Feeding Quality Forum Takeaways with Kara Lee

Attending industry events is one way to keep our minds sharp and create meaningful connections with other cattle producers, feeders and stakeholders. In Amarillo, Texas, on August 4-5, members of the cattle industry did just that when they gathered together for Certified Angus Beef’s Feeding Quality Forum. 

On this episode of Angus at Work, Kara Lee with Certified Angus Beef joined our team to:

• Give some history on Feeding Quality Forum
• Offer key takeaways from sessions commercial cattlemen can use back at home
• Shed some light on the annual Industry Achievement Award
• And more! 

Additional Resources:

• Feeding Quality Forum webpage
• Feeding Quality Forum overview
• Del Miles profile
• Commercial Programs at the American Angus Association
• AngusLink program information
• Subscribe to the Angus Beef Bulletin EXTRA

Find more information to make Angus work for you in the Angus Beef Bulletin and ABB EXTRA. Make sure you're subscribed! Sign up here to the print Angus Beef Bulletin and the digital Angus Beef Bulletin EXTRA. Have questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you! Contact our team at abbeditorial@angus.org. 

Transcript

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Host Lynsey McAnally (00:04):
Angus at Work, a podcast for the profit-minded cattlemen. Brought to you by the Angus Beef Bulletin, we have news and information on health, nutrition, marketing, genetics and management. So let's get to work, shall we?

Hello and welcome back to Angus at Work! Attending industry events is one way to keep our minds sharp and create meaningful connections with other cattle producers, feeders and stakeholders. In Amarillo, Texas, on August 4-5, members of the cattle industry did just that when they gathered together for Certified Angus Beef’s Feeding Quality Forum. On this episode of Angus at Work, Kara Lee with Certified Angus Beef joined our team to give some history on Feeding Quality Forum, offer key takeaways from sessions commercial cattlemen can use back at home, shed some light on the annual Industry Achievement Award and more! So, let's dive in.

Welcome to Angus at Work! I'm your host, Lynsey McAnally, and today we're joined by Certified Angus Beef's Kara Lee. Kara, welcome to the show. I just have to say you did quite the job emceeing this year's event! Before we dig into Feeding Quality Forum and some of the presentations, can you tell our audience a little bit about yourself and your role working with commercial producers?

Kara Lee (01:40):
Thanks, Lynsey. It's an honor to be here. I appreciate your kind words. Feeding Quality Forum is definitely one of not only my highlights, but the brand highlights for the year of our integration with the commercial cow-calf sector. So yeah, I've been with Certified Angus Beef for 17 years now, and the vast majority of that has been on our supply development or cattle production part of the brand. I have the opportunity to work from the packer backwards. I work some in the marketing and education space for seed stock producers, but also work very heavily in the marketing and education space for commercial cow-calf producers and cattle feeders. Those really are our two primary audiences we target for Feeding Quality Forum with a tertiary audience being that seed stock producer that takes a more hands-on approach to feeder calf marketing for their bull customers. It's really become a fun event that we see every segment in the production chain in the same room, having the same conversations about the topics that impact each of us differently.

It's become a great way annually to step back and see how those impact those different areas and ultimately how the decisions we make at the farmer ranch or at the feed yard are impacted by or impact the next chain down the road. Feeding Quality Forum is absolutely, without question, a Certified Angus Beef event, but these kind of things don't just happen on their own. We're very grateful to have some tremendous industry partners who come alongside us as sponsors for the Feeding Quality Forum. This year we were gracious to be sponsored by AngusLink, Beef Magazine, Caviness Beef Packers, Cottonseed Incorporated, Diamond V, Drovers, Elanco, Feedlot Magazine, Rabobank, Select Sires, and Selco. We were also supported by the Cattleman's Education Series via the National Corn Growers Association. We certainly appreciate all of the support both financially and morally from those partners who came alongside to be a part of our event this year.

