Traditionally, when selling cattle in any industry segment or marketing channel, the more uniform the lot, the higher the price. Also, retailers are increasingly demanding beef cuts that are more consistent in taste and more uniform in size. In response to these market signals, seedstock breeders search for selection practices that will result in herd bulls with less variation in their offspring.

Do you look at the food on your plate and appreciate the hands it passed through and the economies created from conception to consumption? 

Don Beermann promotes beef. He doesn’t stand at the grocery store with a tray of delectable beef products for customers to sample or broadcast over radio air waves the benefits of a diet that includes beef. And he doesn’t necessarily promote beef by scooping corn into feedbunks.

Not every Nebraska legislator can say they were sent out to plow the family farm at the tender age of nine. Not every Nebraska legislator can say that their father warmed their seat in the Nebraska Unicameral, serving as a legislator decades before they got there. And not every Nebraska legislator has been named to the Nebraska Cattlemen’s Hall of Fame as Bob Kremer was.

Change is hard. For many, it’s more comfortable to settle into a routine than it is to forge ahead into new territory. Memories and pride make it difficult for us to critically evaluate programs we helped create long ago. There’s no doubt it takes much more effort to create new, successful programs. Some folks embrace these new challenges and others resist. There is healthy skepticism that new initiatives will accomplish their intended purpose.

A college student graduates with an ag degree in hand, eager to make farming or ranching a lifelong career. He or she works 10 or 20 years, with plans to buy the ranch one day, only to find that there is no option to buy once the original owner retires. By that time, a lifetime of work has been invested in vain.

The second session of the 100^th Legislature offers interesting if not unique issues in the Unicameral’s history. 2008 will be the last year for 15 term-limited senators while 20 freshman senators graced the halls of the state Capitol building in 2007. Three previous ballot measures to enact term limits were passed by Nebraskans, but were struck down by the courts for various reasons.

The Blizzard of 1948-49 staggers the imagination. A series of storms began in November and continued through February. The snow stopped trains, buried houses and threatened nearly 4 million head of cattle. Operation Haylift was a massive, perhaps desperate, effort to save livestock. In 1950 this story hit the silver screen in Operation Haylift, a B movie starring Bill Williams and Ann Rutherford.

Every Monday morning, your NC staff gathers by conference call for a staff meeting. We review the past week’s activities as well as those coming up. We discuss current issues and the strategies we should employ to be both proactive and reactive, depending on the issue.