The Alabama Cattlemen’s Association kicked off Beef Month. Michael Smith with the Alabama Cattlemen’s Association sat down with Southeast AgNet to tell us more.
“For over 60 years here in Alabama, our governor has proclaimed October as Beef Month in the state of Alabama, so it always runs October 1st through October 31st, and we promote events all over the state,” explained Smith.
“And one of the hallmarks of what we do is each county gets involved in promoting beef kind of in their own local way. So be it steak sandwiches or providing meals for sports teams or going to assist the living homes or first responders, they provide beef and just kind of share the story of beef all across the state. We as a staff, we try to make our way. There are a lot of sales in the state, and so we make our way to as many of those as we can to meet up with all of our producers all over the state,” Smith said.
Smith also said, “But on the county level, what we really encourage our county associations to do, because as a state association, we’re nothing without our counties, so what we encourage them to do is to be involved in the community for this month and basically just tell their story and, you know, how they produce beef in their own county and all that goes along with that. Some of the counties that have stockyards in them, they’ll meet there and do events at those stockyards, but we really try to use it as a time to interact with the community, provide as much community service as we can, and as a time just to let everybody know that the cattle producers in this state are their neighbors and they’re hard-working folks and they’re regular folks, you know, just trying to get it done every day.”
“Our best thing to do is actually our Facebook page for the Alabama Cattlemen’s Association, because every Friday we will post pictures. So our counties will send us pictures of what they do throughout the and every Friday we post those pictures of all the events that have gone on all over the state. And of course, it’s Alabama, so we got to make a contest out of it, and at the end of the month, the county that we’ve got a kind of a points grading system on different events, so at the end of the month, we’ll crown the winner of the Cattlemen of Beef Month,” Smith mentioned.
Audio Reporting by Elizabeth Sanders for Southeast AgNet.