LAWTON, Okla. — Of the thousands of head of livestock that move through his sale barn annually, Bill Barnhart can easily identify the imported animals, in part because they are so rare.
The managing partner of OKC-West Livestock says of the sale’s estimated 250,000 head, less than 700 head will be foreign cattle, a tiny fraction.
“As marketers we have lots of experience looking at cattle,” he says. “We know when we see a Mexican or Canadian animal.”
The real question is how to pass that information on to consumers. After the first full month of country of origin labeling implementation, producers, packers and retailers have begun sorting out in practical terms how to transfer live cattle origin information up the chain to consumers at the retail meat case. What the U.S. Department of Agriculture considers the “educational compliance” phase is expected to take at least another six months.
“The best estimate that we are seeing now is that approximately 30 percent of the beef sold in the U.S. will have to be labeled with country of origin information,” says Ryan Reuter, a beef specialist for the Noble Foundation at Ardmore, Okla. Processed items, food service, restaurants and smaller meat markets doing less than $230,000 in business annually, are all exempt from the law.
Most beef is already of U.S. origin. The nation’s largest packer Tyson Foods estimates that 90 percent of all the fresh, retail beef and pork cuts produced in the United States will qualify for a U.S. label. All the major meatpackers have said they intend to label everything they can as a U.S. product by spring.
During a temporary grace period, USDA is allowing auction markets and packers to use visual identification to determine origin. But government officials have continued to insist that visual means of identification of imported animals alone will not be sufficient to make a U.S. origin claim in the future.
Creating a paper trail for verification is an extra step that Barnhart and many others feel is “cumbersome” and unnecessary, especially since all imported cattle are already being identified when they cross the border.
“We could really take care of this whole thing if they would let us,” he says. “We already have laws to take care of all this. We already identify the foreign cattle. It would be too simple to just say the rest of the cattle are USA born, which they are.”
Simplify, simplify
With USDA remaining firm on its beaurocratic requirements, livestock auctions are doing what they can create the simplest paper trail possible to corroborate visual evidence for country of origin labeling purposes.
Barnhart, like others, is in the process of collecting signed affidavits from everyone who sells cattle through his auction. While routine business records are expected to be sufficient proof by the producer that his cattle are U.S. born and raised, having an affidavit on hand allows Barnhart to pass assurances on to those who buy from him.
One of the ways the process has been simplified is the use of “continuous” affidavits that only need to be signed once and then kept on file to satisfy multiple transactions. For those who never buy foreign cattle, it’s the most practical format to use.
“I think it is good that they are going to allow us to utilize them year after year and not making us re-sign them every time we bring cattle in,” says Dean Keiffer, a wheat and cattle producer from Helena, Okla., and president of the Oklahoma Grain and Stocker Producers. “As long as they are on file and they haven’t changed, they are good.”
Barnhart uses a similar form to satisfy his customers that everything purchased at OKC-West is USA origin unless otherwise specified.
“Since we’re their vendor of cattle, the packers require us as an auction to sign a continuous origin statement that says everything that they are going to be buying is of American origin,” he says. “I’m comfortable doing that as long as we look at the cattle. After this grace period ends July of next year, we still want all affidavits on file. My worry is if they are not on file, that producer could get penalized for the sale of his cattle.”
All of the monitoring does come with a price. USDA has requested millions of dollars in additional funds to fully implement the program. Barnhart notes that he is liable for the information he passes on and is potentially subject to fines. Cattle producers could also be subjected to audits. Barnhart expects USDA’s market reporters, who are handling the educational process on COOL, to eventually serve as the program’s enforcement arm.
Many people — like Tom Johnson, a cattle buyer from Ordway, Colo. — have questioned whether the benefits can ever offset the costs of creating a whole new government program.
“It’s a very typical government thing: the theory is great, the application sucks,” he said recently at the La Junta Livestock Auction in Colorado.
All of the paper shuffling intended to safeguard consumer information doesn’t necessarily beat a simple visual appraisal for accuracy.
As evidence, the first load of imported cattle to arrive at the OKC-West facility after COOL implementation were identified as Mexican even though they could technically have been designated as U.S. under a grandfather clause.
“A load of Mexican cattle showed up this week, the first we’ve sold since September 30 when this was enacted,” Barnhart recounts. “We called that producer, sent him a form, changed the USA origin to USA/Mexican. He’d had them in the country since last April so they were grandfathered in. We could have just left them USA origin. But it was obvious they were Mexican, and we had him sign-off that way.”
On occasion, Barnhart’s also had Canadian cattle come through his facility, and due to a CAN branded on the hip and “a big metal tag in their ear,” they are equally easy to identify, he says.
“When we get a set of Mexican cattle, we declare them as Mexican cattle — we always have,” he adds.
Down the road, any time imported cattle show up or someone arrives to sell cattle who doesn’t have an affidavit on file, OKC-West will flag it, Barnhart says. At that point, there will be a request for additional information.
“We’ve got plenty of time to do this, but I don’t think we need to procrastinate. We’ve been pushing our customers to sign up.”
Barnhart mailed out copies of the affidavits for customers to fill out and bring in at their convenience.
“So far, we’ve done a real good job. We’ve got about 2,500 of them,” he says.
By phasing the program in, livestock auctions have a chance to avoid a log-jam capable of slowing down commerce.
“Everyone is trying to make it the least intrusive as possible,” says Brian Winter, with the Winter Livestock Market in Dodge City, Kan. “For most people in our area it’s simple, because there are almost zero non-U.S. cattle out here.”
Anyone buying cattle directly from a producer out in the country is being urged to go on-line to the Livestock Marketing Association website ( HYPERLINK "http://www.lmaweb.com" www.lmaweb.com) and download a similar affidavit form to fill out when the cattle are purchased.
No one Barnhart has encountered has bulked at signing the forms, although he knows there will be some procrastinators.
“They shouldn’t be too concerned,” he says. “All you are doing is stating that your cattle were born and raised in the U.S.A. and that’s 99.9 percent of all the cattle that come through our auction.”
Even so, Barnhart believes there could still be additional hurdles and notes that the adoption process isn’t over yet.
Just this week a cattle feeder in Washington state sued the USDA over the rule because it was creating a discount on Canadian animals without increasing the value of U.S. cattle. In Canada, hog producers who had been supplying feeder pigs south of the border for years have been forced to liquidate their herds. Some observers believe COOL disrupts international trade relations and will eventually be challenged by the World Trade Organization.
Barnhart’s main concern is that it could eventually “flow right into” the National Animal Identification System, requiring all farms and individual livestock to be identified and monitored by the U.S. government, creating an even bigger bureaucracy.
Already farms that are participating fully in the NAIS program are exempted from maintaining on-farm production records for verification purposes.
But that makes sense to Harold Yoder, a rancher, cattle buyer and past president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association from Karval, Colo.
“I think we got the cart in front of the horse,” he says. “To make it (COOL) work, we needed an ID program in place. Not that any of us wanted ID — but it will give us some things the industry needs.”
Lawton, Okla. —
