Cattlemen's Beef Board, State Councils to Restructure

By CnAgri2012-08-16 19:43:58 Print

A newly approved structure for joint beef checkoff committees endeavors to engage more cattle producers and beef importers who pay the checkoff in a more efficient decision-making process about investment of their hard-earned checkoff investments.

Adopted unanimously by both the Cattlemen's Beef Board and the Federation of State Beef Councils during the recent 2012 Cattle Industry Summer Conference in Denver, the new structure effectively reduces the number of checkoff program committees - which are responsible for making recommendations to the Beef Promotion Operating Committee about programs to fund with checkoff dollars - from the current 13 to just four in 2013.

Each of those four new committees will be tied directly to core strategies identified in the 2011-2013 Beef Industry Long Range Plan, with subcommittees for the domestic market formed around the beef demand drivers identified in that same plan. As envisioned, committees will be flexible enough to change with adoption of a new long range plan, if those strategies and demand drivers change.

"Unification of the industry around the goals of the Long Range Plan is the vision of the plan itself," said Beef Board member Hank Maxey, who chaired the CBB Special Committee on Committee Structure, appointed by the Beef Board to examine the checkoff committee structure and determine if it was still the best fit for today's checkoff. The resulting proposal approved at summer conference was the work of that committee, with input from and coordination with producer leaders of the Federation of State Beef Councils.

Approval of the new structure came just months after the Beef Board and Federation adopted a new Joint Committee Agreement, at the 2012 Cattle Industry Convention in Nashville in February, which removed all policy members from any committees with checkoff representation and adjusted the way members are appointed to committees. At that time, both boards asked special subcommittees to review the committee structure and report back to them at the summer conference.