GROW THE SHOW | BEEF CATTLE SHORT COURSE | SAFE TRAVELS | TRICH-ONOMICS TOKYO’s SLAUGHTERHOUSE | WAGYU CATTLE BUYERS | CATTLEFAX

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eNEWS

Taste Excellence

Official Publication

www.wagyu.org208-262-8100

EDITORPaul Redneremail pcredner@hotmail.comphone (719)331-6531

PUBLISHERAmerican Wagyu AssociationMichael Beattie - Executive Directoremail office@wagyu.orgphone (208)262-8100website www.wagyu.org

CONTRIBUTORSPaul Redner, Texas A&M,Texas Wagyu Association,Snake River Farms, Agri Beef,DROVERS CattleNetwork, Rebecca Milner & Japan Times,Cattlefax

GRAPHIC DESIGN / ADVERTISINGJon Hayenga - Creative Directoremail graphics@wagyu.orgphone (208)262-8100

DISCLAIMERAmerican Wagyu Association, Inc (AWA) makes no statements, representations or warranties about the accuracy or complete-ness of, any information relating to third party advertising and/or, inquiries made through this medium; and, disclaims all responsibility for information and all liability (including with-out limitation, liability in negligence) for all ex-penses, losses, damages, and costs you may incur as a result of information being inaccu-rate or incomplete in any way for any reason. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden without prior written permission to the AWA.

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Grow The ShowNow over 37 animals have been registered for the National Western Stock Show with more to come. The show promises to be excellent and the sale following will definitely feed off the show. Bring an animal and travel home with a pocketful of cash.

Your show committee is planning on having a reception or dinner as an introduction to the auction at the NWSS. Details to follow, but start thinking of who you’d like to invite. Think about that very contented buyer as the auction starts.

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The Texas A&M University conducts an annual educational program for cattlemen and women that is of real value to the attendees and a credit to the University. The “Texas A&M Three Day Short Course” covers a wide range of subjects touching on areas of cattle handling, meat evaluation, range management, and a myriad of related subjects.

In addition to an excellent course schedule the University incorporates a first rate trade show in the presentation. Texas Wagyu breeders have had a booth at this show for the last four years and the continued growth for the Wagyu breed and in many ways be traced to this Course. This year more interest was generated which will start the ball rolling for another growth spurt for Wagyu in the US. In fact there were more than twenty states and several foreign countries represented.

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61st ANNUAL BEEF CATTLE SHORT COURSEfrom the editors desk - Paul Redner

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During the recent Cattle Transportation Symposium in Fort Collins, Colo., Lisa Pederson, beef quality assurance specialist at North Dakota State University Extension, noted that about 125,000 finished cattle are on the road every day in the United States. And that is just finished cattle. Add in all the calves and feeder cattle shipped to markets, to other farms or to new pastures, and the total is likely close to 400,000 per day.

All that loading, unloading and time on the road create potential for injuries (to cattle or handlers), stress and economic losses. Veterinarians, though, are well-positioned to help their clients develop practices that minimize the risk of problems.

Also at the symposium, University of Tennessee professor emeritus Clyde Lane, PhD, pointed out that for many in the general public, their only exposure to livestock production occurs when they see animals being transported on roadways. If they see cattle

confined in a broken-down trailer on a hot day or, even worse, injured cattle resulting from a preventable accident, their perception of animal agriculture is likely to become more negative.

Transportation involves a number of known stressors, including loading, unloading, an unfamiliar environment and commingling with unfamiliar cattle. Sometimes feed and water are restricted prior to shipping, and environmental conditions such as severe heat or cold contribute to stress. Cattle expend energy maintaining their balance on the trailer, meaning the duration of the trip and the driver’s skill level can influence stress.

The American Association of Bovine Practitioners (AABP) has developed a set of cattle transportation guidelines, which veterinarians can use in training clients to use safe, efficient and ethical transportation practices.

For more information and the complete article visit http://www.cattlenetwork.com/news/industry/safe-travels-0?ss=animal_health_center

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SAFE TRAVELSfrom DROVERS CattleNetwork

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When a third or more of a rancher’s cows turn up open, which can happen when trichomoniasis, or trich, infects a herd, the rancher obviously takes a significant economic loss. But due to the sporadic nature of the disease, quantifying losses the disease causes across a region or across the country presents a challenge.

Texas A&M University economist David Anderson, PhD, recently presented his economic estimates of trich losses during a meeting of the NCBA BVD Working Group at the Cattle Industry Summer Conference. Anderson worked with university veterinarians to develop a set of assumptions and calculate the annual losses across the Texas cow-calf sector attributable to trich. He estimates that 20 percent of the 150,000 beef herds in Texas have some degree of trich infection in any year. Based on research, he used an average calving rate of 85 percent for the 80 percent of herds that do not have trich and a 73 percent calving rate for herds that do have it.

