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As the senior director of sustainability for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), Ashley McDonald is at the forefront of the discussion to improve and grow the beef business. She also led an effort by the NCBA to launch new goals for sustainability for the industry this summer.
She’s hoping the sustainability goals and targets will be something the beef industry can coalesce around.
McDonald is also the executive director of the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (USRSB), which she describes as an organization with a high-level view of the entire beef supply chain: from producers all the way to food companies and restaurants. The goal is to communicate across the entire food value chain about issues that impact each member – because it affects them all. McDonald spoke to Successful Farming in September after the goals were released. (You can find the report at ncba.org/sustainability.aspx.)
AM: Well, we have the holistic definition, which I think is key to continually remind folks. It has three legs of the stool: economic, social, as well as environmental. We spend a lot of time reminding people that beef sustainability is not just about the environmental factors, even though those are important. There are other very important legs of the stool. We want to have economically viable beef operations that care for their animals and their communities and their people – along with the natural resources under their care.
AM: We had a goals task force formed of producer members from across the country who heard from a lot of experts on where the industry is in terms of the environmental issues, in terms of animal welfare, and in training and certifications on animal welfare and health. They also heard research on what consumers and others are worried about. After a lot of thought and a lot of information about what we know, what we don’t know, and what opportunities lie ahead for the cattle industry, we came up with four goals: two under social, one under environmental, and one under economic.
It was important to NCBA and the task force to make sure that we were being holistic with our goals; goals that the entire cattle industry could embrace and get behind. Probably the biggest one that people will talk about is the environmental one, which is to demonstrate the climate neutrality of the U.S. cattle industry by 2040.
Of the two social ones, one is animal welfare. The other is focused on the workforce and protecting the well-being and safety of the workforce – just being known and recognized as responsible stewards of our animals and resources, and ultimately to improve animal welfare outcomes through increased training and events. We’ll focus a lot on stockmanship and stewardship, the Beef Quality Assurance program, and other programs that drive education and adoption of practices that ultimately produce better animal welfare outcomes. The worker safety one is to improve worker safety and well-being. For everybody involved in the industry – whether you’re a veterinarian or working at the feed mill, or the owner of a cow-calf ranch – we are trying to make sure that we continually work on improving the safety of our industry.
The economic goal focuses on working toward an increase in producer profitability. We realized through this process that we really don’t have a great measuring stick for the sectors. One of the first efforts will be to form a group or a task force of experts throughout the cattle industry, and put together objective factors that we can use as our measuring stick, and then use that measuring stick to show an increase in profitability over time.
AM: Those were all big discussions. I’d say underlying each of them is the question: How are we going to measure? Let’s start with the climate one. Soil carbon science is still an evolving science. Really, a lot of the tactics underlying that goal involve a lot of research. We want to have a lot of research done, so we know where we are, and make sure we can justify any progress – the amount of carbon that we have in the soil currently or in the future. We do have a solid base in a life cycle assessment that is funded by the Beef Checkoff; it’s done every five years and focuses on greenhouse gas emissions. We have the EPA greenhouse gas inventory, of course. So there is a lot of science out there about how to estimate these things. We will work with the King Ranch Institute for Ranch Management, as we did in the goals development process, to measure progress over time.
We’ve probably had the most analysis on the economic goal. For the social goals, we have measures in place for the certifications and trainings in a lot of programs, like the BQA program, and we do track certifications. One of the underlying tactics is a 10% increase year over year in certifications under the BQA program.
On the worker safety and well-being, I’d say that’s probably the hardest one. We are going to work on safety programs, trying to catalog and keep an idea of what programs are out there, knowing how many people we can continue to educate on those subjects. We do recognize, as an industry, we are one of the most dangerous industries in the world. It’s obviously very close to everyone’s heart that we make sure that we continuously improve the safety and well-being of the people who are working to produce cattle.
AM: We call it a multi-stakeholder collaborative effort that brings together members of the supply chain, from the cow-calf producer all the way to the retailer or the restaurant company or franchise, and then also our allied industry – everybody who contributes to the beef industry as well as other stakeholders. We have researchers and the NGO community, who really care about the sustainability of beef. It brings together basically all the people who do, in fact, care about making beef a better and more sustainable product here in the United States.
AM: Yes. USRSB is kind of bringing everyone together to say, OK, what are our entire full supply-chain industry goals going to look like? We have all of this underlying information to work with as well, which is really positive. We’ll wrap up this fall with a launch, and then in the coming years, work toward progress. We’re pushing to finalize them in November. That’s what the timeline looks like right now.
AM: Oh, wow. That’s a big question. I have to defer to my D.C. colleagues for most of that. But, in general, NCBA’s mission is fairly clear: We want to create a better business atmosphere for cattle producers. A lot of our D.C. efforts are focused on that. A lot of the work in the D.C. office is trying to streamline or get rid of red tape so that a lot of the efforts, or even the resources, can get back down to the ground, whether it’s environmental improvements, physical improvements, or research that improves the efficiency of the animal and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
I know some of the work right now is making sure we can keep our industry financially and economically viable through the stepped-up basis. We’re making sure that the regulatory burden is not as big, or doesn’t grow, at least.
AM: It’s so funny, I had a question recently about who handles the resiliency of the supply chain. My mind went to how do we better prepare to pivot from a lot of beef going into food service to quickly switching to retail? That was a huge issue identified during the pandemic, right? We had beef out there, we just couldn’t get it to the right places for customers, for consumers. Separately is getting a direct channel to consumers from producers. Part of our goals was a quantifiable increase in profitability. The first part of that goal, of course, is increasing opportunities for producers. Marketing opportunities are an important piece of growing opportunities. I think in the future we’ll continue to develop some of those resources for our producers to adapt, if these black swan events start piling up again. Maybe it makes the pivot a little more bearable and, and hopefully, seamless.
Name: Ashley McDonald
Title: Senior director of sustainability for National Cattlemen’s Beef Association; also executive director of the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (USRSB).
Education: Degree in Agriculture Economics from University of Missouri; juris doctorate degree from George Mason University School of Law, Arlington, Virginia.
Experience: Served as NCBA’s environmental counsel in the Washington, D.C., office; served as Missouri Farm Bureau Federation’s director of state legislative affairs.
NCBA goals are here.