Cattle Trade and Stewardship of the Land

At the annual National Cattlemen’s Beef Association event, CattleCon in Nashville, host Tracy Sellers took the Clear Conversations podcast on the road. Her guest was someone who knows that event well—California rancher Tony Toso of Mariposa County. Part cattleman, part appraiser, part policy advocate, Toso represents a generation of producers who balance life on the land with leadership. Toso ranches in the Sierra foothills, but in Nashville, he was wearing another hat: chair of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s International Trade Committee. Exports, he explained, are not an abstract policy discussion. They are dollars and cents at the ranch level. “When we sell an animal in a sea container,” he said, referring to boxed beef shipped overseas, “that contributes about $400 a head to the value of that animal.” In a business where margins are often thin and risk is constant, that $400 matters.