Host Lynsey McAnally (03:49):
Awesome. And tell me, how long have you guys been hosting Feeding Quality Forum?

Kara Lee (03:54):
This will be our 21st year holding our annual Feeding Quality Forum. So for more than two decades now, we've been able to get these kind of like minds in the same room. I'll admit the event's taken quite a bit of evolution over that time period. We started out as a single day event that we would hold in two different locations, and today we've evolved. We do move our event to different parts of cattle feeding country each year, but we've created a two-day agenda that really brings some folks together with some added networking opportunities over that first evening, really with the goal that we can present a tremendous amount of great quality, but most importantly is the connections within the industry that folks are able to make while they are all there together. This is the first year we've been back in Amarillo, Texas, since 2019.

So as an industry, we've definitely seen a lot of evolution. We hadn't been back since pre-COVID. One of the most exciting things to me is that we had the best year attendance-wise we've ever had in Amarillo, one of our top three years overall from an attendance perspective. Perhaps historically when we go down to the Panhandle, we might see fewer people, but more cattle represented. This year I feel like we hit the nail on the head with both of those. We had more than a dozen states and all three countries across North America were in attendance, and it's become just very exciting to see how committed the cow-calf producers are to traveling from all over the country to participate in that event and get to know other folks in their business.

Host Lynsey McAnally (05:29):
I was sitting at a table, and I've probably mentioned this on the podcast previously, but I'm from the Florida Panhandle. I feel like it's not very often in Texas that you bump into somebody that is actually from the town over from where you grew up. I sat down at a table at Feeding Quality Forum, and sure enough, there was another Florida Panhandle family there at the table. So you talk about representation and people traveling? It was obvious from those folks that I got a chance to talk to, and man, the stories that people share at those tables, right?

Kara Lee (06:01):
We had ranchers come over from Hawaii this year. To my knowledge, this is the first time we've ever had attendees come in from Hawaii. To me that's just really a testament to how loud and clear the signal of targeting quality has become to the commercial cow-calf producer. We're no longer just focused on raising those high-quality cattle, and then we don't care about what happens when they leave the ranch. We know that it's a bigger picture and folks are willing to travel to get that information.

Host Lynsey McAnally (06:26):
Sure. Folks that traveled in this year certainly were in for a treat. There was some speakers, a lot of speakers there at the event that I took some very good takeaways from, and then I didn't get to attend the tours, but that's one thing I want to touch on next. Feeding Quality Forum actually kicked off with a set of tours to two different Caviness Beef Packing facilities. Were you able to attend either of those events?

Kara Lee (06:50):
I did not attend those particular events. I had responsibilities back at the hotel getting things ready for kickoff, but I have had the opportunity to work with the Caviness team and coordinating those tours and have been through those facilities in the past, but really exciting this year. This is the first year that we've offered two separate tours. For several years now, we've tried to offer one tour being your traditional packing plant tour. What we've seen year after year is that we create a wait list pretty quickly for those plant tours. Those things fill up very quickly. We know that it's not something you can just walk in off the street and knock on a front desk and say, "Hey, can I get a tour of the packing plant?" We feel like there's a great advantage to the people who are producing those quality cattle to go into the plant to have a better understanding of what goes into their product, the kind of workmanship and responsibility that goes into taking those cattle from cattle to carcass and ultimately to merchandising out into the customer.

The beautiful thing about Caviness as a partner is that they do have your traditional packing facility just down the road in Hereford, Texas, but then right there in Amarillo as well, they have a ground beef processing facility. And so they were gracious enough to offer to give us, I think we had around 65 people total throughout the two tours and we still filled every single seat, which that tells me loud and clear message heard from producers that they still have interest in seeing those things. The ground beef tour is one that perhaps that's even more unique than having the chance to get into a traditional packing plant. We maybe tend to think historically about ground beef as the leftovers of the carcass, but I would really challenge our producers, and this was one of our agenda topics, was the idea of thinking about ground beef as a value add.

