Operating Committee Recommends ’08 Budget

At the end of a long week of detailed meetings, the Operating Committee today recommended a $48.87 million Cattlemen’s Beef Board budget for fiscal 2008, which begins Oct. 1, 2007. The budget reflects a sharp 9 percent decrease from the $53.28 million budget for fiscal 2007, and the week’s discussions certainly reflected the difficulty that decrease brought to the table.

The budget for the Beef Board next year includes projected revenue of $45.7 million, plus money to be available from program budgets costing less than originally estimated in the current fiscal year. Because checkoff contractors improved their expense estimations so much in 2007, it has reduced the amount available to add to the budget in 2008.

Cattlemen’s Beef Board Chief Operating Officer Tom Ramey said that while getting better at estimating costs is definitely a good thing, it does amount to a hard hit on the budget for next year because there was such minimal over-budgeting for individual programs this year.

The breakdown of the budget recommendation from the Operating Committee — which still must be approved by the full Beef Board and USDA before any funds are expended — includes the following budget elements: promotion ($22.7 million); research ($7.4 million); consumer information ($6.2 million); industry information ($2.4 million); foreign marketing ($5.15 million); producer communications ($2.27 million); evaluation ($240,000); program development ($125,000); USDA oversight ($210,000); and administration ($2 million).

“We faced a substantial challenge in determining where to decrease expenditures to meet the smaller budget in the coming year,” said Ken Stielow, a producer from Kansas and chairman of the Cattlemen’s Beef Board. “Many of us arrived in town early to spend the week with state beef council executives and leaders of the checkoff’s joint program committees, as they developed strategies for investing the limited checkoff dollars in the most efficient manner possible in fiscal 2008. The producer members of the Joint Budget Committee and the Beef Board Executive Committee also weighed in on the week’s discussions to help make the tough decisions.”

In the coming stages of the fiscal 2008 budgeting process, the full Beef Board will be asked to approve the budget at its meeting in Denver in July. Joint industry advisory committees and subcommittees also will meet in Denver to prepare recommendations for specific program proposals that are funded with that budget. Those proposals will be considered by the Operating Committee in September, before the Oct. 1 beginning of the fiscal year, and must finally be approved by USDA before any checkoff dollars may be spent.