NCBA’s Ethan Lane on Government Shutdown Impact to the Cattle Industry
As the federal government shutdown takes effect, cattle producers are bracing for its potential impact. We spoke with Ethan Lane, Senior Vice President of Government Affairs with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), to understand what this means for the cattle industry and the critical USDA services it depends on.
Lane emphasized that lessons learned from previous shutdowns have helped shape better contingency planning.
“So because we’ve been through them before, we know those areas to highlight leading up to a shutdown and make sure that the agencies are getting really good feedback from us on those areas that need to be deemed essential, that need to continue operating, whether that be meat inspection programs, quality grading programs, ensuring that we have access to all of those USDA services like market news to make sure that producers are getting quality information on the supply chain every week so they can make good business decisions.”
He said the continued operation of these essential services is helping to lessen the burden on cattle producers.
“All those things continuing to operate lessens the impact on producers and we’re pretty comfortable right now with the vast majority of those, how they’ve shaken out in this shutdown.”
Still, Lane warns that some disruptions are unavoidable.
“Certainly there will be problems that come up somewhere. There’ll be something that gets missed or some service that ends up impacting some folks. Certainly we know that anybody that was trying to close loans right now is going to have problems or get loans funded right now is going to have problems with that.”
He also highlighted potential interruptions to crop insurance payments and conservation program disbursements, as FSA offices triage operations based on the shutdown’s duration.
“Processing of some crop insurance program and conservation program payments could be impacted as FSA office staff is kind of triaging this and they kind of have a sliding scale for how they’re going to deal with this depending on how long the shutdown lasts.”
As the shutdown unfolds, the NCBA is keeping close watch to ensure cattle producers continue receiving the support they need.
Audio Reporting by Dale Sandlin for Southeast AgNet.