For this model, he based the estimates on a 90-day calving season. When cows are exposed to trich from bulls during breeding, they often conceive but lose the

fetus 50 to 80 days into gestation. Over time, cows typically clear the infection and return to near-normal fertility in two to five months. So, with a 90-day breed-ing season, trich-infected cows probably will be open at the end of breeding. A longer breeding season could increase calving rate, but late calves would be much lighter at weaning, also resulting in financial losses.

Based on Anderson’s assumptions, trich could be reducing annual calf production in Texas by 2.5 percent, or 96,000 calves. Using 2013 averages, the lost revenue for those calves would be $95 million. At the finishing level, the lost value for those 96,000 missing calves is another $156 million.

He also applied his model to an actual ranch using historical data from Texas A&M’s Agriculture and Food Policy Center. Anderson selected a 335-cow opera-tion and examined the impact of a 73 percent calving rate versus 85 percent. The model shows the loss of 40 calves at a 73 percent calving rate would result in a reduction of $44,000 in net farm revenue, and because the farm would have invested in maintaining the cows and all other associated costs, that loss represents an 81 percent reduction in net farm revenue, which clearly would not be sustainable for the business over time.

For more information and the complete article visit http://www.cattlenetwork.com/news/industry/trich-onomics?ss=disease_diagnostics

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TRICH-ONOMICSfrom DROVERS CattleNetwork

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“We thought you might be interested in this article from the Japan Times. The Japan Times is an English language newspaper that does its best to keep the many English speaking residents of Japan up on what’s going on in the country and the world. The following was a human interest piece submitted by a journalist, that lends some incite to the meat industry and Wagyu in Tokyo, as understood by the author. It might raise some questions by our members, but it is interesting and you can get an idea where the public gets some of their opinions. Right or Wrong.”

Wagyu literally translates as “Japanese beef,” but that translation doesn’t quite do it justice. It’s a word that calls to mind images of rural Japanese cows being fed beer and massaged daily, and richly marbled ruby-red steaks, shot through with fine ribbons of glistening white fat.

Wagyu is an obsession and a craft — and it doesn’t come cheap. A serving at one of Tokyo’s top steak-houses, such as Dons de la Nature in Ginza, will set you back upward of ¥30,000. Brands such as Kobe and Matsuzaka are discussed in reverent tones, and the best places to eat it in Tokyo are hotly debated on Internet discussion boards, with meals documented in excessive, salivating detail.

However, exactly how Wagyu gets from the fattening farm to the table is more of a mystery.

Tokyo’s municipal meat market — the last slaughterhouse in the city — hasn’t become the tourist pilgrimage site that the Tsukiji fish market has. In fact, most people, tourists and locals alike, wouldn’t even recognize the meat market if they saw it.

Located near Shinagawa Station, it looks like any other office complex: A large boxy amalgamation of granite, glass and tile. And it’s surrounded by similar-looking buildings, many of which are owned by large corpora-tions — the Sony Headquarters is just down the road.The market (nicknamed “Shibaura,” the same way the fish market is called “Tsukiji”) was officially founded in 1966, but it has been a functioning slaughterhouse since 1936. Originally, it looked a lot more like a fish market, with narrow, winding passages. Today it’s state of the art, with onsite labs that test for quality and diseases such as BSE, aka “mad cow disease.”

Shibaura can handle a maximum of 430 cows and 1,400 pigs per day, and processes 15 percent of all Wagyu

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WAGYU: PROCESSING COWS AT TOKYO’S SLAUGHTERHOUSEBy Rebecca Milner - Special to the Japan Times

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beef in Japan (which, considering Tokyo makes up only 10 percent of the nation’s population, is more than its fair share).

Most of the cows come from the Kanto and Tohoku regions and roughly two-fifths of them fall under the coveted A4 and A5 rankings. Meat in Japan is graded on a letter scale from C to A, based on the ratio of meat-to-carcass weight, and on a number scale from 1 to 5, according to quality, which includes marbling. A5 is the highest grade.

Unlike Tsukiji — where tourists line up well before dawn for the chance to be one of the lucky 120 who are permitted to watch headless, frozen tuna be prodded, thwacked and dragged across the floor with steel hooks — the inner workings of the meat market are not open to visitors. However, Shibaura does run the Meat Information Center (2-7-19 Konan, Minato-ku, Tokyo; 03-5479-0651; open Mon.-Fri. 10 a.m.-6 p.m.) on the sixth floor of the market building, which is open free of charge to the public. It is here that the story of how Wagyu goes from pampered cow to high-end steak comes to light.

As it turns out, the rumors about cow-massages are mostly true — it helps with the marbling. But the beer? Not so much. What goes on at the fattening farms is only part of the story. In fact, the road to the perfect steak begins before the animal’s conception.

