Actually, the brand law is fine

Don't expect change just because you feel personally inconvenienced.

I read Jaclyn Wilson’s most recent article about the Nebraska Brand Committee in the Midwest Messenger. I rarely read The Messenger, (TSLN and Fencepost are better papers in my opinion), but people kept sending her article to me.

I have had this substack for a few years but haven’t published anything on it yet. My drafts folder contains a bunch of half worked essays that weren’t fit to put into the public. But I’m so passionate about this one issue that I’ll give Ms. Wilson the honor.

I’m responding to things from her article in no particular order.

Fees Fi Fo Fum

Since its inception, the ranch has paid tens of thousands of dollars to the brand committee for inspection fees. During that time, we have had one “stolen” animal recovered. It was a Hereford steer that was in with the neighbor’s cattle and rode the train to Omaha. Needless to say, that was a couple of decades ago.

I wanted to address this one first. In all of the tens of thousands of dollars Ms. Wilson’s ranch has paid into the brand committee, it is mighty damn arrogant for her to imply that her neighbors haven't also paid tens of thousands of dollars to keep the committee functioning.

Despite her claims, Ms. Wilson’s ranch is not all that remarkable.

Brand is a security deposit to ensure that — in the ever so unlikely event your cattle do go missing, or stray, or accidentally wind up on someone else's truck bound for a registered feedlot (where it will never be seen again if LB 646 passes) — a means exists under law for you to recover that asset.

$1 per head is pretty cheap insurance.

Veterinarians aren’t Brand Men

• “…why am I having to have both a veterinarian and an inspector come out to inspect cattle that are heading out of state when I can provide individual EIDs?…

For someone who previously served on the brand committee and has been in this business for a while, Ms. Wilson asks a lot of questions about why the agency the governor appointed her to does things the way it does.

A veterinarian is attesting to the health of the animal. The EID tag is a component of disease traceability, but it’s not the be-all end-all. Disease traceability doesn’t work without health inspections to identify sick animals. A veterinarian isn't (and shouldn't be) concerned with attesting to who owns that animal. That's the Brand Committee's job. The late Dr. Don Cain of Broken Bow taught me that.

A livestock investigator is an officer of the court. They can be brought in to attest to livestock ownership before a judge or jury. They rely on the inspection staff to provide them with the necessary documentary evidence that supports the investigation. This most often happens in bankruptcies, divorces, and most recently, neglect cases.

A Doctor of Veterinary Medicine does not want to get wrapped up in the legal business. Unlike a brand man, he is not a disinterested third-party. He’s an independent contractor. You paid him to come to your ranch to do one single thing: certify that an animal is healthy enough to cross state lines. That’s it. That’s his job. That’s the one thing he is qualified to opine about.

Again, it’s basic Matlock level stuff that I’m surprised Ms. Wilson doesn’t know.

But what Ms. Wilson and progressive cattlemen in general struggle to understand is that most of us will never take their word for it when it comes to tag numbers. EID is not a sufficient replacement for a hot iron brand, nor will it ever be elevated up to be equal status with a hot iron brand. The common cowman doesn’t trust EID tags for a myriad of reasons that I don’t want to get into here. The common cowman is also rightfully skeptical of the people who are pushing for mandatory EID tags. If it would benefit the common cowman then the common cowman would have already done it.

And I really have to stress this — branding isn’t mandatory. You can leave all your cattle slick. But brand inspection doesn’t discriminate. It has to apply to everyone, regardless of how big or small your operation is or how you run your business.

A hot iron brand has been the primary method for showing livestock ownership since at least 2700 BC.

We keep branding our cattle because it works.

We want to keep brand inspection because it keeps honest men honest.

No one is holding a gun to your head and saying “you must brand your cattle”

• …There is nothing for me that is more time consuming than getting a group of cattle in to walk them by an inspector that none of them have brands on and then have an inspector give me a paper that says “NB” or no brand.”…

As I’ve said, it’s Ms. Wilson’s choice to leave her cattle slick, just like it's also her choice to use the tags. They are her animals and she can do what she wants with them.

But she is being quite deceitful by not telling you the whole story here.