It's not just "the rest of the carcass" that we have to sell, but it's a real consumer opportunity, especially with where consumer beef prices are today. We know that ground beef, it creates a real value for the consumer, and ground beef is not ground beef, is not ground beef. There are quality differences very much so within that ground beef category, and it's something that creates a lot of sales opportunities for the beef side of the business and ultimately adds a lot of dollars back into those premiums that go into those processor paying premiums for producers.

Host Lynsey McAnally (09:15):
Post-tour, everyone came back to the hotel and had the opportunity to kick off the session portion of Feeding Quality Forum. That first session was a global market overview with Dan Basse of Ag Resource Company. Were there any highlights from that session that you feel like our listeners need to hear about?

Kara Lee (09:35):
Dan is always such a highlight. He's become kind of a perennial staple, if you will, at our Feeding Quality Forum. One of the things that I think our audience appreciates about Dan so much is that he's not your typical market speaker that you get at a lot of cattle industry events. I mean, you think about the old adage of what's that have to do with the price of tea in China? Dan can probably tell you. He gives us that hundred thousand foot view maybe rather than getting down into some of the nitty-gritty. Especially with such a broad audience of what we have today, I think it's just helpful to give everybody context about what's going on in the other markets, whether that's grain markets, fuel markets, international trade and tariffs. I'll absolutely give the caveat and keep in mind our Feeding Quality Forum was the first week of August.

There have been a lot of different market factors at play, different international political factors at play that were not on the table for discussion in early August. So bear that in mind that Dan wouldn't have necessarily covered any of that ground, but he would've shared some of the same perspective that we've seen from other economists in the sense that obviously the old news is that the cow herd is small and that Dan would've shared he doubts those numbers will return to what they are or will return to what they were for quite some time. But the silver lining being that they've been trending bullish since 2019. I would argue even with many of the hiccups that producers have been facing in the 60 days since we had this event or since early August, there's still a tremendous amount of value out there for the cow-calf producer.

The downside is that Dan would expect us to whip back and forth repeatedly between the highs and lows from a price level over the next several months. We also would've been right on the heels of some of the news about the Mexican border opening back up from a feeder calf perspective. Dan reminded us all that keep in mind that's not a glut of ready to harvest cattle that are all going to be coming across the border right at one time. They have a plan in terms of bringing those cattle in. Again, for the majority of those cattle, they're not fed cattle that are ready to go to harvest. So it's not something that will come in and overly glut the market. It'll certainly be a benefit to many of those southern feed yards that are looking to fill pen space, but not necessarily something that should overly glut a pretty tight market to begin with.

Basse does expect to see effects of cattle fed supplies the second half of 2027, but we're looking out at the crystal ball and realizing that we'll probably have to put our seat belts on and hold onto this market for a while now.

Host Lynsey McAnally (12:14):
Another session that our commercial cattle audience I think would find of interest was the "New Tools to Capture More Dollars: Red Meat Yield Update" from Nick Hardcastle. Do you mind giving us a little bit over what that session covered?

Kara Lee (12:28):
Yeah, absolutely. So Dr. Hardcastle from Cargill has done quite a bit of work in the space of red meat yield evaluation. It's not a new conversation. You go to any of the industry events, there's been a lot of chatter over the last few years about ultimately looking at the current yield grade equation and questioning whether or not its relevance still applies to the way that we buy and sell carcasses today. Nick would've shared some of the work that Cargill has been doing in terms of both evaluating the current yield grade equation and then even some of the new technology. Ultimately the moral of the story is there that we know we want to raise pounds of gold instead of pounds of lead. That's not new from a Certified Angus Beef perspective. We know that a pound of prime carcass is worth more than a pound of select or a pound of low choice carcass, but the goal being we need to be able to do it without creating so much waste and we need to be able to do it without the added back fat and some of that other waste yield and just being able to better value those carcasses and balancing both your quality and your red meat yield.

I would say Nick's comments on some of the technology, whether it's looking at CT scans in the packing plant, they've been doing a lot of work today at Cargill at trying out some of that CT technology. It does seem like that may be the gold standard going forward in terms of cherry-picking the technology that's going to do a better job of evaluating that red meat yield on the carcasses. That would also go kind of hand in hand with some of the messaging that Pete Anderson would've shared in his session about balancing the way we manage and market those cattle towards the most profitable end target is the idea of, hey, what's it take to get a prime yield grade two? The message for the producer being if you can create that better carcass, less waste. That's going to continue to drive the financial signal for the packers.

I think we have to be careful to make sure that we're not setting off alarm bells in this whole red meat yield conversation saying that red meat yield is the end all be all. We don't want to chase just red meat yield at the expense of chasing quality. We know that's the opposite direction of where the consumer wants us to go. That's a really good way to put a bullet in the foot of our consumer demand is to not give them a higher quality product. But there are some real financial repercussions today with some of the excess bark that we're putting on some of these heavier carcasses in terms of the packing sector. So it's a balance across the board. We want to make sure that we're sending the right financial signals to the producer about the target endpoints for how we want to feed those cattle without creating a lot of excess waste for the producer or disappointing the ultimate consumer.

Host Lynsey McAnally (15:21):
Thanks for that. That was a session that I was all ears for because that's not something that I deal with on a day-to-day basis, but that information was so interesting and I think so relevant to the audience that was in the room that day. Another one that I thought was really, really interesting, and it's no secret, I love a panel and "The Value of Supply Chain Coordination" group, which was Levi Berry, Tom Fanning, and Spencer Smith. I think there was a lot of great content there as well. So hit us with the high points for that one.

Kara Lee (15:52):
Yeah, that was a really fun panel to put together when you get the kind of industry experience and expertise of those three gentlemen. We wanted to approach the topic of supply chain coordination as you mentioned, but also acknowledging that coordination is not the same as integration. And we know we are not a fully integrated ... We're not an integrated processing system. You get into some circles and the idea of integration might even be a four-letter word to some folks, but we also are living in a system today where you can't ignore the fact that coordination between different segments of the business is absolutely advantageous. Whether you're a cattle feeder or a commercial producer. I always say that progressive management requires progressive marketing if you want to get paid for it. What these gentlemen were able to talk about really just it rides right into the message of that.

Tom there, he's been with the Pratt Feeding Group for a long time. He was the manager at their Buffalo Feeders yard and now oversees the entire Pratt Feeders group. Would've talked quite a bit about their procurement strategy and even some of the DNA tools that they are using today and bringing those cattle into the yard. Getting a better idea of the actual genetic potential of those feeder cattle. All three gentlemen would've agreed we're not just chasing a black hide anymore. Yes, we know that that black hide adds more value, but just being black hided isn't good enough. We know there's a range and a variety of quality underneath that black hide, and to be able to have the tools we have today to quantify those genetics can, one, it adds leverage to the cow-calf producer at marketing for those calves, and it gives better information to the cattle feeder on how we want to manage those cattle to their best endpoint.

Spencer Smith would've spoke quite a bit about the AngusLink program and the way that we can really build some feeder calf resumes behind those calves. Again, you get them in, you get that information and you manage them accordingly. You have a better idea in terms of hedging those cattle from a marketing perspective when you know more about what their potential is. Even if it's a matter of maybe you know the potential and it's not quite as high, but you can manage according to that. They've also had a lot of success and even working hand in hand with their commercial cow-calf producers of sharing that data back and helping those cow-calf producers make more informed decisions in the next round of genetics or even the next round of health management that they're doing to be better. I think one of the very expected questions that came from the audience, and I don't recall if this was fielded to Tom or to Spencer, but the question was, do you ever worry whether you're a feeder or a stock or broker ... When you share that data back, does the cow-calf producer ever come back to you next year and use that data against you and try to leverage you for more money?

