New Year Certainties
Jan 01, 2010
By Steve Cornett
It would be easy to look back on beef’s 2009 and find things to complain about. But that would be, well, complaining. And we don’t do that, do we? If we weren’t all optimists we wouldn’t be expecting to support our families off something coming out of that end of a cow anyhow, would we?
So let’s look at all the good things that will almost certainly* happen in 2010.
- The weather will be better. The El Nino is here, so those of us who are deserving—namely in the Southwest—should get some rain. Then the weather will change and you sinners will get some. Anyhow, we’ll all have lots of green grass this summer and that will be swell because
- We’ll start holding cows and heifers to take advantage of the swell grass we have and
- A big uptick in the market as grass fever strikes about April. I still slobber a little when I remember 1979 when that very unswell "Wreck of the Seventies" ended and I had to actually pay income tax. You about need rock climbing equipment to even look at the chart of cattle prices that spring. It will be so nice that
- We’ll make peace among cattle producers. National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s new governance plan will be adopted at the annual convention in San Antonio and it will allow leadership to stop the association’s Tyranny of the Majority so that there can again be one voice for the industry which will be just swell because it will let us
- Pay attention to the many “opportunities” provided by the current political atmosphere and do things like
- Renew the industry’s commitment to beef promotion and exports by developing newer and stronger state beef councils that can do stuff the national program can’t do and
- All work together on protecting the industry from the opportunity of excessive regulation and
- Goofy animal rights referenda and
- Being labeled as carbon-coughing, methane-making global warmingists which will let us all
- Have a Swell New Year!
* To paraphrase the churnmasters in the commodity business: The risk of trading can be substantial and each investor and/or trader and/ or starry-eyed optimist must consider whether cattle are a suitable, or even sane, investment. Past performance, whether actual or indicated by simulated historical tests of strategies and promoted by old guys who have been predicting turnarounds for, oh, about 3 years now, is not indicative of future results.
Steve Cornett is editor emeritus at Beef Today. You can reach him via e-mail at scornett@farmjournal.com.
