 
Tom Jones: What would I be doing if I
wasn't feeding cattle today?
I'm at a loss.
It's just what we do.
I grew up in a farm north of Garden City.
And we were primarily irrigated corn
and dryland wheat farm.
So we ran a lot of pasture
cattle for a gentleman
named Earl Brookover.
I left the farm and went
to work for Mr. Brookover
at Brookover Feed Yards
when I was quite young.
If I look back on my
career, I'm most fortunate
for having worked for
some of the early pioneers
of feeding cattle.
And I learned a lot about protocols
and tried to do it right every day.
And then I progressed up
into a packing company,
and they were really growth-driven.
And it was a company called IBP.
And so I learned a lot about the business
when I started working
with Iowa Beef Processors.
One of my customers came to me
and asked if maybe we should
have our own feed yard.
And I explained to them I was
totally happy where I was at.
I said, "Why would we want to do that?"
And I started making excuses
for probably why it would be hard to do.
We decided to the make the change anyways.
When we decided to go ahead
and own a feed yard ourselves,
the hardest part of it
was done at that point.
It was just making our minds up to do it.
We've got a great crew,
and they're very interested
in making a difference.
My longest-term employee
would be my feed caller, Caesar Martinez.
And he and I started
working together in '77,
and that was quite a few years ago.
He's my go-to guy.
If I'm gone for a few
days, I show up with him
'cause he's an unusual person.
I show up to ask him what's
happening while I've been gone.
He's an unusual guy.
He manages the feed mill
and the feed calling,
so he sees everything.
He knows everything, what's going on.
A very sharp individual and
he's driven to be the best.
I feel good on nights when I go home,
and knowing that everybody
did the best they could.
And I'm really serious about that.
When we get feedback from
our consulting nutritionist,
or consulting veterinarian
said, "Hey, we've made
"a lot of progress over
here in this area."
That, to me, is comforting.
I like to see my people win.
One of the things we try to
teach to the management people
out here and the interns as
well, I always ask these kids
to please try to own
something in their life.
And it doesn't matter
whether you just own the job
where you're working,
or you need to buy land,
or you need to own your own business.
I want that in their minds.
To me, the people that I
worked with when I was young,
outta school, kinda put that into my head.
And it makes you think
about life differently,
and it makes you think about business
and how you're managing
your business differently.
Even if it's your job,
it makes you think about
how you do your job.
I really push for these
young kids to think about
owning what they do.
Nothing we do at the feed
yard is a timed event.
We move cattle slowly,
we process cattle slowly.
We get asked all the time
how many cattle can we
run through in a day?
I really don't know.
Probably not as many
as everybody else does.
It's like I say, it doesn't matter to us
how the cattle are handled.
The cattle will tell you
how fast they wanna go.
That's where we spend a lot of our time,
is teaching stockmanship
skills to our employees.
The cattle feel better about themselves,
they're not stressed.
If they're more comfortable,
they're gonna perform better.
We have veterinarians
who feed cattle with us,
we have farmers that feed cattle with us,
investor groups that invest
in feeding cattle with us.
And then we get to our fund groups,
which will be our commercial cattleman
and our seedstock operators.
Those are the guys that
really enjoy working with,
because it's great to
be involved with people
that are influencing
change in the industry.
We've got cattle to 100% Choice now.
Now we're working on the Prime,
so what's the next thing gonna be?
We have to look at our
new customers out there.
And so they're looking for transparency.
They want wholesome food.
They're looking for traceability.
Those are some of the
things that we're looking at
for the future.
How can we incorporate
that into our systems?
Part of the reason that we
built the research center too,
is I travel a lot of different places,
and a lot of people talk
about we just don't tell
our story very well.
And that's all I ever heard.
There is a good story to tell,
but we're all so busy
with the way markets are,
and environment and weather,
there's a list of things
that we worry about.
It's hard to find time to do it.
So that's why we have a lot
of trade groups out here.
They keep us awful busy, but
we have the time to do it.
We felt it was time.
The industry has changed
over the last seven years.
Genetics have changed, our
ability to study cattle
and collect data and see
how that effects performance
has changed, so we decided
it was time to get into that.
To see if we could make some improvements.
Anti-microbial resistance
is such a huge thing
that the industry's getting involved on.
Sustainability, our carbon
credits, our carbon footprint,
our greenhouse emissions.
The normal consumer doesn't know today
that we are working on making changes
to what we're doing to the environment,
that sustainability is
not just a buzzword.
One of the best things that's happened
to our industry out here has
been Certified Angus Beef.
They've helped us make
improvements in our product,
which I think is the biggest
thing they've added back to us.
They've incentivized us
to move our cattle up from
50, 60% Choice up to 100% Choice
and tackling the Prime issues now.
They've made us think about what's next.
