The U.S. beef industry in recent years has been often accused of not being transparent enough in how it operates. Producers, notably cow-calf operators, have responded by using social media to talk about their operations and how they care for their cattle and the environment. At a national level, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association has used its Environmental Stewardship Award program to publicize the efforts of individual ranchers.
As laudable as these efforts are, they still don’t fully address consumers’ increasing desire to know how their food is produced. As far as beef is concerned, they want to know how animals are cared for, they want guarantees that beef is safe and that it has been produced in an environmentally sustainable way. In other words, they want the entire beef production system to be more “transparent.” Some branded beef programs offer this, but they are tiny.
Beef industry detractors have used the lack of transparency as a weapon to attack beef eating. They also continue to attach the label “factory farming” to beef production, largely because of feedlot operations, especially large ones. I have friends who tell me how shocked they are at the sight of Harris Feeding Company’s 100,000-head feedlot that runs down the edge of Interstate 5 in central California. I can’t convince them that the cattle are extremely well cared for and are happy.
The industry therefore urgently needs a national program that focuses on feedlots to provide consumers with the assurances they want. No such program existed until now. However, a new partnership between Tyson Foods and the largest feedlot cooperative in the U.S. is about to change all this. They have joined forces to offer the beef industry’s first-ever program that gives consumers key assurances about cattle care, food safety and environmental sustainability. The program has the potential to reshape the entire industry.
As reported in last week’s Western Livestock Journal, Tyson Fresh Meats has become the first beef processor to license the Progressive Beef program, a cattle management and sustainability program for feedlot operators. In writing my own story about the program, I talked at length with the key people involved. Details emerged which suggest that the program has the potential to become truly national and the norm as to how cattle are handled in feedlots.
The program is already the largest-ever cattle sustainability program. The program’s driving force has been feedlot cooperative, The Beef Marketing Group (BMG), based in Manhattan, KS. It designed the program in 2000 and has grown it into a quality management systems approach to beef production with the goal of bringing transparency and verification to consumers. BMG offshoot, Progressive Beef, LLC, developed and currently manages the program.
The BMG has eight feedlot owners and has 325,000 head of feeding capacity in 18 feedlots in Kansas and Nebraska. Not in the group but in the Progressive Beef program are several other feedlot operators. Their combined feeding capacity is 400,000. That’s how more than 1 million cattle are currently cared for annually through the program at certified feedyards which are primarily located in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest.
Tyson and the BMG are keen to see many more feedlots join the Progressive Beef program and for most fed beef processors to license it. They want the program to be widely adopted for the good of the beef industry and its long-term profitability, they told me. Tyson in fact decided to license the program rather than buy it so that feedlot operators would not see it as a packer program, says Tyson Fresh Meats President Steve Stouffer.
Certification of a new feedlot takes eight to 10 months, says John Butler, CEO of the BMG and Progressive Beef LLC, which manages the program. The cost of becoming certified varies based on what a feedlot already has in place. Feedlots that already have extensive practices in place which address cattle care, food safety and environmental sustainability will pay very little. The program is not a profit center and costs are designed only to cover the cost of the audits, training and materials, says Butler.
Tyson currently harvests most of the 1 million head in the program. That’s out of 6.760 million head it processed in fiscal 2017. It is so convinced about the program’s importance to the industry that its goal is to buy 2 million program cattle in the first year and 50 percent of all its cattle under the program after three years. Both Tyson and the BMG hope this will spur a huge uptake of the program so that Progressive Beef program beef will become the norm not the exception. I hope so too, for the sake of the industry’s future. — Steve Kay
(Steve Kay is editor/publisher ofCattle Buyers Weekly,an industry newsletter published at P.O. Box 2533, Petaluma, CA, 94953; 707-765-1725. Kay’s Korner appears exclusively in WLJ.)
