Glass house or what

[rsomer]

Your right about the ACC/ABP being a bureaucracy. More and more control of the spending is being removed from the delegates. I was going to say elected delegates but they are not all elected. The beef checkoff has increased at a rate of 14.5% compounded annually since the ACC was started 25 years ago. If the increase in the per head beef checkoff keeps increasing at this rate for the next 25 years it will be over $100 per head by 2028. Since the checkoff is collected 2.5 times per animal and when you realize the backgrounders and feedlots are margin operators and simply pass the cost of the checkoff back to the cow calf man, if we were to look ahead the cow calf operator, or if not him his children, could be effectively paying as much as $250 per head checkoff unless people show up for these meetings and say enough is enough. The cow calf man should not be so willing to pay more and more checkoff when the financial benefits do not make it back to him, instead all the benefits are siphoned off by the retailers and packing plants. And once our beef organization is successful in having American feeder calves come into Canada year round, which will effectively place a price ceiling on our feeder calves, all the promotion and market development in the world will not increase the price of a weaned calf to a Canadian producer. Yet he will continue to be asked to pay more and more checkoff without realizing any financial benefits. At what point will the people paying the checkoff realize that they need to get some benefit for their money, when they are paying $10 per head, $25, maybe $50 or will it have to go all the way to $250 per animal sold before they take enough interest to go the fall meetings.

[pandiana]

Another thing that I got to thinking about after this meeting was the amount of promotion that these check-off dollars were assigned to. It occurred to me that it would seem strange that the person harvesting trees was paying to promote the sale of newspapers or furniture and yet the primary cattle producer is paying to promote beef. Why would the packer not be expected to sell his product. No doubt we have to sell beef to sell cattle but why would the packing plant not be responsible to sell to the retailer and the retailer to the consumer?

[cowman]

I think the argument the ACC uses is the packers can't and the retailers won't! Afterall the packers claim they don't really make any money! They always trot out figures where they have a net profit of like 1% or something. And the retalers always claim beef is a price loss leader or something. I guess they just butcher and sell beef out of the goodness of their heart!
Somehow or other they use voodoo economics to survive! I sure don't understand it.

[ValueChainFX]

My understanding is the next meeting for the CCIA is Dec. 15th in Calgary!