Cattle Raiser Members Talk Of
Past But Focus On The Future

By Colleen Schreiber

SAN ANGELO — A panel of speakers this week at the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers fall board meeting here offered some fond memories of bygone days and hopeful expectations of what is to come in the cattle business.

Former Texas Gov. Dolph Briscoe, Uvalde, recounted his first memory of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Assn. The year was 1933 and his father, Dolph Sr., was president. The convention was in Fort Worth at the old Blackstone Hotel.

"Those were some of the darkest days of the Depression," he recalls. "Cattle were selling for less than the cost of the commission and the freight to get them to market. Many ranchers after shipping their cattle received a bill for part of the freight and part of the commission."

President Roosevelt had recently been inaugurated. During the convention he closed all the banks.

"That panicked this 10 year-old boy," Briscoe told listeners. "I thought I'd never see home again. So I went to my father and said, 'Daddy, how are we going to get home? The president closed the banks.'

"And he replied, 'Son, you just remember this: we’re in the cattle business. We don’t have any money in any bank anyway, and the longer they keep those banks closed the better it is for us."

Briscoe focused on past accomplishments of the association. The mission on which it was founded in 1877, that of prevention of cattle theft, he said, remains today one of its most important and primary functions.

Another great accomplishment, Briscoe pointed out, was the eradication of the Texas fever tick. In the early part of this century the problem made it impossible for Texas cattlemen to move their cattle out of Texas to other states.

"It was a very controversial program at the time," Briscoe said. "It created a lot of turmoil and unrest. The cattle had to be dipped in arsenic. The program was successful, and now except for the tick quarantine area along the Mexican border, Texas is free of the fever tick."

Another major accomplishment attributed to the association was its involvement in the screwworm eradication program.

"TSCRA played a very active role, and without their support, that program would never have gotten started, much less been successful," the former governor remarked.

"Many changes have occurred in our state from the days of the open range. When I went back to the ranch after WWII, we didn’t have a single thing leased for hunting and I wish we didn’t have one today, but my son has leased out the whole ranch, including the runway, and I’m confined to the back yard for my hunting," Briscoe lamented.

"Today a South Texas hunting lease goes for two to three times more than a grazing lease. That makes it absolutely necessary to lease the land for recreation purposes," he concluded.

Martin Hubert, deputy commissioner of the Texas Department of Agriculture, outlined what he saw in the future for Texas agriculture on three different issues.

The one that will affect everything else and will be most significant, he told listeners, is the growth of the population in the state of Texas.

"We passed 20 million many months ahead of the original prediction, and it’s predicted that Texas will reach 34 million people by 2030. This will be a huge benefit and a huge burden to agriculture," Hubert said.

The second issue, in his opinion, has to do with expanding markets. He plugged the "Go Texas" campaign which is Agriculture Commissioner Susan Combs' baby.

"TDA did a survey which indicated that 90 percent of the people would buy Texas products if they were identified as such," Hubert said.

He told listeners that TDA has already signed up 1400 parties interested in participating in the program. Adding value to ag commodities, the speaker further noted, is critical to the industry's future.

"We send out 90 percent of our product in the raw form and only add value to 10 percent of it," he said. "That’s kind of amazing when you consider for every one percent of value-added processing we do, we add $2 billion to the state economy. There is a huge opportunity here."

Hubert also noted the importance of continuing and improving trade with foreign countries, and he touched on the growing importance of natural resource issues, particularly water.

"As our population continues to grow, we have to keep in mind that we have to be very proactive when it comes to water," Hubert told association members. "In Texas those involved in agriculture account for a little less than two percent of the total state population, yet agriculture accounts for a little over 60 percent of the total water consumption. That is decreasing as we come up with more efficient ways of using water.

"We have to continue to look at regulations like the CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) and make sure that they're common sense and don’t increase the burden on the cost of production."

One issue that should concern all in agriculture is the loss of ag lands. Texas, Hubert said, has lost approximately 750,000 acres of ag land since the early 1980s.

Finally, he told listeners about a legislative committee appointed to take a comprehensive look at agriculture in Texas to see how various issues should be dealt with. He encouraged members to become active in that process.

Mary Lou Bradley, with B3R Meats, Childress, told listeners that one of her greatest concerns has to do with foreign beef imports.

"We have enough problems in the U.S. Wait until Brazil starts sending beef in here," Bradley said. "Brazil says in the next 10 years that they will be the number one beef importer in the U.S. Don’t be naïve," she warned. "They can produce it for 30 cents and they can make money at those levels because they don't have all these regulations that we’re facing. Can we compete?

"Major U.S. corporations are going to South America and setting up beef processing, cattle feeding, etc. because there’s major money to be made by importing beef back to the U.S."

Another issue close to her heart, Bradley said, is the worldwide economy.

"The worldwide economy affects all of us, even if we live at the end of a dirt road," she said.

A prime example of how world issues affect the U.S. economy and the beef industry in particular, she noted, was the BSE or "mad cow" scare in Great Britain.

"We need to think about how the world interacts with us. We’ve got to market to the world; we have to talk to the world, because if we don't, someone else will and they will do it better."

