Behind the Burger
Created by the New Mexico Beef Council, we are telling the stories behind the beef in New Mexico.
Behind the Burger
From Lobby Floors to Arena Doors: How Denny Gentry Built Cowboy Golf and Shaped Beef Advocacy
A lobby fight over the beef checkoff. A dusty arena humming with beginners and world champs. And a simple reframing that changed everything: team roping isn’t just a rodeo discipline - it’s “cowboy golf.” We sit down with Denny Gentry to chart how a ranch kid from southern New Mexico helped unite a divided industry, grew local qualifiers into national institutions, and built the infrastructure that turned a ranch skill into a billion‑dollar ecosystem.
Denny recounts the hard lessons from Santa Fe, where ranchers split over a new assessment and the vote became an eye‑opener in coalition-building. That political savvy carried into the arena, where smart handicaps and day permits opened the gate to new ropers without diluting the culture. We follow the rise of USTRC and the World Series of Team Roping, the birth of a barrier system now used nationwide, and the people-powered database that quietly became a travel safety net and community directory for Western families crisscrossing the country.
Horses, cattle, and beef are the same story here. Denny explains how roping cattle move into the beef supply, why Corrientes fit evolving consumer tastes in lean beef, and how the Riata Stallion Incentive links earnings to bloodlines in partnership with AQHA and Equine Network. The result is a clearer market for performance horses and a recognition that roping increasingly sets the price signals for the broader Western horse economy. We also touch on modern nutrition science, methane research, and how better data has shifted the tone from defense to confident clarity.
If you care about ranching, horses, beef demand, or just love a good origin story, this one is packed with trail-tested insights and practical wins. Subscribe, share with a friend who ropes (or wants to), and leave a review telling us the moment that surprised you most.
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Welcome back to another episode of Behind the Burger. I'm Caroline Romo, the executive director for the New Mexico Beef Council, and I'm here with Denny Gentry, who lives here in Albuquerque, and he is the former executive of the New Mexico Cattle Growers, founder of the USTRC, the World Series Team Roping, the Super Looper magazine, and Riata Stallion Incentive. Denny, thank you for joining the podcast. My pleasure. I'm so excited to have you here. Well, I kind of like to start from the beginning.
SPEAKER_00:So where are you from and and uh kind of what's the background that down in southern Otero County, there we are placed that kind of straddle the Texas-New Mexico line between Carlsbad and El Paso, there, a little town called Dale City that my grandfather founded.
SPEAKER_01:Perfect. Well, and and uh you've lived other places and you started at um um or you helped start with the New Mexico Beef Council, and we you told me about the um at being the executive secretary for the New Mexico cattle growers. Of course, our organizations work hand in hand in a lot of ways, but ta talk to me about the the New Mexico Beef Council and your involvement there.
SPEAKER_00:Well, as in the mid-80s, I think it was mid-80s when the beef checkoff was passed, and of course it was building up steam. Check-off was getting passed in lots of states, and that was the promoting beef was the the um uh what every association was wanting to do. Uh, you know, we've got to promote ourselves. If we don't, well, you know, that was going in, the farm bureau was doing it, and all the cattle organizations were doing it, and here in New Mexico, they tried a couple of times and got close. But one year pretty much everybody got on the same page and they were gonna try to get the beef checkoff done. And uh at that time I was uh running the Cattleman Association and the main lobbyist there handled all the lobbying in Washington and Santa Fe. And um I I would say probably um uh as it went along, I wound up Farm Bureau was partners with us on this thing, but as it went along, they started dumping more and more of that on me. And all and the reason was is because when we went up there, we thought all the cowboys were united in one group and we were gonna rah-rah pass this thing through. And that was not the case because there were a lot of cowboys that didn't like that idea of being taxed on their cattle, and um they were a little bit unhappy about it, and uh, two or three of them were senators. Oof. And so they were very silently working behind the scenes to counter everything that we were doing. And at some point, Farm Bureau said, Okay, we're we're handling this. You try to handle your people over there. And I understood what they meant. So we had two groups of ranchers walking around that rotunda up there, one group working for and one group roping working against, and us running around trying to patch all the places, and the and the legislators, representatives of the senators were saying, Hey, we'll do whatever you guys want to do as soon as y'all can agree on what it is you want to do.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And uh, and eventually we got it through, you know. But it was it was um it was the first time that I had ever lobbied on something, you know, because usually when you go up there, all the cowboys were for the same thing. This was the first time that it was split down the middle and and it was an eye-opener.