Wagyu’s origins stretch back to Tajiri-go, a Tajima bull born in the village of Ojiro, Hyogo Prefecture, in 1939. According to local lore, Tajiri-go had a pretty good life. His owner Matsuzo Tajiri doted on him. He sired 1,500 calves. Today, 99.9 precent of all Tajima cows — better known by their brand names, such as Kobe and Matsuzaka — are his descendents.

Since the 1960s, cattle in Japan have been increasingly bred through artificial insemination, and this is where things get weird. The standard practice for breeding Wagyu is as follows: When the female cattle are butchered, their ovaries are removed and the eggs inside are artificially inseminated (by one of Tajiri-go’s descendants) and implanted into a different breed of cow: a Holstein milk cow. The Holstein raises the calf for nine months (all the while conveniently producing milk) and finally, the calves are shipped to fattening farms, where they’ll pick up their brand-name pedigree (and presumably get that massage and maybe a beer, if they’re lucky). It’s not exactly the primal experience that carnivores are liable to associate with beef.

From there, the Meat Information Center doesn’t pull any punches: photos show the step-by-step process on the slaughterhouse floor. Cows and pigs arrive live at the market and, on the floors below, are systematically killed and separated into meat, organs and skin, all of which are sold.

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TOKYO’S SLAUGHTERHOUSE CONTINUED

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The slaughterhouse union pushed the city to establish the information center as a place to educate younger generations about the history and value of the work here, and how meat gets on their plates. That’s the official line, but it goes a little deeper than this — the information center is part of a wider attempt to pull the shade off of a vexing issue that had long been sidelined.Historically, the slaughtering of animals in Japan was relegated to the lowest caste of society. Today the most common word for this caste is burakumin, which translates as “hamlet people” — a reference to the segregated communities where they were once forced to live. Here, out of sight, they could perform work deemed unclean, such as the slaughtering of animals. Though the caste system was abolished in the 19th century, the stigma has been hard to shed.

“There’s less discrimination than there used to be. But if we tell someone what we do, they assume we are from one of those communities,” explains Yutaka Tochigi, the 58-year-old president of the Shibaura Slaughterhouse Union.

Not all of the nearly 250 people who work at the slaughterhouse have burakumin ancestors, yet they all run the risk of incurring discrimination. Still, the job has its advantages. Tochigi actually had an office job until his 30s, but left it for the slaughterhouse because the working hours allowed him to spend more time with his family. In hard economic times, the market provides

steady, stable work with no overtime. The workers prefer not to see themselves as defined by the stigma, but rather by the skills required to do their jobs. Work at Shibaura is done in an assembly-line fashion, with each worker focusing on a specific task: slicing off hooves, skinning, or pulling out the intestines, for example. It takes 50 minutes to process a cow (20 minutes for pigs), a procedure where a live animal is turned into a slab of meat that you’d expect to see at a butcher’s shop. Work-ers have about 20 seconds to get their part done.

According to Tochigi, it takes 10 years to master the job. Some tasks are mechanized, but others require only a blade used with incredible precision. Cutting just a millimeter off can lead to a mistake that may lower the value of a prized cow by thousands of dollars. Knives must be kept razor sharp — sharp enough to slice a sheet of paper with a clean stroke. For that purpose, the workers are never without a honing steel at their side.

While knives wear out in about three months, a knife sharpener is for life. Getting your first is a right of passage, Tochigi explains; some are passed down from generation to generation. Keeping one’s knife sharp is a point of pride.

“We call ourselves craftsmen. We shouldn’t be working with strength. What we do is art,” Tochigi says.

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TOKYO’S SLAUGHTERHOUSE CONTINUED

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A Bar N Ranchcontact Cade Nichols 972-978-9296

A to Z Feeders contact Jim Skartvedt 712-243-4515

Agri Beef contact Office 208-338-2500

Imperial Wagyu Beef contact Lawrence Adams 402-426-8512

Jackman Florida Wagyu Beefcontact Mark Hoegh 903-910-9121

Mishima Reserve Wagyu Beefcontact Shane Lindsay 208-941-3793

Morris Stock Farmcontact Joe Morris 806-922-5274

Raines Farm, LLCcontact J.R. Hayden 318-791-9402

* If anyone else is in the market for stocker calves, feeder calves or fats just send us an e-mail with your contact information and we’ll post you to our buyers list. *

WAGYU CATTLE BUYER$

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Of all our listed buyers of Wagyu cattle Snake River Farms certainly stands out. The foundation unit of Agri Beef has certainly made and continues to make an impact on the Wagyu meat business. In fact Agri Beef annual sales now exceed one billion dollars, that’s with a “B”, and that’s an impact.

Started in 1968 by Robert Rebholtz Sr. the beginning was not that impressive or promising. Mr. Rebholtz first had to convince local bankers that he could turn around a bankrupt feedyard. He did that and then this San Francisco native with a UC Davis degree in animal husbandry took over the Snake River Cattle Company in American Falls, Idaho.

