
Colin Woodall was all smiles during a recent visit with Pennsylvania cattlemen.
After a tumultuous 2024 election that swept Donald Trump back into office and led to Republican control of both the House and Senate, Woodall, CEO of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, said he is confident “things will get done” to benefit agriculture and, in particular, beef producers.
"It has probably been one of the most efficient starts to any administration that I can recall," he said during an appearance at Lancaster Cattle Feeders Day.
But Trump’s rhetoric has also alarmed some in agriculture. There is concern over the impacts of possible tariffs on ag exports and the president’s hard-line stance on undocumented immigrants, many of whom work on farms.
“We’re not going to lose all our workers. That’s one thing we have to keep in mind,” Woodall said as he downplayed the issue. What it could do, though, is speed up an ag guest-worker program bill out of Congress.
"We have the votes. It's a bipartisan issue," Woodall said. "We have both Democrats and Republicans that will support this, but it's never been allowed to be voted on. And the reason why it's never been allowed is … the overall issue of immigration and border security has always been one of those big topics that drives elections and drives the political positions of the Republicans and Democrats. And if you cut out ag workers, then all of the sudden you let a lot of the pressure out on this issue of immigration and border reform."
Then, there’s the pressure over rising food prices.
"Now that there's such a concern about what's going to happen to our food supply because of the workers, or potential lack of workers, we could get something in place that makes it legal to have an ag guest-worker program that we can tap into,” Woodall said.
Here are some other meaty topics Woodall said to keep an eye on:
New world screwworms. While these flies were eradicated from the U.S. in the 1960s, they were recently discovered just before Thanksgiving in Chiapas, Mexico.
It led USDA to temporarily ban imports of beef cattle from Mexico, though it was announced over the weekend that the ban would be lifted pending the implementation of a comprehensive preclearance inspection and treatment protocol. According to Agriculture Dive, the U.S. relies on live cattle imports from Canada and Mexico to fill in the gaps from years of herd declines. In 2023, Mexico cattle imports increased 43% to 1.25 million head following a record-low year. That’s about 3.7% of the U.S. calf crop.
Screwworms can be harmful to cattle and spread rapidly between farms. Female flies lay their eggs in open wounds or body orifices of cows. When the eggs hatch, they burrow deep into the skin, feeding on tissue and causing larger wounds.
Since female screwworms only mate once, Woodall said the most effective way to tackle an infestation is by raising sterile males to mate with them. This was one of the ways the government eradicated screwworms in the past, but surveillance programs and additional breeding of male sterile screwworms fell by the wayside.
Woodall said a USDA-supported facility in Panama is producing about 100 million male sterile flies a week. That’s enough to keep the flies in Mexico, but he claims production needs to ramp up to 200 million a week to get them back to South America.
“This is where funding is needed,” he said. "We don't want to find it here. I would much rather take my tax dollars and give it to the Panamanians to that facility if they can produce those sterile males to make sure we never get that screwworm across the border."
Kennedy and HHS. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is expected to be confirmed as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Woodall thinks this is a potential problem for beef producers.
"That's problematic for us because HHS has a lot to do with our business," he said.
Case in point, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans are up for renewal this year. USDA and HHS have co-jurisdiction over its development. And while very few people likely lean on these guidelines for their everyday meals and shopping, they are still important, Woodall said, because they dictate what can be served in federal food programs such as school lunches, SNAP, federal prisons and military installations.
Woodall is also concerned about Kennedy’s past leadership with the Waterkeeper Alliance and his past statements on “corporate agriculture.”
"He has a history of being anti-agriculture,” he said. “That’s why we’re putting faith in Brooke [Rollins], ensuring she'll educate him a little bit on farms and farming.”
Foot-and-mouth vaccine bank. Woodall said he is confident a new farm bill will be voted on and signed this year.
A big priority for NCBA, he said, is maintaining the government’s foot-and-mouth disease vaccine bank, which was authorized in the 2018 Farm Bill. A recent discovery of FMD in Germany in a herd of water buffalo is a reminder that the disease is still out there and that it is likely just a matter of time when it arrives in the U.S.
"We need to make sure we are prepared," Woodall said. "It is not if we get foot-and-mouth disease in this country. It's when we get food-and-mouth disease in this country. That's why we need to get this farm bill done to make sure we have that vaccine bank in place."
Protecting trade. Foreign exports have become important to the beef industry.
According to USDA data, in 2024 the export value per head of slaughtered beef was $413 a pound. By comparison, it was just $30 a pound in 2004. Korea, China and Japan are the biggest markets for U.S. beef.
Woodall said it is evitable that proposed tariffs on foreign imports will likely lead to retaliatory tariffs on agriculture.
“We saw it in the Trump 45 years. We will see it again. We don't know what the impact is going to be,” Woodall said. “But is it time to panic? No, it's not time to panic. We will be OK. We will find ways to move forward."
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