What's the beef? During tense times in the meat industry, CSU brings together stakeholders to imagine a better future
Over the past 100 years, CSU Extension has played a key role in supporting rural farmers and ranchers during some of their most trying times.
From helping implement relief programs during the Dust Bowl to taking on modern day struggles like drought, countless Extension specialists have dedicated their careers to serving communities across the state, working to make life a little easier for the people putting food on our tables.
For livestock producers, the future demands resiliency and a willingness to adapt and respond to change.
For the past few years, access to meat processing options has been a growing challenge for Colorado’s livestock producers. On the other hand, meat processors are also facing difficulties as labor has been a limiting factor for many companies that have struggled to retain and train enough workers to meet demand.
Meeting the need
One of the overarching challenges that CSU Extension experts have seen in their efforts to support Colorado ranchers and processors is a lack of communication along and across supply chains, creating disconnects between people who are in positions to help one another.
For instance, in a global meat industry, changes outside of Colorado can have a direct impact on the state’s meat industry, which in the last twenty years has doubled its beef exports. However, if producers don’t know how to make sense of shifting markets, or what that means for them, they can be caught off guard as global demand changes.
“The Colorado livestock and meat industry is local and global so it’s important for producers to have a scope for what’s happening outside of their bubble.”
– Jennifer Martin
Associate Professor & Extension Specialist
International Livestock Forum and Mountain Meat Summit: A rising tide to lift all boats
With the goal of advancing market opportunities, building connections, and supporting skills development across the Mountain West’s meat supply chain, experts from Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming worked together to launch the Mountain Meat Summit, run in conjunction with the ninth annual International Livestock Forum.
The series of lectures, tours, consultations and facilitated discussions brought together industry leaders, government professionals, and academics and helped establish a shared understanding of the complex problems that need to be addressed to improve livestock and food production.
“Typically, people segregate by scale, and so smaller-scale, direct-to-market producers aren’t usually in the same room as the people from JBS Swift,” said Martha Sullins, an agricultural economist and business management expert with CSU Extension, who helped organize the Mountain Meat Summit.
“We made a concerted effort to convene conversations that were inclusive of all viewpoints,” added Jennifer Martin, an associate professor and Extension specialist who has helped organize the International Livestock forum for the past nine years.
“Our goal was to facilitate dialog and acknowledge the value and contributions of all members of the supply chain, versus saying one approach was better than another,” Martin said.
Throughout the summit, people connected over their common challenges, sharing best practices and insights into topics that they had previously felt isolated in addressing.
Supporting the next generation of leaders
Offered alongside the Mountain Meat Summit, the International Livestock Forum, which is offered annually in January, brought high school and college students interested in learning about livestock and meat production into the conversation.
“Coming from a more rural and isolated part of Colorado, it’s hard to make the connections with people in the meat industry past the cow and calf producers and private processors,” wrote a 4-H’er from La Plata County in a letter sent to the organizers after the event, going on to describe how hard it had been for her to gain an understanding of how international markets played a role in her local livestock industry.
“This experience has helped me to understand the meat industry in more ways than a book or the Internet ever could,” she said.
Building onto a suite of existing resources
The success of the International Livestock Forum and Mountain Meat Summit is part of a broader effort stemming from a three-year grant from the USDA’s Western Region Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program that also includes:
- Developing a tool to help meat producers more accurately use their costs of production to ensure their pricing will help them generate profits across different markets.
- Partnering with higher-ed partners to offer an 8-week, online Western Meat School, which helps farmers, ranchers, butchers and others learn the essentials for direct marketing niche meat products.
This adds to the list of existing resources found across CSU Extension, including from the Food Systems Institute and the Agricultural Business Management team, as well as the Extension county specialists and academic faculty across campus who have dedicated their attention and research into helping improve value chain for stakeholders across the meat industry.
The next Mountain Meat Summit will be held in Montana in May of 2024. To learn more, visit: meatsummits.com