SPEAKER_01:Oh yeah, it makes you worry. I think I think in some ways sometimes the checkoff is still a split conversation. Um but or and I'm really grateful that that it is in existence for not only my career, but also the the impact that I see it ha has with consumers. Yeah. Um so well, I and I also think that when we talk about the podcast, we try and kind of explain who the beef council is. And it's interesting to me that we're created by state and federal law, but then now as our as an organization, we can't lobby and we don't do anything politics. That's what New Mexico Cattle Growers is for.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that was exactly that was it was that way back then, see, because a lot of times I would be carrying the water for the livestock board and in a lot of cases for New Mexico State University, because at that time they weren't allowed. So anything that was going on with the Ag College, Farm Bureau and Cattle Growers were the two that were carrying the carrying the mail on that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. Well, and it's come a long way, right? I think uh New Mexico agriculture has uh has won a lot of um big things, and and uh I I see positivity uh and I also see positivity in me not having to to take bills to the floor.
SPEAKER_00:That's well we we and we had a really Farm Bureau had always been kind of um they weren't real proactive politically, and cattle growers was during that time period, and then in the late 80s they had this young guy come along and he was was pretty aggressive and he he did a hell of a job. His name was Jeff Wheedy.
SPEAKER_01:Uh well we just had a podcast with Jeff. He was one of our one of our guests a couple times ago. Yeah, and he said he was uh a reluctant politician.
SPEAKER_00:Well, he wasn't actually, he can say that on um, but but I had worked with five different um uh government guys for Farm Bureau and and Jeff was was in a different league.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, oh man, that's so cool. Yeah, I know he he said his his trajectory wasn't originally that, but then it worked, and then he realized he found a uh found his place.
SPEAKER_00:There you go. So yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:That's neat. That's neat. Um we've already talked about uh before we started recording the the small world of New Mexico agriculture, and even agriculture in general. Uh so to kind of get right into it with um even your your titles and the the introduction. So New Mexico cattle growers, the the rumors are or the story is which you've you've now confirmed and we'll let you confirm again that that one of the first team ropings that you put on was for the New Mexico cattle growers.
SPEAKER_00:I had a friend over there, Don King, was the executive director for Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers. And uh we had a membership. Um membership in our organization was a little bit stale, and then you know you'd hear them talking, you know, everybody here is old, and we got to get the kids involved, and how do you do that? And so every cattle organization was trying to get new membership in. And and Don King had a program he was running in Texas, and it was um association uh cuttings, and they wouldn't allow anyone that was a professional horse trainer or involved in a QHA cutting or anything. They had to be on the ranch and they had to be either an employee or family member or something like that. And they had kicked that off and ran it for two years and were just going gangbusters on their deal and getting all these young people in and getting their membership picked up. And Don called me up on the phone and he said, You need to do that in New Mexico. You need to go. I said, We don't have any cutting over here. And he said, Well, what do they what do the cowboys do? And I said, Team rope. He'll team ropers. He said, Well, do it with team rope, but don't be a dummy. So uh Jasper Coons, who lived over on the in Rio Rancho over there, Jasper was an old turtle. And he was a rancher, and he was former chairman of our membership committee and everything. And when I hit him with that, he oh, I'll run interference with the board of directors, I'll get this through. So we built a a uh county by county um um we'd go around qualify ropers in the counties, and then we would have at the state convention, we would have an event here in Albuquerque over at Tingley. And what started happening was is we started having people from Texas and Colorado and Arizona joining New Mexico Cattle Grove so they could get in that team roping. And um uh we that we started that in '83, and by about eighty-six or eighty-seven it was getting out of hand, and the board of directors called me in and said, Well, our dues at that time was$40 a year, and they said, you know, um Stockman magazine cost us X dollars a member, and the newsletters cost us X doll a member, and these people aren't interested in categories, they're interested in roping, and by our estimation, we're losing ten dollars a member to your team roping. And so I said, Well, I'll come up with an idea because this was a benefit. We were the funds were benefiting New Mexico and uh and uh boys and girls ranch. Okay. Is what that where that was going to. So the next year I came in and I said, Okay, if you're not interested in cattle growers, we will let you come, but you're gonna pay a day permit. And so 380, 390 teams of division over here at Tingley Coliseum with Calcuttans. And when it was all said and done, the permits made more money than the roping did for the for the charity. And by that time it's dawning on me that kind of like you said about Jeff Wheedy, that I may have found my niche here.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And that's kind of where it all took off at. And so we did New Mexico Championships in 88 and 89, and uh turned my resignation in in 89, and we started US TRC in January of 1990.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. Wow. So I I know for some New Mexicans they're really proud of the fact to see how how that's grown and that it that it started in New Mexico. Uh I've I had a rancher tell me that story as I was getting on a flight to to go to Vegas to go rope in the finale. Well, you know the history, and so that's really neat.