Sex and color are always put on the brand paper. That’s a data point that helps to identify those animals. If someone shows up with a brand paper that lists four slick red steers, but I look in the trailer and there are four slick red heifers, I’ll probably call the brand man to ask him if the steers he inspected were somehow transgender. I don’t think that’s the way it works, but it’s hard to say in this world today.

To Ms. Wilson’s earlier point about veterinarians — there’s a space on the brand paper where the inspector can put the Certificate of Veterinary Inspection (CVI) number, which helps to tie the two pieces of documentary evidence (the brand paper and the health paper) together. If you have to go to court there’s a paper trail that says you owned the slick cattle in question.

There’s a space for odd brands and if they carry more then one brand. There’s also a space for the number off the bangs tags. Brand Inspectors often use a bangs number to locate the owner of a slick stray that has no other identifying characteristics.

Provisions were included with Senator Halloran’s LB 572 in 2021 that allowed the brand committee to adopt other forms of “visual and nonvisual animal ID” as evidence of ownership. There’s not a space for EID tag numbers on the brand paper because the brand committee hasn’t built that program yet (I’ll have to write a whole separate article about that topic).

But here’s the point: even a brand paper that says “no brand” still contains a lot of information that helps to identify who owns that animal. The brand paper is evidence of ownership that will hold up in a court of law. When an EID tag holds up in a court of law as a valid form of proving ownership, I think it will be trusted.

Until then, the banker still wants you to put your brand on the loan paperwork.

The law in Nebraska as its written today says you have to prove ownership to ANYONE who asks for it. If my neighbor wants me to prove that it’s my calf that crawled through his fence, I’ll point to the brand. If he still doesn’t believe me and tries to take my calf to the salebarn anyway, the brand man will catch it there and I’ll get my calf back.

Ideally brand inspection should cover the whole state. Former Senator Al Davis introduced that bill back on 2013 that would have done just that. Nebraska Cattlemen were the only organization that showed up to oppose it.

Nebraska Farm Bureau has a really good and simple policy that says brand inspection should be statewide and the should be no sweetheart deals for the feedlots. I wish Cattlemen were more like Farm Bureau in that regard, but that’s about as far as I want to go with that.

Other technology like face recognition software is being perfected and they are superior to EID tags in a lot of ways. But until I can scan a cows face with a smartphone and see who owns it with some reasonable degree of accuracy, I’d feel much better if there were a disinterested third party there looking at the hide.

Trust, but verify.

Internal processes doesn’t impress regular ranchers

• With our ranch ID system in place, I can tell you at any time that we work cattle – birth, branding, AI, preg check, weaning weights, yearling weights, etc. We know exactly who is not accounted for, and in that case an investigator can be contacted if need be. Otherwise our traceability system is better than any brand paper, even if you cut out the EIDs and visual tag. Our tattoo system can still identify animals.

I don’t know how many times tattoos get misread, but that was another thing Dr. Cain and I had spent time visiting about. A veterinarian might put that animal in a head catch if someone has cut out the EID tag, and he might read the tattoo correctly and he might check to see who it belonged to when the tag was applied, BUT AGAIN: The Veterinarian is there to attest to the health of the animal, not to who actually owns it.

Ms. Wilson spends a lot of column inches in The Messenger bragging about her traceability program. Her or her help are responsible for entering every data point that’s in her traceability system.

There’s no third party there auditing the keystrokes. The brand man doesn’t have access to it. Her traceability system won’t hold up in a court of law. Ergo, it’s not better than any brand paper.

People can — and have — used traceability systems to commit fraud. It’s also pretty damn arrogant for Ms. Wilson to claim that she has set a standard for everyone else to follow.

If that is really the best practice I would think more people would have adopted it.

They haven’t.

The fact you can keep records is dandy when you’re a high school senior applying for your State FFA degree. When you’re conversing with the common cowman at a church potluck or after a basketball game, most of them couldn’t care less about how you do things. They care more about how your parents are doing or what your sibling is up to.

I keep track of calf numbers in my little book and I try to keep up on tagging. My friend doesn’t even bother because his cows are mean and he’s not going to provide some waspy bitch the opportunity to punch his ticket onto the life flight helicopter.