I think that's a pervasive question that we get in this business. I think some people have certainly been burned by the realities of that and it's made us a little bit gun shy, but all three of these gentlemen would've expressed the importance of you've got to vet people who want to be partners in this business. We don't want to just be transactional. We want to be partners. The only way for the rancher to get better is to get more information from the person that's buying their cattle. When we can give them more information, they can raise better cattle the next year that I can buy with more confidence. Because if you're in the business of buying feeder cattle right now, let's be honest, they are all sky high. They're high. You're going to be paying more for those cattle. So if you can hedge those purposes or those purchases rather by knowing a little bit more about what's under the hood, that's advantageous all around.

Host Lynsey McAnally (19:43):
You just talked a little bit about health and getting into later in the evening, we had the opportunity to recognize a giant in the industry as far as cattle health goes. Can you tell us a little bit about our Industry Achievement Award winner?

Kara Lee (19:58):
Yeah, so I'll probably start, Lynsey, by maybe just giving a little background about the Industry Achievement Award in general before we talk about our winner. This is the 16th year that the Industry Achievement Award has been a part of our Feeding Quality Forum, and we've really tried to make it that flagship of our evening together. It's an opportunity to recognize a true pioneer in the cattle feeding industry, and it could be someone who works truly in the feed yard side of things. Maybe it's a meat scientist, maybe it's someone who worked on the pioneering side of grid marketing and quality-based payment for cattle. This year in particular, we were able to recognize Dr. Del Miles, who would've been one of the, again, the pioneer of premier feedlot health management, one who, I'll be honest, he was one of the first people in my life I've ever had to talk into receiving an award.

I've had the privilege on multiple occasions of contacting folks on behalf of Certified Angus Beef to share some of the good news. I'm not sure that Dr. Miles wanted it initially, and I don't mean that in a sense of he was ungrateful by any stretch. I truly believe it was a testament to his humility. He sees his work in the industry just as the right thing to do. He said we were curious early. We were asking the hard questions. We were asking the questions about vaccinations and antibiotics and asking for data that people hadn't been brave enough to ask about before. He just sees it as, again, the right thing to do. I look back now at almost the pedigree, if you will, of some of the people who would've been mentored by Dr. Miles and continue to be the leaders in our industry today.

There's just absolutely no doubt in my mind that he has made a tremendous impact both at the cattle feeding health level and then as the next generation and generations to follow of leaders in that field. It's become a pretty special evening. As we do that Industry Achievement Award program, we've transitioned our evening program to be kind of like a TEDTalk, if you will, on stage with our award winners. This is the second year in a row that honestly, I felt like everyone in that room had the opportunity to have a front row seat at some of the kind of fireside chat stories that you would never know about. They're not the kind of stories that come out in an article or a biography. And quite frankly, sometimes we get to celebrate these people in ways that normally you wouldn't get to sit around and celebrate them until you're maybe sitting around at a celebration of life.

As heartbreaking as that is to think about, it just makes my heart happy to think that we can all sit around and do it with them while they are there and able to enjoy it. I think about, especially through the lens of some of the younger people in our industry who are in the room today, they leave with a little bit of a wide-eyed like, "Wow, I met a giant from our industry tonight." It was a lot of fun to celebrate Dr. Miles, and we look forward to that evening every year.

Host Lynsey McAnally (23:13):
So I mentioned earlier, I'm a big fan of a panel. There was another with Arnis Robbins, Paul Dykstra, and B.J. Johnson. I thought that one was really unique because it wasn't perspectives that we oftentimes get. So can you tell our audience a little bit about who those gentlemen are?

