The US Roundtable for Sustainable Beef has been around for a little over a year, working to advance, support and communicate the continuous effort being made by producers to improve US beef production practices. During its most recent meeting held in Denver this past July, Farm Director Ron Hays met up with the Roundtable’s Chairman, John Butler, who laid out the group’s mission and their plan to accomplish it. Keeping things in simple terms, Butler explains the importance of sustainability.
“It’s about ok, I’m in the food business, really - I’m not in the cattle business,” Butler said. “I want to prove to that consumer they can trust what I’m doing to produce the food they’re consuming.”
Butler boils his definition of sustainability down so that it basically becomes an exercise of continual improvement in several different facets like animal welfare, water conservation, etc. He explains that the group is working to develop benchmarks and indicators to associate with production practices, so that later on, measurements can be made to show progress. This way, they will be able to ask the questions, ‘did we make a difference; if so, how did we do that; can we replicate it and become better?’ He notes though, that strategy has must be kept in mind.
“The way we’re trying to approach it at the Roundtable is, as we develop indicators that we will measure, let’s make sure that we don’t make it so difficult that implementation will never happen,” Butler said. “There will be fear, and we’re trying to avoid that.”
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