The Alabama Cattlemen’s Association (ACA) is looking forward to their upcoming session two of their Young Cattlemen’s Leadership Program (YCLP). Michael Smith of the Alabama Cattlemen’s Association talked with us about the importance of programs like this.
“Our Young Cattlemen’s Leadership Program is a checkoff funded program here in the state for folks aged about 22 to 40 and we kind of travel around the state for a total of six visits a year and this coming weekend will be session two,” said Smith
“So, they got started in May and kind of had the summer off and now we’re going to get back rolling here as we move into the fall. The state of Alabama, like most states, is pretty geographically diverse as far as soil and grass and so wherever we kind of travel to in the state, we take them to different farm tours and operations in that area of the state to let folks’ kind of see how it’s done there. This particular weekend we’re going to northwest Alabama to the kind of Tennessee River Valley area and they’re going to get to see kind of how those folks up in north Alabama are doing it and it’d be good for this class because most of this class is kind of from the southern part of the state so getting up in that soil and grass would be different for them,” Smith added.
Smith also said, “It’s just a good opportunity to network and to meet other producers and we open it up to folks that, you know, if you work for extension or if you are in equipment sales, let’s say, but just kind of building a network for these younger folks to come up. That’s kind of the goal behind it so they can kind of grow through the association over the years and have that network that kind of in years past you kind of had to be a little bit older I guess to build that network and so we’re helping them to build that now. But that’s really the end goal of it and just to see how different things are done and hopefully pick up stuff for their operation at home because the soil and the grass may be different, climate may be different, but somebody has a good catch pen or good shoots, you know, that stuff you can take home anywhere.”
Smith encourages other to applying saying, “We open up applications, I believe it’s every December or January folks can apply and we have graduates of the program that make up the YCLP council and these are folks that participated and graduated in the program and they will actually select the new class that starts every year. But all that information is on bamabeef.org. If you go to the checkoff tab and click on YCLP, there’s a bunch of information there that can get folks up to date on that when we open up applications here end of this year or early next year.”
Audio Reporting by Elizabeth Sanders for Southeast AgNet.