to larger farms, according to an analysis of the latest data from the 2017 Census of Agriculture by USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS). But beef cow-calf operations remained the exception to consolidation in agriculture, says ERS. The midpoint beef cow herd size, 89 cows in 1987, increased to 120 cows by 2017, a far smaller rate of increase than that in other livestock sectors or in almost all crops. Moreover, beef cow-calf operations are the primary user of permanent pasture and rangeland, which showed no consolidation over time.
The beef cow-calf sector is an important sector in agriculture, says ERS. The 2017 Census of Agriculture counted 729,046 U.S. farms with beef cows. By comparison, 54,599 farms had milk cows, 66,439 had pigs and 303,891 grew soybeans. Bigger, faster and smarter equipment and vehicles have allowed individual farmers and farm families in other sectors to manage more animals or acres, leading to steady shifts of production to larger farms. Those developments have yet to make a major impact on the cow-calf sector, says ERS.
Cropland accounted for 44 percent of all U.S. farmland in 2017, while permanent pasture and rangeland accounted for 45 percent. As cropland shifted to larger operations between 1987 and 2017, pasture and rangeland moved the other way, shifting away from the largest farms and ranches toward smaller operations. Farms and ranches with 10,000 acres or more of pasture and rangeland held 43 percent of all such acreage in 2017, down from 51 percent in 1987, with most of the land moving to farms and ranches with less than 500 acres, says ERS. — Steve Kay
(Steve Kay is editor/publisher of Cattle Buyers Weekly, an industry newsletter published at P.O. Box 2533, Petaluma, CA, 94953; 707-765-1725. Kay’s Korner appears exclusively in WLJ.)
