Second Beef Checkoff Loses National Farmers Union Support

USDA secretary Tom Vilsack says comments are starting to come on regarding his beef checkoff proposal. Villsack continues to say the only reason he has proposed the secondary checkoff is for a lack of agreement by the checkoff working group.
Vilsack: “The comments are coming in obviously folks are concerned at the end of the day this is really about an effort to try and put more resources behind marketing, research and promotion of beef. We have a challenge domestically from lots of competition from other sources of protein and we have obviously tremendous export opportunities. All of which speaks to the need for additional resources. My hope would be that the industry to come together and coalesce around a single check off but they haven’t been able to do that over the last three years of discussions. My view is if we can’t reach an agreement on a single checkoff then by all means we ought to look at a complementary checkoff to ensure that we do get those resources into the system and that we do a better job of promotion, research and marketing.”
If you recall the National Farmers Union pulled out of that working group earlier this fall. Now the NFU are saying that they do not want a second checkoff program but rather prefer to do away with 1985 Beef Checkoff Act.