Management Insights

Q 

How long have you worked for Beef Northwest?  Tell us about your background prior to coming to BNW?

I started work with Beef Northwest in Sept of 1997 shortly after the Boardman feedyard was acquired. When I started with BNW my husband and I had just moved back to Eastern Oregon following a short ranch partnership venture in Southern Oregon. We came back to the Boardman area which is where we had lived the better part of the prior 15 years. I grew up in Walla Walla, Washington where both of my parents’ families were involved in agriculture in one form or another. My dad was in the cattle business and his dad was an old time horse trader. My mom worked with her dad in their family businesses which including farming and retail stores. Growing up, I helped out by working for both sides of the family. I got my start in accounting as a teenager helping my mom and aunt with bookkeeping, but also spent a fair amount of summers helping take care of cattle and other farm work. After college and marriage, I continued to work for agricultural companies in accounting and administrative jobs until eventually coming to Beef Northwest.

As controller, it is my responsibility to provide oversight of the administrative staff and functions at the feedyards. This includes making sure we have properly trained staff who have the tools necessary to carefully track the multitude of transactions that go through the feedyards every single day. This ranges from daily activities such as the purchase of feedstuffs and commodity inventory tracking, update of cattle feed, veterinary costs, and cattle sales records, to monthly invoicing and financial reports. It is my job to ensure that our administrative staff provides accurate and timely records to our customers and managers, as well as superior service to our internal and external customers.

My husband, Jim, and I moved to the area in the early 1980’s. Jim worked for Taggares Farms for a number of years, which was the original owner of the big farm on which the Boardman feedyard is located. Back then, I thought the farm was gigantic, and I guess it was, in comparison to the dry land wheat farms where I grew up. Irrigated farming on the Columbia River was still relatively new at that time, as the farms along the river were developed in the early to mid 70’s. So many things have changed along the river since we first moved here. The Taggares family sold the farm which was later expanded and the dairies were added. What had been the original Sim-Tag feedlot, with six big pens (where I actually used to keep my horses), was developed into a 15,000 head yard which Beef Northwest bought in 1997. The feedyard subsequently went through two expansions increasing capacity from 15,000 head to 45,000 head. Wind farming came into existence and colossal wind turbines now dot the landscape. Driving to work on a clear morning, when I can see for miles, I am often struck by the enormity of it all. It is pretty amazing to think about how many people are supported by these operations. Not only are there hundreds of employees who directly work at operations at the feedyard, dairies and farm, but also the thousands of people who indirectly work with the food produced; the processing plants workers, truck drivers, grocery stores, and the list goes on. Not a lot of people know that all of this exists just a few miles off of the interstate.

I have seen Beef Northwest grow, change and adapt over the last fourteen years. Since I’ve worked with Beef Northwest, we expanded the Boardman facility, leased a facility in Hermiston for two years, acquired the feedyard at Quincy and reduced the head count at Nyssa (as Barry Kane describes in his Management Insight). Throughout all of this, there have been numerous system changes, technological advances, and staff changes. When I first started at Boardman, we didn’t even have computers for the first month and faxed records to the Nyssa yard. Operations folks who had previously done everything on paper had to join the computer age. We eventually became networked, developed a website and hired an IT staff. We’ve developed internal controls to ensure food safety and compassionate animal care and enlist the services of an outside auditor to verify we maintain those controls. We’ve had a myriad of consultants help us evaluate our systems and operations over the years. Education and training never stop as we continue to strive to be progressive and efficient.

Thanks to our talented IT staff, I am able to do a lot of work with the other feedyard offices remotely. I can actually access a staff member’s computer from my desk at Boardman and help them work through a problem. E-mail and instant messaging are widely utilized to communicate back and forth. I also spend a fair share of time on the telephone with team members at the other offices. I can access each feedyard’s software from anywhere. However, there isn’t a replacement for face to face communication and I try to make regular visits to each location.

Although we have some differences in operations at the three feedyards, we do run mirrored systems at all locations. Our processes are standardized and our staff is all trained similarly, as well as crossed trained on different jobs. Therefore, we are able to rotate people between locations and fill in for one another as needed. All of our feedyard office team members have a few things in common. They like working at a feedyard, enjoy the company culture, and aren’t afraid of hard work. Our office staff works closely with our co-workers in operations and can be often found lending a hand with a computer problem out at the cattle hospital or mill.