Which of us has the more sophisticated outfit? The progressive cattlemen would argue that while I’m doing better than my friend, I’m still only doing the bare minimum. The progressive cattlemen are too sophisticated for their own good.

A momma cow can’t even read the number I write on her calf’s tag but miraculously she still knows which calf belongs to her. God works in many mysterious ways.

At the end of the day the brand man doesn’t give a shit about my calf book or whether or not my neighbor tags his calves. He doesn’t need to know each calf’s nickname or Zodiac sign or what their favorite color is. He is after one thing: can I provide evidence that I own the animal he’s looking at.

Not everyone is a cattle thief (except for the ones that are)

Maybe instead of thinking the whole western two-thirds of the state is home to every cattle thief in the Midwest (even though we can’t determine how many of those are actually stolen or estray), we should instead be looking for ways to better the movement of cattle more accurately and efficiently before we lose it all. This ongoing battle is not going to end anytime soon unless we find some compromise.

Technically Nebraska is a part of the Great Plains, not the Midwest, but I digress.

Ms. Wilson can easily claim that cattle rarely go missing from her place with the law as it is now. I have heard that exact same line in triplicate year after year for the last decade and I’m not impressed.

Ms. Wilson isn’t saying anything important. She’s making an observation and it's impossible to prove the negative of that observation because its like saying we won't have drunk drivers anymore if the cops quit pulling people over for driving drunk.

How the hell would we even know?

“Cattle theft never happens,” they say, except in all the places that it does happen (usually in non-brand inspected states and areas). And that’s to say nothing of the sophisticated crimes like Ponzi schemes and check kiting and other white collar crimes that occur when you don’t have inspectors generating a paper trail for the cattle cops to investigate.

A quick google search turned up a list of crimes here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here. I’m sure I could go on. It’s not an isolated incident and it happens across the country. Just because it doesn’t happen to you doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Congratulations on being fortunate enough that your ranch has not attracted cattle thieves.

Meanwhile in Kansas, which is a volunteer brand inspection state, cattle go missing all the time. If they’re ever recovered, its usually in the Nebraska brand inspection area because we have mandatory inspection. I don't know exactly how many it is the committee catches each year, but Kansas ranchers wind up with stuff stolen from them all the time.

In Nebraska the brand law applies to the whole state, not just the inspection area. The Brand investigators spend something like 40 percent of their time in a year investigating things east of the line. Those producers benefit from a service they will never pay for. Ms. Wilson served on the brand committee. It's either dishonest or disingenuous for her to act like she doesn't know any better.

I'm unflinching and uncompromising on this issue.

I argued against the EID mandate at the Nebraska Cattlemen convention in Kearney back in December. I don’t think they fully understood what I was saying, however, I can at least see the point they were coming from.

Both disease traceability and brand inspection rely on a similar principle: if one segment doesn't play, then there's a hole in the traceability scheme and stuff falls out through that hole. That’s the whole justification Nebraska Cattlemen and NCBA are using to push for the EID mandate for all classes of cattle.

We are talking out both sides of our mouth if we say one system still works if Jaclyn Wilson doesn’t have to show the brand man her livestock, but the other system fails if Spike Jordan isn’t forced to put an 840 button in all his cattle.

The cost of doing business.

Today, if I have one animal that needs to be inspected, I can pay $21 to have the inspector come to the ranch or I can take the time to load the animal up, drive it 72 miles round trip to town and pay $1.

I guess I don't know how far outside of Lakeside Ms. Wilson lives, but she’s crying about inspection for one critter. Ms. Wilson could pay $21 for the convenience of the brand man coming to her place to look at on animal. LB 572 authorized the Brand Committee to charge mileage, but they haven’t quite figured out how to do that yet and still make it work with the iPads. At the current Federal Mileage rate (67 cents per mile) the mileage alone from Alliance to Lakeside would cost you $34.84.

But if the roundtrip drive is the big concern, I believe Alliance is closer to Lakeside than Rushville or Gordon. Ms. Wilson could load that critter onto a trailer and take it over to the Brand Committee’s Headquarters Office in Alliance and have Dean Anderson or Tom Hughson or someone else who is qualified look at it and do up a clearance.

