Tom Ramey, CBB’s CEO sure has his hands full dealing with some challenging times for the Checkoff. This morning he made a presentation at the second general session of the Summer Conference. You can listen to his presentation below.
I also interviewed Tom and found out that there are two main issues of special importance to the Checkoff here at this conference. The first one, according to Tom, is the budget. The recommended budget was presented at the CBB Update Session and committees will be looking at the parts that affect them during their meetings. Tom says that Checkoff dollars are down and that it’s a tough time right now. He says some difficult decisions will need to be made.
The other big issue is the process to create recommendations for ways to improve the Checkoff. Tom says the staff has sent out over 300 letters soliciting comments and that they’ll be organizing meetings with a number of the organizations targeted. Once those comments come in the staff will organize them and scrub them so that the Admin Subcommittee, which is charged with overseeing this process, can look at them on the merit of the comment without being affected by seeing who wrote them. Then the staff will be helping organize meetings with the committee to review the comments and formulate recommendations prior to the end of the year.
Tom says producers here seem excited about what the Checkoff is doing but are concerned about the budget. He says these are difficult times for the beef industry.
Listen to my interview with Tom here: cisc-08-ramey-1.mp3
Listen to Tom’s general session presentation here: cisc-08-ramey-general-session-2.mp3