Kara Lee (23:31):
Absolutely. Lynsey, you're spot on with the idea of it being a different perspective. Each year when we're building our agenda for Feeding Quality Forum, we want to have at least one session on there that brings some perspective to why what ranchers and cattle feeders do matters to the other end of the business. And when we look at the growth in the industry from the prime category and even areas of focus within the Certified Angus Beef brand, our largest area of growth for the fiscal 2026 year was CAB Prime. We have evolved as an industry from Prime being something that maybe 10-15 years ago was considered a happy accident. If you had a handful of cattle that graded Prime, that's all fine and dandy. Today, we know it is attainable, it is repeatable, and it pays. We felt like Prime was a category that was worth having some of that end user perspective on because we get a lot of questions from producers today about with consumer beef prices being high, have we priced ourselves out of the market or where is that threshold where the consumer is no longer willing to pay for quality?

Do we need to be producing Prime if beef is already so expensive? So that was really the goal with that panel was to bring in a little bit of that end user or consumer perspective and also balance it with the relevance of prime production to the cow-calf producer. So Paul Dykstra from Certified Angus Beef would've been, his role on that panel was to weigh in from a cow-calf producer standpoint and speak to the profitability of what producing prime carcasses can mean to the cattle feeder and to the cow-calf producer. But the other two gentlemen were there to provide the impact that that Prime product really can have at the food service level. So Arnes Robbins would be from Evie Mays Barbecue. Evie Mays being just down the road. Their flagship rather, is just down the road in Lubbock, Texas. They do have a second location in Destin, Fla., where they've brought high quality barbecue from one side of the country to the other.

When you think about Texas, you think about briskets, you think about barbecue, but historically we maybe haven't always thought about Prime. For Arnis and the folks at Evie Mays, Certified Angus Beef Prime, it's the linchpin of their barbecue business. They say, "If we want to come in here and create a high quality product, we want something that people are going to write home about." He can talk about his business from that before and after making the transition and just has a tremendous testimony in terms of a business model that's built around that high quality product. BJ Johnson with Buckhead of Atlanta has a long time successful career in the food service business. So his role at Buckhead would be ultimately servicing those restaurateurs. He would be that last person standing in between a box of beef and the chef or the restaurateur determining what is goes on their menu. What goes in a box in the back of their cooler or their freezer.

He has seen Prime as a true advantage from a sales perspective. He's dealing with those restaurants that you think about it, in the grand scheme of things from a business perspective, we aren't too far out of COVID and you still have a lot of restaurateurs who are, they're really trying to sharpen their pencil and figure out how can we work on the high food cost margins we're at today while still delivering our customer a product they're willing to pay for and do so repeatably. And BJ would say that Certified Angus Beef Prime has really been a trump card in their deck to be able to get that done. In a lot of cases, it's maybe taking that customer who has the mindset, "I need to have a rib, a strip, or a tender on my menu." And maybe if their mentality is, "I need to downgrade to select or to low choice to save a little bit of money," BJ can come in and say, "Hey, what would it look like if we changed rather than the quality of your beef?

What if we change the cut? Maybe we do a Certified Angus Beef Prime top sirloin. We can give your customer a better eating experience and at the same time, save you money." They've had multiple cases of that as a success story. Then also even going back to their customers who aren't afraid to charge higher price margins for those middle meat cuts, but to say that people expect all beef to be more expensive, they're more likely to be disappointed by the money they spent on a poor eating experience. They don't remember the three or $4 they saved. They remember the money that they spent on a steak that wasn't very good. Why would we not want to sell them a steak that's absolutely going to knock it out of the park every single time? B.J. just did such a great job of sharing that perspective.

