As a rancher and marketer, Joe Goggins sees firsthand the challenges of keeping family ag businesses in the family amidst growing input costs, unfavorable policy and regulations, and lack of access to land. Following in the footsteps of his legendary father, Pat Goggins, who passed away in 2015, and as a father and grandfather himself, he has personally experienced the generational transitions that take place on the family ranch.
Joe’s experience within the livestock industry is well-rounded, although he may be known best as one of the nation’s leading auctioneers. In addition to his extensive work as an auctioneer, Joe is also vice president of Vermilion Ranch Co., Public Auction Yards, Billings Livestock Commission Co., Western Livestock Auction and Northern Livestock Video Auction, in addition to managing J&L Livestock with his wife, Linda, and overseeing the Goggins family’s many other agricultural enterprises.
Joe has rallied his support behind a new initiative spearheaded by the Livestock Marketing Association(LMA) that strives to unite producers with the goal of stopping one of the most alarming trends in the industry today: the rapidly declining number of livestock producers across the country.
The Producer Profitability Initiative was created to start a conversation at the grassroots level to tackle the ever-growing issue of the difficulty and expense it takes to raise livestock in the U.S. Without incentives or livable profit margins, the less likely that producers will be able to continue their livelihoods—let alone give younger people an opportunity to enter the industry.
“Hopefully we as producers, as auction market owners, as people living in rural America, will get this message to the right people within our communities that will carry it to local state affiliates and create some national policy,” Joe told WLJ. “Let’s get on the same page on a few of these things that we can unify around.”
Although the initiative is backed by the representative organization for livestock marketers, Joe emphasized the foundation and goal of the effort is to help producers start the conversation. “Are we trying to become a producer membership organization?” Joe asked. “Absolutely not. We’re trying to preserve our way of life. Without these producers, we’re nothing.”
He explained that to get the conversation rolling, it is first necessary to have a template in place and a baseline to start with. To create that baseline, Joe said LMA has been working to gather input from producers to find key issues to rally around. “LMA really did their due diligence and went through a lot of time and expense to have focus groups with producers that were handpicked by different auction market owners across the U.S. in their communities,” he said.
After LMA hosted several producer focus groups around the country, three key issues emerged that were unanimous concerns for producers:
• Eliminating the death tax.
• Keeping land in livestock production.
• Competing with grain production for land.
“It didn’t matter if we were in Alabama, if we were in California, Montana or Kansas, these were the things that consistently we had some unification around,” Joe said.
At one of the focus groups, government intervention was discussed when brainstorming incentives that would make the younger generation want to stay involved in livestock production. While there was a general opposition to the idea from some more well-established producers in attendance, it became apparent that for the smaller producer, government incentives would greatly help keep their struggling operations afloat.
“If you don’t want government intervention—I don’t either,” Joe said. “I want to go take a shower every time I talk about it; but come up with something better. I can’t think of anything that will attack this like that. And I haven’t had anybody come up with something different, either.”
Right now, respective membership groups in the industry have different priorities, and chances are the three concerns uncovered at the focus groups are not No. 1 for most of them, Joe said.
“The only way we’re going to get unification on something that we can all push forward as far as policy in D.C. is getting these state affiliates to create national policy at their respective organizations and putting it as No. 1 on their list,” he said.
Perhaps most pressing right now is the looming sunset of the estate tax cap, also known as the death tax. In 2025, the tax cap will expire, and Joe speculates exemption levels will be reduced to $2.5 million per person/$5 million per couple, from the current cap of $12.92 million per person/$25.84 million per couple.
“That is going to eliminate the generational family ranch,” Joe said. “It will just wipe them out.”
As it stands, input costs are already extremely high for producers and the estate tax just adds to the financial burden. The number of producers able to afford the costs of operation decreases more every year. Joe recalled a time when there were only a couple ranch dispersal sales in a week of sales, but now, that number looks more like 10-15 dispersals at each sale.
He emphasized, “We have to get on the same page and make the No. 1 priority an incentive to encourage the next generation and to leave land in livestock production, instead of other issues that we know we’re not going to unify around—why can’t we all get around something we know we will? I can’t imagine any group not being for it.”
Preserving the family ranch isn’t just a matter of industry interest, but also to protect our nation’s food independence, Joe said. “If we continue to lose these smaller producers, the big boys can’t produce enough. It’s absolutely a national security issue and we just keep brushing it under the mat.”
He added, “We are no longer a superpower if we lose our food independence when we’re having to import more food than we’re producing.”
It gets a little trickier to find a united front on the issues of keeping land in production for livestock use and the competition for land between crops and livestock.
“Why is it a grain grower can afford to give $300-500 an acre for a cash lease and a guy using it for forage production or livestock production can afford to give maybe $50-100?” Joe asked. “Until we get on an equal playing field with those folks, we’re sunk.”
Whether it takes new policy, incentives or even government intervention, it is clear that something needs to happen to keep families operating livestock operations.
“The way I look at it—and it’s pretty simple—is if the world and this country want us to produce the highest quality, safest food product there is in the world, all we ask for is a few perks so that we can do it and not live in poverty,” Joe said. “But we’re also not asking the government to pay us to do it.”
For the past 70 years, the industry has been on the defense, Joe said. This initiative is a chance for the cattle industry to play offense and score on something meaningful.
For producers wanting more information on the Producer Profitability Initiative, visit producerprofitability.com or be the first to start the conversation with your local member associations.
“I really think something special could come out of this, but we can’t just hit it once and hope it happens,” Joe concluded. “The key is to promote unification and the idea that we as producers have got to become proactive. We can’t expect somebody else to do this for us. We’ve got to do it ourselves.” — Anna Miller, WLJ managing editor
