Date: 12/11/2017

Title: AUDIO: 25th Anniversary of Cattlemen’s College Coming Up in 2018

Audio with Josh White
Executive Director, Producer Education
National Cattlemen’s Beef Association

The 2018 Cattle Industry Convention and NCBA Trade Show will be here before you know it, and helping kick off that event in Phoenix Jan. 30-31 will be Cattlemen’s College, the premier education opportunity for cattlemen around the country.

Josh White, the executive director of producer education for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, which hosts the event, says there are many special things about this year’s event.

“The first thing to mention is the 25th anniversary of Cattlemen’s College being held in association with our convention, and another unique part of that is that Zoetis, formerly Pfizer, has been our sponsor for the whole 25 years, so that is really unique. Not many programs have that kind of lasting relationship between sponsor and host.” (21 seconds)

White says live animal demonstrations will be another unique aspect of this year’s event.

“It’s been many years since we’ve done that. So it’s exciting, this year we are doing a full track on Wednesday as part of our normal sessions. You can slide outside, very close proximity to the other classrooms, and hear about live mobility scoring of animals and new research around mobility scoring and the genetic influence of cattle mobility and lameness, as well as animal ID and recordkeeping, look at the latest and greatest tools to scan EID and how that can work in a chute or a gate situation, and then how that feeds into recordkeeping.” (40 seconds)

According to White, also new to the 2018 Cattlemen’s College is an encore for the most popular classes.

“We did a social media campaign earlier in the fall for past attendees, where we asked them ‘what have been your favorite topics and what looks most interesting to you of the topics that we had already slated to do on Wednesday.’ The top vote getters, we’re repeating those on Tuesday afternoon as well. So folks will have more opportunity to get more education live than they ever have.” (26 seconds)

White says it’s always wise to plan ahead for this kind of event.

“We know that things fill up fast. We’ll try to add another row of seats in the back if you do show up late and decide you want to attend. We did exceed our capacity last year in Nashville; we had to turn people away because of the fire marshal not allowing folks to come into the general session at the close.” (17 seconds)

White says there’s a chance to save money and headaches by not procrastinating.

“I guess there’s a sense of urgency in general around convention and our meeting, because the hotels book up and the registration costs for not only Cattlemen’s College but also the convention itself go up beginning January 6, so make sure you get registered in December. Go ahead and get that done before Christmas gets you sidetracked and you forget.” (20 seconds)