He's a dollars and cents kind of guy. He's not built a career of success over just selling people smoke and mirrors. One of the messages that he would've shared with our audience is keep bringing on the cattle. If you keep making more Prime, we can sell it. The demand is there, the growth is there. Restaurant concepts that 10 years ago might not have ever even thought about dipping their toe into the Prime market can do so today because the product is there and available to be sold. We've even seen this ... This wouldn't have been represented on the panel per se, but we've seen it on the retail side as well. I know Bruce Cobb shared a little bit of context before he brought this panel up about the kind of retail growth that Certified Angus Beef has seen in the prime category. One of the things that our product services team is taking a closer look at all the time is what are the cuts coming off of a CAB Prime carcass today that could be some great buying opportunities for that retailer who wants to run a feature

Ultimately, all of those things come together to continue adding value for the cattle feeder that's getting those cattle across the threshold into a Prime box because we've continued to see a little bit of ... The laws of supply and demand in the sense that even though we have more prime, we continue to grow the demand for it as well because the consumer wants it.

Host Lynsey McAnally (30:09):
Bouncing back to the cattle health side of things, I know we're kind of going all over the place. There was just so much good content and I find myself curious about several of these sessions. I found the advancing quality for beef on dairy with Taylor Engle really, really interesting. Can you talk a little bit about Taylor's perspective on that care aspect?

Kara Lee (30:30):
Yeah, Taylor did a great job. He's a great voice for the beef on dairy production system. To be fair, this is the first year we've really had a session specific to management of the beef on dairy category at our Feeding Quality Forum. We looked at coming to Amarillo and when you look at the landscape of cattle feeding in the panhandle area, we'd absolutely be remiss to not acknowledge the role that that segment plays in our business today. Taylor would very much have shared that not all beef on dairy production models are the same. There are a lot of differences and we know those cattle are extremely important to our production system, but you've got to manage that beef just a little bit differently. I know for me, even some of the things he shared about the kind of questions to ask a cattle feeder who's maybe considering bringing in a population of beef on dairy calves before.

If you've never fed those cattle before, what are the right kind of questions you need to be asking about the kind of management that they've had? Or some calf ranches will water out of a bucket, others are going to water out of a nipple. Does a calf that was raised in a calf ranch that drank out of a nipple its entire life know what to do when they go into a feed yard and there's a water box instead of a nipple? So it was just great to have the kind of perspective that someone like himself, he goes all over the country from Pennsylvania to Colorado down to the Panhandle and consulting with those cattle feeders who are hot and heavy in the beef on dairy population and trying to help them develop the best outcomes according to each and every one of their specific management strategies.

Host Lynsey McAnally (32:16):
All right. Well, we rounded out the day and Feeding Quality Forum closed out with "Planning for Growth" with Brian Walt, James Henderson and Mark Sorensen. Give us the high points of that one.

Kara Lee (32:28):
Yeah, we chose that session to be at the very end to put a bow on our two-day program. It seems like the crystal ball that everybody wants to have right now is around this idea of a herd rebuild. Is it happening? When is it going to happen? How is it going to happen? I'll be the first to admit, we did not answer any one of those questions. I think different parts of the country, people have different outlooks, but the goal really was to think about some of the considerations that need to happen if and when someone is in the position to think about growing, whether it's growing your numbers or even growing your marketing outlook. We're in a different environment today than we were coming out of the 2011, 2012 drought. It's been recent enough since we had the last cow herd build that I think it's tempting for producers to think about what we did in 2014 and 15 coming out of that last drought and maybe think we're just going to wash rinse repeat this time around.

Then that probably isn't the case. We specifically chose to have Mark Sorensen from Rabo Agrifinance on the panel to speak a little bit to the financial side of things. We know interest rates are different today than what they were in 2014, 2015. So we wanted him to be able to weigh in from a financial side of what's a lender looking at in terms of risk management for the cow-calf producer thinking about growth. What does the role of genetics and your marketing plan play into how much latitude a banker is going to be willing to give you? It was great to have the perspective of Brian Walt and James Henderson up there as well. James at Bradley 3 Ranch, he wears the hats of both sides of the fence of being that seed stock producer, the commercial producer has been very heavily involved in helping several of their bull customers over the years in terms of merchandising those calves and has come alongside them in terms of the kind of genetic tools that are available to them to make some of those keep coal decisions, if you will.