SPEAKER_00:Well, and it's it's it was uh really funny because New Mexico has never ever really acknowledged that. In fact, uh we had every major facility in the United States trying to get us to come put on the U.S. finals in their area, and we couldn't even get the the um Chamber of Commerce or anybody in Albuquerque to acknowledge that they were worried about the Arab horse show.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:And and we're saying we're homegrown. We're building this whole industry here in Albuquerque. They didn't care, and the same with World Series. When World Series came on, uh this is not cowboy country. Right. And it just doesn't, it does it never did resonate here.
SPEAKER_01:Well, and it's a it's a important part of what we do at the beef council too. We had billboards this summer and and then we have this podcast trying to teach people that New Mexico is beef country, and New Mexico is cowboy country. I mean, yes, Albuquerque, obviously, in in ways you've seen more than me that them isn't as accepting of it, but New Mexicans, we there's cowboys, the cowboyist of cowboys. Like we are the wild west in a lot of ways.
SPEAKER_00:It's it's all together, you know. The whole I I'm um of course, you know, for the last 30 years I'm dealing with United States and Canada and Brazil and and uh I even have ropings in Dominican Republican. I did I we did ropings for a while in the Czech Republic, a little uh in Italy. My man that was in Italy that was putting on the events in Europe has retired and started growing almonds now, so I don't have that over there anymore. But when you start thinking in terms of national and international, um I just don't think in terms of New Mexico any longer. You know, I mean it's part of the But yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, gone beyond. It's gone beyond. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. Um well, so for for folks if there's listeners or um or viewers watching that um maybe don't understand team rubbing, so I just want to kind of go back to team rubbing from from the very base of it is a skill or a or a tool, or can be a skill or a tool used on a ranch, right? When you're in a pasture, especially in New Mexico, you can't get an animal to a horse trailer or you know, a cow trailer, you can't get them to a trailer necessarily, you can't get them to a small pen to doctor. But what you do have is a horse and a rope. And that's still a pretty common way of doctoring um and managing herds. And then like like anything, we got it we got a little competitive back in the day, right? And so um so so team roping is now a competition, right? It's now an equine competition and a very large equine competition thanks to a lot of the work you do.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I've I've been pitching the same pitch for three decades and it's starting to catch on now. I'm starting to see it in a lot of crit and everything because they always would try to go, well, you've got working cow horse and you've got cutting and raining, and team roping is a discipline. It's one of the rodeo disciplines and everything. Well, the drum I've beat all along is no, no, no, no. This is cowboy golf. We are cowboy golf. We are not a discipline. And now everybody's starting to catch on and going, because we've got all the cutters and the reiners and the racetrack guys and the ranchers and the farmers, and anybody else that watched Yellowstone that wants to compete.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, they come to team roping. Well, and it has such a great entry-level uh thing, not not to go too far into it, but it's it's set up that that uh we can, that beginners can be winners in some ways.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. Um so how else would you say the industries are connected, team roping and ranching?