Estate taxes was another issue mentioned by Bradley as one of critical concern.

"Here we have our grandparents and parents who have spent a lifetime building and improving an operation but because a hunter is willing to pay more, we have to get a new evaluation and with that new evaluation our estate taxes change again. It's a moving target.

"We must fight the good fight on this," she stressed.

Bradley concluded by encouraging producers to find ways to better communicate their story to the public.

"Some of my meat buyers tell me I’m insignificant. Well, as cattlemen we’re beginning to be insignificant in numbers. How do we as a ranching community tell our story better? How do we use the words to tell our story? How do we speak up better and better communicate? We must find a way."

Briscoe, Texas, Hereford breeder Lee Haygood said he's hopeful about the future, in large part because of what his forefathers and the TSCRA were able to accomplish.

"I take a lot of pride that I’m able to be a cattleman, and I'm even more proud to be a Texas cattleman and a member of this association," Haygood said. "As I look at the past, we’ve had everything we can imagine thrown at us – bad drouths, floods, bad markets, bad economies, but cattlemen have always found ways to be resilient and to come back from those adversities. That gives us, the younger generation, as we look at our problems that do seem fairly daunting at times, hope that we can fight through these problems as well. People continue to refinance their ranches, and it shows that we have a continued desire to be in this business."

He praised the association for its work in the past as well as its continued work today.

"We can be hopeful not only because they have solved so many issues of the past, but they continue to tackle the new issues head-on."

Haygood talked about change and the importance of changing with the times even though change is often a difficult task.

"I know it's easy to want to continue to do things the way they were always done," the young rancher said. "I know when I took over my family’s operation, I had a lot of reservations about changing things from the way Dad did it. I thought that was probably the right way, but then I realized that he and those before him were successful because of their ability to change for the future, and that’s when I became more aggressive in the way I attacked my business."

Haygood said he was optimistic about changes gradually taking place in the way cattle are marketed.

"Cattle producers who raise the right kind of cattle, who use proper management practices, have an opportunity to sell their cattle at a bonus price. On the flip side, I don't think it's happening fast enough.

"I believe as an industry we still need incentives to make those positive changes happen," he continued. "Right now the basic industry still doesn't give enough bonuses to the good cattle over the lesser quality cattle. The cattle industry is slow to move compared to the pork and poultry industries. I think, however, that we in the cattle industry might surprise people given the opportunity with incentives to make rapid change."

Haygood said he also viewed the shift back to more moderate sized cattle as positive.

"We've gone to extremes in terms of frame and growth, extremes that haven’t really helped us in the long run. Now we’re going back to the middle of the road, a more moderate framed animal that is more efficient on the range and more readily able to convert the grain more efficiently. We need to raise cattle that are absolutely efficient," he concluded.

The Panhandle cattleman said those in his part of the world have been slower in coming around to opportunities in hunting and recreation, but many now realize recreation is one way to make an enterprise more profitable.

Like other speakers, Haygood noted the continuing shift of government policymaking decisions away from those who live and work the land to the urban and inner city dwellers.

"It’s a natural progression, and as population dynamics continue to change, it will get worse. Still, it's nice to know that we have some champions at the state and federal level taking care of us."

John Howard, director of natural resources and environment with the Texas Governor’s Office, focused specifically on progress made on the state level in the environmental arena.

"Texas has 20 million people. We're the second largest state in terms of land mass, 97 percent privately owned. Right now we have a booming economy," Howard said. "If Texas were a country, it would be the world’s 11th largest economy.

"Texas leads the country in producing more oil and gas than any other state," he continued. "We have one-third of the nation’s refineries, two-thirds of the nation’s chemical business. We’re the country’s second largest agriculture producer. Yet with all those big booming economic factors, our environmental conditions by and large are improving."

He addressed specific policies in which Texas has shown marked improvement. Air quality was one example.

"The federal government has six federal air quality standards. Every city in the state meets all six of those standards except for El Paso because of some of the border conditions and also some of the larger urban areas because of ozone problems. You don’t read that in the newspaper very often," he said.

Texas, he added, leads the nation in the amount of toxic materials disposed of.

"In fact, since 1995, Texas’ reductions are more than all the U.S. combined. Furthermore, we’re improving our water quality. In 1988 only 85 or 86 percent met all the health standards. Today more than 96 percent meet all the health standards."

In 1995, Texas was one of the first states to establish a voluntary cleanup on sites that weren’t bad enough for the government to come in and clean up, Howard told listeners.

"In just four years we've had more than 300 sites that were voluntarily cleaned up."

He recognized the significant efforts of ranchers to conserve their land.

"It's crucial as we go into the future that we protect our agriculture lands. You should know that Gov. Bush wholeheartedly supports the elimination of the estate tax and is working hard on that," he told cattle raiser members.

Howard concluded by outlining some of the trends of the future.

"First, governments will allow greater flexibility in environmental requirements in return for greater accountability," he said. "More communities are going to want to have a say in decision-making. That sounds good until you realize that some of those folks don’t know much about the land. Also, more businesses are going to produce environmentally friendly goods in environmentally friendly ways."