HORACE MCQUEEN: Where to from here?
When it comes to common sense — and honesty — plenty of our elected leaders in Texas come out on the short end of the stick. Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller is one of those who should have never been elected. His tenure in the state legislature was marked by controversy over several issues. Finally the voters in his district around Stephenville said “enough” and voted him out of office. Then a couple years later, Miller saw an opportunity to jump on the “tea party” bandwagon and convinced voters that he was the anointed one. Ok, now we have him — and hopefully just for the remainder of his term in office.
Miller a couple weeks ago announced that Texans who wanted to get rid of feral hogs could start using a new hog bait named “kaput”. Only problem is “kaput” may really be kaput before all the coins are counted. The hog-killing bait has not been proven to be safe when fed to hogs. If the hogs scatter the bait, what is the effect on livestock, deer and other wildlife. As of now, Kaput is off the market awaiting hard evidence that it is safe for man and beast. In the last two weeks, I have visited with many of our East Texas farmers and ranchers and have yet to find one who is ready to use the feral hog bait until these questions are answered.
Most of our older generation farmers and ranchers got a college education without government gifts, subsidies and loans. At several of our colleges and universities students physically took their milk cows to school. At Texas Tech — and Texas A & M — students could bring a cow or two to the college and put the bovines in the college dairy herd. The milk from those student-owned cows would go into bottled milk, ice cream and other dairy products at the dairy center. A good deal for the students and the colleges who needed labor to operate the dairy farm.
Vaughn Meyer is a South Dakota Angus breeder and a member of the Cattlemen’s Beef Board. That’s the organization supporting the beef checkoff program that raises mlllions every year for alleged beef research and promotion.
However, Meyer is just not a believer in what the beef checkoff has accomplished. His gripe is that 89 percent of the beef produced in the U.S. is sold right here at home.
That other 11 percent is sold to markets in other nations. Meyer points out that the 89 percent of the beef that stays in the U.S. cannot be labeled as to where it came from, where it was processed and the name of the ranch that raised the beef. But, he points out, if our beef is part of that 11 percent sold outside the U.S., it often has to be labeled as to where the beef was born and raised, name of the beef packer and generally the name of the rancher who raised the animal in question.
Meyer says what is good for the goose is good for the gander — if folks in another country know more about our U.S. beef than our own consumers, something is fishy, concludes Meyer.