SPEAKER_00:Um you know, I think there was a time I've talked to you two or three times, and you're kind of thinking in terms of beef, beef, beef. But I've never looked at that in in that paradigm. Um To me, it's cattle and horses and cowboys and the whole realm of it. How you can't separate it. I mean you can't separate the horse breeding and it's another side of it and no more than you can with water and minerals and every other thing that goes along with living in the sixteen western states and now beyond that, you know. So it's I don't view beef as a separate entity. And in fact, you know, I guess that's had a guy tell me here a while back, he said, Well, you you don't know that much about the beef industry. And I said, Well, I know a little. And he said, Well, what do you know? And I said, Well, I know that there's 40,000 members in our organization, there's 20,000 that come and go, there's sixty thousand, and if you take that sixty thousand, cut it in half to about thirty thousand, and figure out that they buy two sets of cattle to practice on a year from six to twelve head. Um we're handling about a quarter of a million head of steers a year that are gonna wind up in slaughter at some point. And he kind of looked at me, what are you talking? I said, Well, we're in the beef business.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, but yeah, absolutely. I think uh the yeah, the cattle that are used for roping might not be the same cattle that are for the stakes and the the you know, high quality cuts, but they're still a high quality meat and it's still a great animal that's gonna go into the beef supply.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, with this grass-fed thing going on, I mean you're you're seeing a lot, a lot of marketing and packing going on on these coriantes and and or the native um rope and cattle. And it's happening more and more, and people are moving to a thing. I mean, that's that's what they see. What's what y'all are advertising, lean beef, and so they know where to find it, and that's usually us first.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think uh yeah, I mean, that's I always tease uh I don't have a lot of cattle myself, but I do have seven head of core innies.
SPEAKER_00:I kind of nailed you, didn't we?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, exactly. How many times do you buy those? Well, we actually uh we've held on to these ones for quite some time. Yeah. We don't practice very much.
SPEAKER_00:Of course, this market right now, we'll never see this again. And a lot of people are hanging on.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, yeah, yeah. We are we are those. And uh for whatever reason we've been really lucky with uh some of our cattle. We can keep them about two years, but we we are also weekend warriors, so we when we rope, we're roping in the tiny bit of daylight we have after work and and before the kids gotta get to bed.
SPEAKER_00:There you go.
SPEAKER_01:And uh so they they stay fresher longer at our house.
SPEAKER_00:No dally, none of that stuff.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. We take really good care of them. They're they live the high life. They're they we usually don't get rid of them until they don't fit in the shoot.
SPEAKER_00:There you go.
SPEAKER_01:Uh so well, um what is something that you are proud of that you've worked on recently?
SPEAKER_00:Oh gosh. Um we're the the last frontier for team roping is to get the earnings on. We've s spent a good part of three decades creating this cowboy golf deal that's that's producing over a hundred million dollars a year in earnings. It's a billion dollar a year industry. Um within the horse industry, though, um we never tracked earnings or any of those type of things. And so when we started the Riata um Stallion Incentive a few years ago, we had 180 stallions come on board to promote their stallions. Uh kind of a way I I can describe it is um a country club, and we put a we've got an event coming up in three weeks where we've got a million eight added money. That's never occurred in the cowboy world ever. And that's all stallion money that we're using. But the only way you get in is if you're riding a horse that's out of one of those that's a progeny from one of those stallions. Um recently the um uh my partner that I had in Riyadh sold uh their part of Riotta to Equine Network, who has global handicaps, which has got all of the earnings records for every cowboy in the world. So now we're working with AQHA and Equine Network, and we're gonna marry those earnings to those um uh to those horses. So potentially, and I'll give you a picture of that, um the top three would be uh cutting produces about sixty million a year in earnings for stallions, barrel racing sixty-seven million, and horse racing 150 million. Um since um Riota uh stallion incentive came along, us and the fraturities, we're laying down about fifteen million in earnings on those horses. But in the very near future, we're gonna try to pass the barrel racers and the and the cutters, and then at that point, the whole breeding aspect, uh whether they are ranch bread, cutting bread, working cow horse bread, whatever, we're gonna find out what the true market is for the horse, because we've known all along that the cowboy golf world actually controls the horse market. Nobody wants to admit it, but it's the truth. Stevie Ray Bon in there last year, year before last, he was one of our he was our top stallion last year. And uh Alvin uh told me the story. He said, Um we had 200 Colts in the NCHA fraterturity, and so he said I said to my trainer, you know, I'm not quite sure why we need to get involved in the team roping deal, and he said, Because these 200 Colts, by March, 90% of them are gonna be team roping horses. So th that's catching on. You know, a lot of these these guys that have been traditionally reigning cutting reiners are going, you know, we recognize this is is our market also.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's that's that's always been the thing since I was a kid. Everybody wanted a a cutting reject, or you know, that that phrase or whatever. But the truth of the matter is is they didn't have to be a reject.
