Danish Government and Industry Officials Get Firsthand Look at U.S. Red Meat

A team of government and meat industry officials from Denmark recently visited U.S. Meat Export Federation (USMEF) headquarters in Denver and met with USDA staff in Washington, D.C., to gain a better understanding of American red meat production and how agribusiness is conducted in the United States. The Danish delegation, which was led by the Ministry for Agriculture and Environment’s chief veterinary officer, also toured a Colorado cattle ranch and feedlot, the Cargill beef plant in Fort Morgan, Colorado, and the Smithfield Foods pork plant in Tarheel, North Carolina.

USMEF Technical Services Manager Cheyenne McEndaffer offers more details on the objectives of the team’s visit and explains that the U.S. and Danish meat industries see several issues of common interest on which they can work together – such as market access for specific products and administration of the European Union’s high-quality duty-free beef quota, under which most U.S. beef entering the EU is imported.

TRANSCRIPT:

Joe Schuele: A team of government and meat industry officials from Denmark recently visited the United States to learn more about the U.S. red meat industry. U.S. Meat Export Federation Technical Services Manager Cheyenne McEndaffer helped host the group, and she has more details in this USMEF report.

Cheyenne McEndaffer: The team was comprised of trade associations representatives, somewhat equivalent to USMEF here in the U.S., so they help promote exports on behalf of Denmark, as well as government officials learning more about the U.S. industry. Some of them are newer to the U.S. industry and some have been stationed awhile. So the team went to D.C. to meet with their equivalent counterparts in the regulatory agencies. They also toured a pork facility on the east coast and they came to Colorado for a beef day comprised of beef slaughter plant, a beef feedlot and a cow-calf operation. We always see huge benefits of these joint tours that we do. These groups host me in their respective countries. I’ve toured many plants in Europe that are hosted by these similar organizations and we like to do the same here, especially for a country like Denmark which is known for pork production. Any beef production Denmark is dual-purpose, or dairy-focused, so they really learned a lot by seeing what beef production looks like here in the U.S., as well as grain finishing, which is something you would not see in Denmark.

Joe Schuele: While the U.S. and Danish industries compete in some markets, McEndaffer explains they also have many areas of common interest.

Cheyenne McEndaffer: We obviously each have issues on our side of the pond that we’d like to address, so we do a lot of collaboration on identifying key government officials that each other could talk to and then working respectively in our own countries to help facilitate communication. This could be on things like helping get a product eligible that Danish importers want or working on a higher-level issue like the high-quality beef quota in the EU.

Joe Schuele: For more information, please visit usmef.org. For the U.S. Meat Export Federation, I’m Joe Schuele.