The Midwest Beef Summit will take place at the Owensboro Convention Center on August 27. According to officials running the event, the summit serves as an educational program designed to help beef producers manage and select cattle suited for long-term production in today’s “challenging marketplace.”
The event is titled “Midwest Beef Summit – Building the Profitable Cow” and Hancock County Cooperative Extension Service Ag and Resource Agent Evan Tate said that’s what the summit will primarily focus on–profitability.
“We will focus heavily on cow longevity–how to keep cows living longer and being productive,” he said. “We’re trying to help producers raise and develop beef production.”
According to Tate, Kentucky is the largest beef cattle state east of the Mississippi River and eleventh in the entire nation.
Tate said he scours the entire United States to find the “best of the best” when it comes to knowledge and innovation regarding successful beef production.
“I scour the countryside and go to multiple conferences. I went through a list of items I thought were relevant to the topic, put the list together, and found the ones who wrote the book on these topics,” he said. “That is my goal and we haven’t wavered on that one bit.”
Last year’s event saw beef producers from Nebraska, Minnesota and Kentucky, while this year’s event will feature speakers from Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky.
With a goal to present speakers who think ahead and “outside the box,” one of the big focuses for this year’s summit will be the use of technology in the beef production market.
“This is for someone who’s serious about being in the business long-term and who isn’t complacent in their own understanding,” he said. “The technological component is new to the countryside, one that’s a little outside the box, ahead of its time. But it helps producers know what’s coming, because it is.”
Over 200 people attended last year’s Midwest Beef Summit and Tate expects between 200 and 225 this year, he said.
“I always tell them, ‘I want you to leave with a headache,’” he said. “When that happens, we learn from it, and we go home learning how to [rework] our programs.”
