2:45 pm - 4:15 pm • Yuma 27-28 Rooms
NCBA Feeder Council
John Haverhals, Chair; John Josserand, Vice Chair
Sponsored by Pfizer Animal Health

National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) councils met Thursday, Jan. 29, during the 2004 Cattle Industry Annual Convention and Trade Show. The Feeder Council used the time in Phoenix, Ariz., to address issues pertinent to the cattle feeding industry and to discuss how the U.S. case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) will affect feeders.

Garry Weber, NCBA director of regulatory affairs, began the meeting by reviewing the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) ruling on non-ambulatory animals. "Data from Europe indicates that if you’re going to have BSE, about 96% of the infectivity in cattle populations will be resident in this class of animals — non-ambulatory animals over 30 months old."

During Weber’s recent travels across the United States after the BSE discovery, many cattlemen have asked questions regarding implications of the non-ambulatory rule.

For example, if a rancher has a steer that is perfectly healthy but has a broken leg, he won’t be able to slaughter that steer as a food source for his family — at least under current rules. For cattlemen, this could pose a disposal problem with "backyard processing," which could carry eventual environmental concerns. However, Weber reminds ranchers that it’s important to retain consumer confidence, and right now, consumers want the industry to be conservative.

"Every solution has its own set of problems, but, overall, I think this is a decision that makes sense until we know more about the prevalence of BSE in North America," he said. "It’s got to be incredibly low, but the government is in a situation where they had to act quickly."

We need to be ahead of the curve to protect against other animal diseases, Weber said.

Rod Bowling, vice president of food safety and quality assurance at Packerland Inc., addressed concerns about another recent regulation change, the 30-month ruling.
"It’s moving our surveillance program from one agency to the other. It’s moved it from the plant to the farm," he said. "It’s going to take a lot of cooperation from feeders, dairymen, those kinds of people to have a surveillance program at all. It’s going to be a lot more difficult to do," Bowling said.

Marcine Moldenhauer, Excel’s quality and special projects coordinator, said that when verifying an animal’s age for harvest dentation will override documentation. However, she reminded feeders that the rule could change with time.

The downer ruling also has implications for exports, Bowling said. "When the Secretary (of Agriculture) makes the downer announcement, it doesn’t just affect U.S. downers, it affects them worldwide. That’s the rock thrown in the pond that ripples and ripples."
He said many cuts considered delicacies in other parts of the world are now being left on the table.

"We need the export markets desperately. We need the Koreans and Japanese badly," he said. "There’s a lot of value that we’re leaving on the table."

Overall, however, Bowling said the ruling isn’t as disruptive as he had first anticipated. "This is survivable, we need to work on getting our export markets back, and we need to all work together," he said. It may bring some pain now, but it will clean up the trash cattle that probably caused some problems we blamed on good cattle."

— by Crystal Albers