Working Ranch April/May 2025

STATE-BY-STATE A WR visit with your local cattle organizations...

BY KACY ATKINSON

FEATURING: Iowa Beef Industry Council INTERVIEW WITH MIKE ANDERSON WR: What is one of your most suc cessful programs? for restaurants in our state, but it helps sell a lot of beef when people want to go try it.

THE RUNDOWN Iowa Beef Industry Council n Founded in 1970 n Mike Anderson, Executive Director n www.iabeef.org

MA: We do a ‘Best Burger Contest’ every year throughout the state. 2024 is our 15th anniversary, and it’s a program that garners a lot of attention. People nominate their favorite burger and its restaurant. Once we tally the votes, we advertise the Top 10, and the Top 3 have incognito judges go try them to pick the winner. This year we actually allowed past winners to compete again as part of our anniversary celebration, and we had three past winners and one past Top 10 burger make the Top 10 again. We got nominations from over 500 restaurants, and it’s life chang ing for the winner. This year’s winner, JJ’s Tavern and Grill, sold 661 burgers in March prior to being announced as the Top 10, and in May when they were announced as the winner sold 14,631 burgers. Not only is it great recognition

WR: What’s one of the big gest challenges a SBC faces?

MA: The constant struggle of how do we do more with fewer, and less valuable dol lars. Today a dollar is worth 35

the coasts where there are more peo ple than cows, unlike here in Iowa. We are also constantly looking for effec tive partnerships with others so that we can make our dollars go further by combining them with someone else’s.

cents compared to when the checkoff began. It’s a huge decrease, and the amount of dollars the checkoff collects hasn’t increased. We’ve had to become really strategic, key in on how we will get the most bang for our buck, and look at how we use current technology to be the most efficient and effective. Today’s marketing is largely digital, versus TV or even radio, because that is where our customers are and we can really target the people we want to reach. We send a lot of money to

WR: What’s one of the biggest chal lenges the industry faces?

MA: Educating our consumers. I believe we are now four generations removed from the farm, and they have no connection to how anything is done. They have a picture in their head that may not match our current abilities or technology. And so, we have to educate them on how we’ve modernized, and why that’s a good thing. We also need to keep commu nicating about the health benefits of beef. We’ve come a long way, but we don’t want to get complacent on continuing to educate our health care professionals, since that’s where most people get health related information they trust, and we still have a lot in that field that believe beef can be bad for you. It’s not only communicating

Pictured is a trade mission group that traveled to Japan and South Korea, the top two coun tries for exported U.S. beef. 62 I APRIL / MAY 2025 WORKING RANCH audited readers run 21 million head of beef cattle.