SPEAKER_00:They had they could have been a prospect or that's what the security people are doing right now. They're saying these are not rejects. We start them at three years old. They're being trained for one purpose and one purpose only.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think uh that's that's uh a great thing that they've seen. Yeah. Interesting. Uh so um so you've got that coming up soon, which by the time the podcast releases, it might have just happened. Um and and uh but that'll be an interesting thing to follow. What uh um so we talked about cattle and the roping industry. Of course, those those cattle uh are really important to the U.S. cattle herd, especially right now because we have low herd numbers. Um so those cattle are probably coming into the beef supply maybe, maybe more often in some ways, or we're holding on to them. Um what would you say is the most rewarding part of uh so I, you know, typically we often are interviewing ranchers, but of owning cattle or of being in this cattle, uh cattle and equine-focused uh industry. What what do you find the most rewarding?
SPEAKER_00:Well, yeah, you know, of course, when I got out of college and I took this job here, it was supposed to be a temporary job. They had lost their executive, and they said, Yeah, you're gonna come in here and you're gonna do this for three or four months until we have a chance to find somebody that's qualified to do it. And uh and uh and I took to the association business pretty well and and that became my occupation and something that I've done and I've enjoyed that part of it for a long, long time. But um if you take the hundreds and hundreds of events and these big events take uh like the finale there, which last uh year was at nineteen point seven million, which is the richest quarter horse event, and the largest performance horse event in the in the world now. Um the planning and all of that to see this stuff come off, um you're in the entertainment business. You're dealing with lots of people and you're making lots of people happy, maybe a few of them mad, but most of them happy. And so looking back through those 30 years, I think the most rewarding part of this was is that we were able to be in the association business and in the entertainment aspect of the business at the same time. And I would have never dreamed when I came to Albuquerque for the very first time over here that this is the way it would have gone, but it took its own life and when it's owned, took took me where it was going. And my now my family is all over my my wife Connie runs the uh Equine Network events division. She's running seven companies over there. Both my daughters are in it, my son is my partner in uh in the Riata uh Stalin and Center. So we've got our whole clan involved, and they all grew up in it.
SPEAKER_01:I think that's a really special part. We often talk about it in ranching and in the industry for something to be generational is a really special thing that doesn't happen in all industries, but it does in the Western industry. It does. Yeah, yeah, that's really neat. Um so uh Okay, so you've talked about your family now. Hold on, let me think. What what inspires you to keep going and to keep coming up with uh the next great idea?
