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a time to make the Certified Beef program work financially.
• Northern Beef Packers, first proposed six years ago, is now operating in Aberdeen but well short of capacity. The plant laid off 108 of its approximately 420 workers in April, citing lack of money to buy and process high volumes of cattle. The plant at the time was slaughtering about 200 cattle a day; its goal is up to 1,500 daily.
• A.J. Monger, director of new business development at the plant, said Northern Beef Packers wants to work with the South Dakota Certified Beef program. He said plant managers hope to reach capacity soon. He declined to talk about efforts to get additional financing to buy more cattle.
• Sarah Caslin, with the state Agriculture Department's Livestock Marketing and Development Program, said about 60 farmers and ranchers are registered with the program, with about 6,000 head of cattle currently enrolled. The program requires that cattle be born, fed and processed in South Dakota, and most cattle now are shipped to packers in Omaha or Sioux City, Iowa, she said.
• The Agriculture Department spends about $52,000 a year to run the program, with much of the cost attributed to a federal audit of the program and the state's checking of farmers and ranchers to make sure they follow the rules, Caslin said. Part of that cost is recovered from the $100 annual fee paid by producers and the 50-cents-a-head fee to enroll each calf, she said.
• To qualify as South Dakota Certified Beef, the cattle have to be born in the state, carry electronic ear tags and be tracked every time they are sold. Before being slaughtered, cattle have to be fed a high-starch diet or corn or other grain for at least 100 days.
• Caslin said other certification programs have taken a long time to develop.
• "We're still in our baby steps. "The producers still feel this is a good program, and we're just going to grow," she said.
• And even though little meat has actually been marketed in the program, its tracking components help some farmers and ranchers sell to buyers who demand to know when and where cattle were born, Caslin said.
• At an event in to kick off the program in 2005, Minerva's restaurant in Sioux Falls served invited guests and others to eat steaks processed and approved through the program. But the restaurant stopped selling the Certified Beef a few years later because Marshall Johns Beef in Hudson couldn't supply enough meat, said Don Anderson, vice president of Minerva's owner WR Restaurants.
• Steve Willard of Marshall Johns said the operation still sells 50-60 head a year for sale to private customers. The steaks are easy to sell, but ground beef is more difficult to sell at a premium price, even though most people would say it's probably

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