Upcoming Beef Safety Summit To Focus On Pre-Harvest Interventions
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Suggested Lead: Since 2003, one annual event has brought every segment of the beef industry together in one room to help bring better focus on beef safety. This year’s Beef Safety Summit, which is partially funded through the beef checkoff, will be held March 3-5 in Dallas, Texas.
Jeff Clausen is a beef producer from Carson, Iowa, and chairman of the industry’s Joint Beef Safety Committee. He says the summit is important because safety of beef products is absolutely critical to both beef consumers and the people who help produce it.
Clausen 1: “Beef safety is one of those areas where you increase beef demand by having beef safety. But if you have a recall or something that jeopardizes that perception of beef safety, then demand is affected dramatically. So it’s important that we build and maintain consumers’ trust in our beef safety.” (23 seconds)
Clausen says much had been done on in-plant beef safety by the Beef Industry Food Safety Council even before the summit was first established.
Clausen 2: “A lot had already been done, and a lot of focus was there, and they were just fine tuning a lot of that. And now, last year – and this year especially, they’re going to have a special session on pre-harvest interventions. And that will involve some vaccines that are being used for e. coli and salmonella, and just some other things that we can do before those cattle actually enter into the harvest facility.” (31 seconds)
According to Clausen, the summit’s sessions are heavy with information, and there isn’t much need for additional motivation for attendees.
Clausen 3: “People are motivated because it’s their livelihood. If we don’t provide a safe product, then our businesses are in jeopardy, because of the beef demand. The motivation is just to better their operations and to provide that safe, nutritious and enjoyable product to the consumer, and that they can be confident that it is safe.” (25 seconds)
Checkoff dollars, which have been in shorter supply in recent years because of a shrinking cattle supply, are efficiently used through this safety summit and other beef safety efforts, Clausen says.
Clausen 4: “Those checkoff dollars are leveraged with $350 million that the beef industry spends annually on beef safety, and that’s just vital to beef demand.” (14 seconds)
For more information on the industry’s beef safety efforts, visit www.MyBeefCheckoff.com, or go to the Beef Industry Food Safety Council’s Web site at www.bifsco.org.
The Beef Checkoff Program was established as part of the 1985 Farm Bill. The checkoff assesses $1 per head on the sale of live domestic and imported cattle, in addition to a comparable assessment on imported beef and beef products. States retain up to 50 cents on the dollar and forward the other 50 cents per head to the Cattlemen’s Beef Promotion and Research Board, which administers the national checkoff program, subject to USDA approval.
Funded by the Beef Checkoff.
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