SPEAKER_00:Um you know, I I guess I would um have been asked that a lot, and I I wish there was an easy answer, but to me it it's kind of a um these things take their course and you know one thing leads to another, you solve a problem, you create a new, and it just transpires over time and everything. And and the creativity part, there's been a few things that I've invented through the years that there's patents on and uh very unique things that the other organizations have borrowed and everything, and those were unique. And the only way I can tell people that we came up with those is I said, Well, I don't know. It was kind of like I hear these guys talk about these songs they write and they don't know where the songs came from. Well, you know, a lot of times I'd go to bed thinking about this problem and I'd wake up the next morning and here's the solution, you know. I mean, it's the divine intervention or whatever you want to you want to call it. But uh in a lot of them, you know, that that have come up were by accident. I did a an interview for a magazine one time, and they asked me the question uh what's better, the uh uh a electronic barrier or a rope barrier? And you know, that's always been a good argument for rodeo cowboys to argue about that because because team roping, everybody was going to electronics, and in the early years there were a lot of problems with it. And my comment was real simple. I said, um, neither, they're both crappy. And well, what do you mean? And I said, Well, they they, you know, I mean, they're predicated off the same theory that the animal starts and you give him a head start, and then the horse goes, and then you've got to learn to judge all this and all this rigomrow, and we are in the uh now that we deal with all different classes of cowboys, we need a better system than that. And so the very next day I had maybe five phone calls of guys that had thought up new systems and everything, and and they weren't um none of them were very viable. And that's when we came up with the uh uh the World Series system, and we started out with Prefort Manufacturing and and Farm Tech was doing our electronics for us, and the first one we did was not very good, but it led to the second one, and now you can't find a team rope in this country that's not using that World Series barrier. And so that one thing there led to that whole deal. And the first one that I did, Preford Manufacturing gave me the patent on it, so you're absolutely worthless because we threw it in the trash after the first year, but I've got that I got that patent anyway.
SPEAKER_01:That's neat.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:That's neat. Uh well I I think uh finding finding solutions to problems is is always a that's the answer. Great way. Great way to live.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Uh what about um you've you've mentioned lots of connections in New Mexico, and I probably couldn't name a a cowboy or a or even a rancher in in the U.S. that you didn't know or you didn't know somebody that knew.
SPEAKER_00:Uh what's that like making those connections and and uh those building those relationships with within the I we had a good start though, because the in the early years of classifications, uh we didn't have any of this computer technology we've got now. So we had to first uh identify who all the ropers were and then try to get them classified on the system that we had. And to do that, I built um in 1990, I got on the road and lived. I in fact, I lived in a on the road for two years, and we had uh 1,800 committee members in the United States, and we were doing two votes a year on 100,000 ropers. So that was two million, two million key punches twice a year. And then I would go to those states and I'd get the committee members there, and then I would show them how I saw the different handicaps as we went through. So all of those networks were built right then on year one, because they were the leaders of the industry in their area, and a lot of them were well-known ranchers and rodeo cowboys and everything. And that was my six degrees of separation from every cowboy in the United States. If and in fact, when we got the database up, even before the handicap deal started, we'd have somebody whose daughter had broke down in the middle of between blank blank Oregon and blank blank Austria, and we're out here at mile mark or so-and-so, and we'd go in and pull the zip code up and say, these are the two phone numbers, call these people, they'll come help you. And it might be a ranch that was five miles away. So before the triple A got going, we were providing triple A to our people when they were going all over because we had that network built and it was all coming off of that database.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and that association mindset that when you're part of our group, we're gonna take care of you. Yeah. That's really neat. That's great. Um, so maybe maybe uh if you have anything else to add, and then I like to ask the last question is uh your favorite way to eat beef, but any anything else you'd like to add about uh ranching or or uh the horse and cattle businesses?
SPEAKER_00:No, you know, the only thing the only uh you're you're in here marketing beef and and uh and the one thing that I want to tell you is is that I'm the the greater greatest marketer of beef in the history of New Mexico. And uh because every association executive that ever came along was supposed to promote beef, whatever that meant. And if you were from New Mexico or Idaho or some other state that didn't have a packing plant. It was pretty hard to say we're going to promote New Mexico beef when we knew they were all going to the Panhandle of Texas over there. So I had this friend at the legislature who was a lobbyist for public service company in New Mexico. And back in the 80s, public service company in New Mexico was uh diversifying. They had a lot of other businesses going. And one Friday afternoon after the session, we stopped by the bull ring for a refreshment. And um he said, What are you gonna do this weekend? I told him, What are you doing? He said, Well, I've got to go up here to uh Four Corners area, Mitsubishi Trading Company, which was the um largest trading company in the world at that time, is coming in and we're gonna meet with them and they want to buy some um uh coal from us. We've got huge coal deposits on our our land up here. Well, I knew that they were the top trader in beef. And so I just made a smart remark and I said, Um, well, while you're at it, get us a beef contract while you're up there. Get in Mexico some beef contract. So about two months later, uh, Don Hoffman, who ran the Bell Ranch, called me up on the phone and he said, Hey, he said, Mac Baldridge, who's a Secretary of Commerce, is coming into town, and he said, He's a neighbor, he's got a ranch next to me down at Clunch. And he said, Mac wants to to meet you. And I thought, Me? Well, but he said, he wants to meet you, come to lunch and go. So I went in and Mac stood up and shook my hand, introduced himself, and he said, Um, you're kind of famous in our office right now. And I said, I am. What did I do? And he said, Well, uh uh Mitch BC carved off uh 200,000 metric tons of beef for the state of New Mexico when I'm here to meet with Carter Packing Company to see, because that's the only packing company we can find that can handle this this bid. So I'd always beat my chest all the time and I'd say, you know, I'm worth a fortune because I'm I'm the only one that's ever sold any beef in the New Mexico beef.
