The Florida Cattle Enhancement Board provides insights which informs policy discussions and we caught up with Dusty Holley with the Florida Cattlemen’s Association who provided more details.
Holley said, “Well the Florida Cattle Enhancement Board is so interesting because we get that and we’re stewards of that money and we really hang our hat on the fact that 98% of that money has gone to research and promotion and only less than 2% has been administrative costs so we really put that money into work and while the real focus of that money is to provide a return on investment to the producers of our state and so there’s a lot of great production minded stuff that has come of that.
Holley said, “Something that turns around and maybe inadvertently impacts public policy, right, because that’s not the goal of the Cattle Enhancement Board isn’t to impact public policy but when you learn things you can take those examples and say hey here’s some real science and it happens to apply to this other issue that we talk about and one of the big ones. I know you talked with Maria Silvera the other day and the work she did on carbon sequestration is amazing and the work where they show how cattle and agriculture like grazing agriculture in the state of Florida and how it adds to that carbon sequestration models.”
“And so all of these things then fit into the greater discussion about keeping working lands working and how there’s so much more environmental sustainability from those lands because we live in a state like Florida and there’s so much pressure from development and not only is there pressure development on the money side because what land costs. But there’s pressure from those voters who think oh maybe agriculture isn’t great for our environment but nope here we go here’s some research that really shows how good it is and that rolls right into a way that we defend those policies of conserving working lands. You know we can serve those policies of why the green belt is so important to keep this stuff here and so that kind of has an inadvertent positive reaction on the policies in the state of Florida,” said Holley.
Audio Reporting by Dale Sandlin for Southeast AgNet.