Clint Peck Talks BEEF, and Lesley Robinson Leads the Stockgrowers

Clint Peck is a former Montana extension agent who started the Yellowstone Cellars and Winery in Billings. He's now back in action for American agriculture as a writer for BEEF magazine.

Clint had an article that caught my eye in particular. With all of this talk about the southern border, he had a piece about how the southern border was shut down. But it wasn't shut down for illegal aliens- it was shut down for cattle.

Without understanding the cattle business, you might think that is good news for American cattle producers- keep the foreign competition out. But Clint tells us how big parts the American cattle industry relies on those cows.

Clint Peck: "Typically, in a year, about a million, million two head of feeder cattle come across the border from Mexico, and those cattle are put on in grow yards and put on winter wheat pasture all the way into Kansas. I think there have been those Mexican cattle come all the way to Montana...and there are a lot of those feed yards, those, those stocker operations that rely on those cattle, especially seasonally, when northern cattle aren't available, just because of the biological nature of beef production, cattle production. So there's an argument that says that maybe these cattle kind of help us, because it helps keep those grow yards, those stocker operations, in business, so that seasonally they can accept the more northern cattle, or those cattle maybe from the Midwest that may go south into those grow yards or on to wheat pasture in Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, those kind of places.

Click here for the full article Clint wrote for BEEF magazine back towards the end of November.

After chatting with Clint on Friday, we got to catch up Lesley Robinson, the newly elected President of the Montana Stockgrowers Association. Lesley is the first woman to ever serve as president of the MSGA since they first got started back in 1884. She also chairs the Montana Fish, Wildlife, & Parks Commission right now. She's a former Phillips County Commissioner who ranches north of the Missouri River.

Lesley talked about MSGA's producer profitability initiative, state and federal tax policy, and more.

Lesley Robinson: "One of our goals is to keep agricultural land in production, because there's just a lot of land coming out of production and a lot of younger people, or just people in general, who would be interested in getting into ranching but with the prices and everything just so high, we're trying to look to maybe lower the barriers to get people into ranching or to continue ranching on a family ranch."

Here's the full audio from our chat with Clint Peck and Lesley Robinson: