The Florida Cattle Enhancement Board has built relationships between cattle producers and researchers. We sat down with Pat Durden, Former Florida Cattlemen’s President to learn more.
Durden said, “So what it’s allowed with the Cattle Enhancement Board is those researchers to come with projects to the board and the board pick the projects they want to fund and the board is made up of producers. So they’re literally looking at what is an issue that’s affecting my ranch and what is what is something that I think we would get a positive, like I need to know this, I need to know how to do this better or something. And they get to dictate which of those projects that they think is going to be most impactful to them on their ranch and they get to fund those. And I think that is the best benefit to it.”
“It’s kind of grown the partnership and the total team effort of working together with the researchers and producers, I believe, with allowing the producer board of the Cattle Enhancement Board being able to say, we’re going to fund that. And I think that is basically how the system probably should always work. And it seemed to work pretty darn good in Florida over the last few years. And luckily, we’ve always been fighting for funding for that Cattle Enhancement Board. And now, as of last year, we do have reoccurring funding in the budget. And that’s certainly a big win to know that the board has got money that they can count on so they can do multiple years of research on a project instead of just having to fund it for a year and then not being sure if the legislature was going to refund them the next year so they could support that same research project,” said Durden.
“Because as we know, it’s pretty hard to complete a research project in one calendar year. It takes a long time to produce a calf that you’re going to sell. So, it’s important that we have multiple years of research on those projects so they can actually see and gain enough relevant data to make a good solid scientific conclusion of their findings,” said Durden.
Audio Reporting by Dale Sandlin for Southeast AgNet.