Former Fairfield resident and current rancher Rocky Forseth lives outside of Helena with his wife and 2 children and is a part of the Montana Stockgrowers Association M Bar Academy. Forseth has recently been given a prestigious role as 1 of 10 people around the United States to be a part of the inaugural NCBA Trailblazer Program. Rocky gave us all of the details.  Continue reading to learn more.

Trailblazer Program and the NCBA

Rocky: It's a beef advocacy program, so the 100,000 foot view that I have, is we’re advocates for the beef business. These are people involved in agriculture, ranchers, beef cattle industry enthusiasts, and those are the people that

NCBA has chosen to being the face of the beef community and promoting beef, promoting the things that we do and the way that we do things and advocating for our industry.

NCBA is who does it, which is a contractor for the Beef Checkoff. And we got together this summer through a Stockgrowers program that I'm part of called the M bar Academy, which is a leadership program associated with providing leadership and media training for Montana Stockgrowers. They brought in a guy by the name of Chandler Mulvaney from NCBA. He reached out, said, Hey, we think he'd be a good fit. He reached out to Colt Coffee from Miles City and he reached out to us and said, hey, we think you guys would be a nice fit. We applied, we were successful and we'll see what this has in store.

Where are the NCBA Headquarters

Rocky: They're headquartered at Centennial, Colorado, outside of Denver. We will travel there a couple of times throughout the course of the next 18 months, and that will be the primary goal, at least initially, will be

professional media training so that we can more efficiently communicate our message

through media and do it more professionally. That'll be the start of it. A lot of this process will be virtual online, Zoom, WebEx. Those kind of platforms will be used to communicate with one another. It's about an 18 month program. So we'll learn a lot and hopefully we get to meet a lot of new people.

Expectations

Rocky: Well, somebody has to advocate for the beef business, right? As ranchers, the piece that we're really, really good at is raising livestock and managing our land. Those are the pieces we're really good at.

One of the pieces, maybe that we're not as good at, is advocating for our business, understanding that though we are cattle people,

all our livestock turns into beef at some point. And so beef needs to be our primary focus. When we think about, from a promotion standpoint, that requires some advocacy today. It's not as easy as it used to be to just trust everybody involved. I don't think that's right. I think that there's good things and we do things the right way and that needs to be advocated for. And so I guess my expectation out of this would be to learn how to do that more efficiently and to learn how to do it the best way possible.

Why Do This

Rocky: They asked me and they said, what's the biggest reason you're applying? And I said, Look, I don't know if I'm the right guy to do this. I don't know if I'm the right guy to advocate for the beef business, but

I'm passionate about the beef business and I'm interested in everybody's success

in the beef business. And because of that, I'd rather it be me in that role than somebody that doesn't have the best interests of everybody in the beef business in mind. Maybe that's not the right way to say that, but the fact of the matter is, I want everybody all the way up and down the chain at every segment of our industry to be successful. And I think that gives me value in this role, because it just seems like when everybody wins, things go better.

If you have a story idea or something you want to learn more about, give Randy a call at 406-788-3003 or send me an email at randall.bogden@townsquaremedia.com