Oklahoma Beef Council Delivers Results to Producers Utilizing International Investment Strategy

Nov 18, 2016

The Oklahoma Beef Council is one of several state beef councils that allocates extra resources to the US Meat Export Federation. OBC Executive Director Heather Buckmaster tells Farm Director Ron Hays, ‘it really pays off.’

“When you look at Oklahoma, we have 3.875 million consumers in the state of Oklahoma and 96 percent of the world’s population lives outside of the US,” Buckmaster said. “We represent 1.2 percent of the US population so we want to make sure we’re making the most difference, so we made the choice to invest with USMEF.”

According to Buckmaster, each dollar contributed is matched three to four times, effectively extending that original dollar amount, enabling participants to support a variety of promotional events. Buckmaster reports that the success of some of the promotions OBC has participated in has prompted foreign host retailers to replace current beef programs with US beef inventory.

“It’s all going to be US beef,” Buckmaster said, “which should increase the volume of US beef purchases into next year by 70 percent.

Video: Cleaning Sheep Barns & Setting Up Chutes

Indoor sheep farming in winter at pre-lambing time requires that, at Ewetopia Farms, we need to clean out the barns and manure in order to keep the sheep pens clean, dry and fresh for the pregnant ewes to stay healthy while indoors in confinement. In today’s vlog, we put fresh bedding into all of the barns and we remove manure from the first groups of ewes due to lamb so that they are all ready for lambs being born in the next few days. Also, in preparation for lambing, we moved one of the sorting chutes to the Coveralls with the replacement ewe lambs. This allows us to do sorting and vaccines more easily with them while the barnyard is snow covered and hard to move sheep safely around in. Additionally, it frees up space for the second groups of pregnant ewes where the chute was initially.