In discussing his ongoing effort to get the Cattle Transparency Act passed during his Jan. 25 Capitol Hill Report, Sen. Chuck Grassley stated there was a divide between larger and smaller producers in trying to get movement on the bill.
“We’re up against the big feedlots of Texas, Kansas and Colorado that want to leave it so that the independent producers can’t get a market,” he said.
The Cattle Price Discovery and Transparency Act seeks to establish regional mandatory minimum thresholds of negotiated cash and negotiated grid trades based on each region’s 18-month average trade to enable price discovery in cattle marketing regions, requires the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to create and maintain a publicly available library of marketing contracts between packers and producers in a manner that ensures confidentiality, prohibits the USDA from using confidentiality as a justification for not reporting and make clear that USDA must report all Livestock Mandatory Reporting information and requires more timely reporting of cattle carcass weights as well as requiring a packer to report the number of cattle scheduled to be delivered for slaughter each day for the next 14 days.
The American Farm Bureau Federation at their recent annual convention had voted to support the bill, with the exception requiring that processing facilities purchase a set percentage of their live animal supply via cash bids.
“Probably these people have been able to persuade enough people not to be against the bill entirely, but to be against the strongest part of our bill,” Grassley said. “That’s where we started the battle, and that’s where it’s either going to end by passing the legislation, or the independent producers are not going to be able to be better off than they are now.”
Commenting on tensions between Ukraine and Russia, Grassley said that the U.S. and the rest of the countries in the United Nations have an obligation to ensure that Russia respects the sovereignty of Ukraine and the agreements that they’ve signed.
“We’re not going to put U.S. troops in Ukraine, but we want to maintain that sovereignty right that they have under the treaties,” he said.
Any actions that the U.S. would take, like sanctions, would need to be taken before any possible invasion, at which point Grassley said it would be, “too late.”
During the call, Grassley also discussed increasing funding for the COPS hiring grant and the ongoing opioid crisis.
Grassley discusses cattle bill
Jake Bourgeois
February 3, 2022
Stephen Gassman • Telegraph Herald
U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, speaks with citizens and reporters during a stop on his 99-county tour in 2021.