“We’re going to figure something out here. We’re going to figure it out fairly soon. So, fair warning,” Vilsack told 250 farmers at the Agriculture Department headquarters. He declined to tell reporters what steps he would take. “I have no idea what he intends to do,” said Roger Johnson, president of the National Farmers Union.
NFU, the second-largest U.S. farm group, pulled out of the talks over the weekend. “It was going nowhere,” said Johnson.
The checkoff, set at $1 a head of cattle sent to market, generated about $40 million last year for research and promotion. Revenues have fallen with the shrinkage of the U.S. cattle herd to its smallest size since 1951. A proposal to double the checkoff, to $2, has fueled demands for a change in operation. At present, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association gets the lion’s share of the money as a contractor for the checkoff board.
Groups such as the NFU say the checkoff board ought to run projects on its own. “Beef is an outlier” among checkoff programs, said John Hansen of the Nebraska Farmers Union. “We have the bulk of producers’ dollars used by an advocacy group.” An NCBA spokesman was not immediately available for comment.