This week marks the tenth anniversary of the “cow that stole Christmas” – a day that will live in infamy for the U.S. cattle industry and one that Kendal Frazier with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association remembers well.

Kendal recalls that NCBA received a phone call from USDA at 1:30 pm on December 23, 2003. “We immediately started to implement a crisis management plan that we had worked on for nearly 10 years in anticipation of that moment,” he said.

By taking action to get accurate information out to the public, the beef industry was able to calm American consumers’ fears about so-called mad cow disease, but the international market was a different story. “Countries around the world … immediately closed their borders to U.S. beef, and that was a tremendous fallout for our industry,” said Kendal. “We just now this year, ten years later, have reached the levels from a volume standpoint of beef exports that we had. It’s been a long road back.”

Two major milestones were reached just this year with Japan now allowing imports of beef from cattle less than 30 months of age and the approval of a final BSE rule by USDA in November, but the cow of Christmas past still haunts us. “The market is still not fully open although we are selling a lot of beef products into Japan,” said Kendal, adding that they have high hopes for the future where beef trade will no longer be impacted by BSE. “This is a dying disease,” he said. “Hopefully, we’ll have wide open markets regarding BSE in the not too distant future.”

Listen to or download my interview with Kendal here: Interview with Kendal Frazier, NCBA