I have to take mine down to Crawford if the brand man can't make it up the hill to Harrison. That’s roughly the same distance. You don't see me bitching about it. You live in a flyover state. Long drives come with the territory.

I don’t know the first thing about Ms. Wilson’s direct-to-consumer beef business, but to borrow a few turns of phrase from ex-Brand Director John Widdowson, “cowboy logic” says that if $21 dollars is what’s going to sink your business, maybe do a bit of back of the envelop “cowboy math” and add that into the price you charge your customer. Might as well tack on the dollar per head you pay for the checkoff too.

If you sell a good product, the consumer should be willing to pay what you are charging. Other businesses in town never seem to flinch when it comes to passing cost on to the consumer. If a can of PBR goes for $2.50 a can to $3 a can at the Saloon in town because shipping costs went up, then I guess I’ll have to drink the $3 can of PBR.

It's really inconvenient for me to have to go to town and register my pickup and pay taxes and wait in line at the Treasurer’s office for a bale bed that hardly ever leaves the ranch, but the one time I try to run it into town for coffee the state patrol man will pull me over and ding me for not having it registered.

I don't get to skip the VIN inspection at the Sheriff's office. I can tell them all day long I'm not a pickup thief. Unless someone comes and physically looks at that pickup and runs the number to verify that it isn’t stolen and that I’ve got my bill of sale, my integrity and my word amount to a hill of beans.

I am a broken record, but “Trust, but verify.”

Parting Gifts

What happens after my calves go to the sale doesn’t keep me awake at night. The same goes for the bulk of my neighbors. I am a price taker and not a price maker. At the salebarn there is price discovery. What that animal is worth is what someone is willing to pay for it right there in that moment. I’ve done my part and it is there in the ring in front of God and everyone.

I could do more to differentiate my product and make the place more efficient, but I’m not trying to be Jaclyn Wilson. I’m not competing against her. She has her cattle. I have mine.

I’m perfectly content being the Okayest Spike Jordan I can be.

Progressives prefer the grid, and I think it’s because someone brought fancy fancy BQA-certified block-chain Prime Pursuits program calves to town one time and they sold really well and set the tone for the rest of the sale, but then they got really salty and butthurt because they put a lot of effort into making waves and all the rest of the unsophisticated commodity cow/calf ranchers were unfairly coasting on their wake.

And I’m sorry if that hurts anyone’s feelings, but find a straw and suck it up.

A rising tide raises all ships.

Change will only happen when the common cowman sees a need to change. It has to be organic. No amount of NCBA coercion or checkoff funded “research” will get us to adopt a practice that we see no value in, especially when it makes absolutely no fucking sense to do it the NCBA way.

I sincerely wish some folks could get that memo. It’s perfectly fine that we’re not producing a standard product. Ranches aren’t a standard size. Pastures don’t contain standard grasses. Lots of things are done differently than how you do them. A good cow in Nevada and a good cow in the Florida Panhandle are radically different things.

We aren’t as eager as the progressive cattlemen to embrace change. Our reticence comes from our grandparents and great-grandparents who survived the depression and we grew up hearing stories about how bad it got in some places. Some can still remember how bad things got in the 80s. I’m sure I’ll be telling my kids stories about 2008 someday.

Hard times leave behind conservative streaks through this country that are a thousand miles long and a thousand feet deep. We aren’t “holding the industry back” because not everyone needs to be moving at the speed.

Sometimes you need to take woah up on the reins to get a wreck sorted out. If you’ve ever moved cattle on horseback you have seen those kinds of wrecks happen a time or two. We won't abandon something that works as it is just because the practice is inconvenient for an individual or group of individuals.

If you can stop looking at your own belly button you’ll realize there’s a whole bunch of other ranchers beyond your fence line, and that they do things differently. Not one person. Not one ranch. Not one group has this whole thing figured out down to a definitive fact.

It’s not about the utility of a service for the individual cattleman. It’s about the integrity of the cattle industry as a whole.