SPEAKER_01:Oh man, that's that's quite the legacy to follow. What a deal. What a deal and what a fun story. Um, well, thank you for for selling New Mexico beef. Um long before they hired me, because that's that's uh what a great great thing. Uh well, uh again, I just uh we love to we love to l leave this question for last, but what's your favorite way to eat beef?
SPEAKER_00:Often. Often that's probably the best answer. It is time changes a lot. And you know, when this beef council first came in and right near here, Paul Freed used to have his office right here, and Paul and I are good buddies. And and we talked about this a lot, how times were gonna change, and he was always defending against the the um PETA and the the anti-beef groups and all of that. At that time, you know, they were beating the drum, and you're not supposed to eat more than six ounces of beef, uh, and you don't eat it more than every three days, and they had all of these things going on. Now, 30 years later, here you guys are, and um you you've got these diets that have been scientifically put together, you know, and and the carnivore diet and all that. I mean, everybody's you're on the other side of that now. I mean, you're not over here defending yourself. They're trying to figure out a new strategy to stop the science. Because basically your nutrition's the nutritionalists that you've got right now, their guns are loaded. Our nutritionists were were were just defending themselves with shields was all they were doing at the beginning. So so that's the that's the the thick of it. There's been a huge change.
SPEAKER_01:Huge, huge. We have a dietitian that works for us, and we talk about the the plethora of resources and and uh things that are to our advantage or to our uh benefit that yeah, people are seeing. And we've been taught for a while now to stay on the edge of the grocery store. That's good for beef. That's that's everything tells us that beef is healthy and beef can and should be a part of a healthy diet. And uh so yeah, we do get to ride the wave of the the battles won.
SPEAKER_00:Well, and in talking front of the front of the cow to the back of the cow, you know, when when uh Paul and I were here visiting about it, he said, you know, I spend a lot of time just talking about cow farts. And he said, and I was thinking about the other the other day, you know, I was listening to someone talk about it, and and we've moved from that end to the other end, and they figured out now that cows don't fart. So we're talking about cow burps now.
SPEAKER_01:Right. At least we've gotten the correct. Well, at least we have the anatomy correct now. Uh and the good news is we have a lot of research and a lot of studies now. I know uh the Colorado State University Agnext program has studied more cattle um in the like four years that they've been in existence than were ever studied before on these cow farts and cow burps. And now we've got a lot of new information that's telling the truth that cattle aren't aren't bad.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, that's still a defensive posture. You have to you have to defend the ridiculous, but that's just part of the Yep. That's part of the game, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Well, we're we're really excited, uh, or really grateful that you were willing to tell your side of the story and uh and even talk about a unique thing that a lot of uh a lot of uh you know, especially me that I'm kind of agriculture adjacent. Uh what we do on the weekends is team roping. And so um thank you for for uh talking beef and talking roping with us. And yeah, again, thank you. Thank you for everything.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for asking me over.
SPEAKER_01:Behind the burger is a podcast produced by the New Mexico Beef Council with the goal of telling the stories of the cattlemen and cattle women of the New Mexico beef industry. Thank you for joining us for today's episode. If you would like more information, please visit nmbeef.com. Whether it be a burger, a steak, or another beef dish, we hope you are enjoying beef at your next meal.