They've seen it pay off dividends for those commercial producers down the road. Brian Walt, he's a walking testimony to what can be achieved both on the fed cattle side of the business and on the commercial cow-calf side of the business. They've been implementing genomic testing on their commercial replacement females to think like GeneMax through the American Angus Association to get a better foundational understanding of those commercial females. Today, they also are able to incorporate those GMAC scores on their females into the genetic merit scorecard on those feeder cattle that they are merchandising. They have seen tremendous amount of success in raising the value of those genetic merit scorecards by plugging in the data on those Genemax tests from those females. I realize that's kind of getting down into the weeds on the particulars, but Brian would say is he's got one of his, I believe it's his son, has come back to the ranch now as well and they think about growing and becoming better as a business.

They're in a spot today where 80% Prime is not out of the question whatsoever on the cattle that they put across the rail. When they look at the dollars per head, that adds back to them from a financial perspective. That's not just talking about preparing for growth from a cattle numbers perspective, that's preparing for growth as a business. Especially when we've seen what the cattle market has been in the last couple of years, it's given them enough margin and latitude to be able to implement some of those tools that they maybe have a little bit of upfront cost to them, but the return on the amount of information you get from them has paid dividends long-term. He does a great job of talking through their evolution because they didn't start out there today or where they are today in terms of that success rate and just a very real world example of the way those tools can be implemented and setting them up for success from a long-term growth perspective.

Host Lynsey McAnally (36:49):
All right. Anything we missed?

Kara Lee (36:51):
It's always fun to look back on the previous year's Feeding Quality Forum, and I continue to have so many great conversations in the last couple of months since then with folks who were there. We also certainly hope that people are getting excited for next year. I mentioned that we do move this event around and while we were in Amarillo last year, we are very excited to head to Kearney, Nebraska in 2027 for our next Feeding Quality Forum. So we really hope folks will hold August 3-4 to join us there in Kearney to be a part of the 2027 Feeding Quality Forum event.

Host Lynsey McAnally (37:26):
Well, Kara, that was a lot to cover, but I think we did a good job of getting all of the high points for this audience. Thank you so much to the Certified Angus Beef team for the amount of solid information that was available to commercial cattlemen at Feeding Quality Forum 2026. We always like to end Angus at Work on a positive note. So what is one thing happening in your life personally or professionally that you were thankful for?

Kara Lee (37:53):
Oh, Lynsey, I'm so thankful for a lot of things. I mean, you look at any of us, we look around, everybody has good days and bad days, but we have a lot to be thankful for when we look at our family. But current events, I'll probably mix a little bit of the personal and the professional side of things. My husband and I are commercial cow-calf producers ourselves in northeast Kansas, and we are primarily a fall calving operation, so we're right in the thick of that right now. I have a five and three-year-old at home, and it's just so much fun to get to go around with them checking calves and cows and watching them learn through our eyes. We also have our first set that we'll get ready to start breeding on here in December of some heifers that we've GeneMax tested ourselves to do a little bit of heifer development on.

It's a lot of fun to be able to do a little practice what you preach at work and at home and see that those things, they pay off. That's what makes them so easy for me to be able to talk about because I get to see the benefits of them every day with my own family. It's a lot of fun. Some people would see the gray areas between personal and professional and see it as a little bit of a curse, but I'm grateful for it every day.

Host Lynsey McAnally (39:07):
Awesome. Well, what a great place to end and thank you so much again for joining us today.

Kara Lee (39:13):
I appreciate you having me, Lynsey. Thanks for everything you do.

Host Lynsey McAnally (39:21):
Listeners, for more information on making Angus work for you, check out the Angus Beef Bulletin and the Angus Beef Bulletin EXTRA. You can subscribe to both publications in the show notes. If you have questions or comments, let us know at abbeditorial@angus.org, and we would appreciate it if you would leave us a review on Apple Podcast and share this episode with any other profit-minded cattleman. Thanks for listening. This has been Angus at Work!