Well the road from taking over a defunct feed yard to today’s industry leader was not always a straight one, nor was it completely predictable. Along the way Bob learned of Wagyu cattle and the idea of exporting beef

to Japan seem promising in the late 1980’s, but the suffering Japanese economy in the 90’s followed by the BSE scare of 2003 forced the company to look in a different direction.

Domestic marketing was the selected direction and this effort was aided by celebrity chefs Wolfgang Puck and Thomas Keller. The Wagyu start up period was exten-sive and in fact lost money for ten years, but in the end it was worth it.

Today over 80 ranches supply Wagyu F-1’s to Snake River Farms under the supervision of Bob Jr. The company has added additional feed yards, food processing plants and a beef processing plant to become a very complete beef entity in the Northwest.

Just another look at your potential cattle buyer.

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GETTING TO KNOW THE WAGYU CATTLE BUYERSfrom the editors desk - Paul Redner

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DATES TO REMEMBER

2015 AWA conference - Ocala, Fl Oct. 21-23Prime Time in the Sunshine Oct. 24 Hosted by JDA - Ocala, FlNWSS Entry Deadline Oct. 31

2016 National Western Stock Show Jan. 18-23 Denver, CONCBA Trade Show - San Diego, CA Jan. 27-29

COMEDY CORNER

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T FOR

GET..

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WA/OR CO MT/WY CA NV/UT AZ/NM /ID AL AR FL GA LA/MS KY/TN

wts9-108-97-86-75-64-5

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utilcn/cutbulls

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8-97-86-75-64-5

utilcn/cutbulls

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STEER200-205 198-205 192-197 191-197 191-196 190-198212-217 211-218 202-207 201-208 201-208 201-209228-234 224-232 213-219 212-219 212-225 211-220243-252 244-255 231-240 230-239 229-243 228-240263-274 265-277 255-266 251-265 253-265 249-263304-316 298-315 291-303 290-302 289-307 287-303HEIFER207-212 205-211 187-192 186-193 186-203 186-194215-221 213-220 201-207 200-207 200-212 199-208226-235 224-234 212-221 211-222 210-226 211-223245-256 243-255 231-242 230-241 229-247 228-242279-291 277-290 252-264 250-263 250-282 248-263COWS101-111 98-109 103-111 101-112 98-109 99-11095-105 94-104 97-105 95-104 92-103 90-103130-140 125-140 123-136 121-135 121-140 121-141

STEER196-200 196-210 200-205 207-212 201-205 206-211210-214 208-215 213-218 216-221 212-216 215-220219-224 224-230 226-232 232-238 221-226 231-237233-240 235-245 246-255 246-255 237-244 245-254255-265 260-270 265-276 264-275 251-261 264-275278-290 283-300 303-315 303-315 282-294 303-315HEIFER191-195 191-198 206-211 206-211 194-198 205-210202-207 204-215 214-220 215-221 205-210 214-220209-216 215-232 225-234 227-236 218-225 226-235224-234 229-253 244-255 244-255 236-246 243-254253-265 252-272 278-290 288-300 250-262 288-300COWS105-115 107-119 103-113 100-110 113-121 99-109103-113 96-117 99-109 94-104 107-111 92-102130-140 132-145 128-138 128-138 135-142 130-140

STEER194-198 194-198 190-194 194-198 194-198 201-205204-208 204-208 201-205 205-209 204-208 211-215214-219 214-219 211-216 215-220 214-219 221-226218-225 223-230 215-222 218-225 218-225 228-235230-240 242-252 228-238 230-240 235-245 240-250263-275 268-280 262-274 263-275 263-275 273-285HEIFER190-194 190-194 187-191 191-195 190-194 186-190200-205 200-205 197-202 201-206 200-205 200-205207-214 207-214 204-211 207-214 207-214 208-215216-226 222-232 214-224 216-226 218-228 230-240235-247 238-250 233-245 234-246 236-248 250-262COWS107-115 100-110 105-114 106-115 103-113 98-106102-107 96-106 102-109 103-110 95-105 97-105132-137 126-136 131-138 132-139 130-140 123-133

West — Feeder cattle prices were mostly $2 to $3 higher. Calf prices were steady to $4 lower. Slaughter cow prices were mostly steady to $4 higher. — Chad Spearman

Southeast — Feeder cattle prices ranged from steady to $3 higher for the week. Calf values were mostly steady to instances of $2 higher. Market cows were steady.

— Troy Applehans

Central — Feeder cattle prices were steady to $2 higher for the week. Calf prices were steady to $5 higher. Market cows were near steady. — Troy Applehans

TX KS/MO ND/SD NE OK IA

West & Northwest Central Southeast

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