It has been an eventful year! Quite a contrast, for me at least, from early 2022, when it was still difficult to leave New Zealand due to Covid restrictions.
I hoped to get to San Francisco for the Animal Ag Tech Innovation summit, but that was not possible. In the end, Scott Stuart represented GRSB in a well-received fireside chat on genetics and genomics with Lee Leachman and Tad Sonstegard.
We Also launched our Beef LCA footprint Guidelines in March of this year:
Resources on the Beef Carbon Footprint Guidelines are available at:
In late April, I was able to travel to the US for the first time since 2019, and attend the USRSB annual meeting in Charleston, South Carolina. You will recall that it was at that meeting that the USRSB released their goals and sector targets for each of the supply chain segments. You can find the full information on USRSB goals and targets here. Shortly after that I was able to attend the retail Butcher’s summit here in New Zealand.
The Mesa Paraguaya de Carne Sostenible (MPCS – Paraguayan Roundtable) hosted an Innovation tour organised together with GRSB, thanks to Josefina, at the end of May / Early June. You can see some video impressions here and an article from IICA here.
While the innovation tour was going on, I had set off for Lexington and the AllTech One conference, followed by the Beef Improvement Federation Symposium in Las Cruces, NM. I wrote about that trip in Connect in June and the proceeding paper I gave is here.
In September, I was in Rome for an FAO meeting on Antimicrobial Stewardship and in London for the Livestock Innovation Summit. You can see the recording of the FAO antimicrobial webinar here.
More recent events are doubtless fresher in your mind, including our own Global Conference on Sustainable Beef in Denver and subsequently CoP27 in Egypt. I hope that 2023 will be a bit easier in terms of travel, and that we will be able to meet face to face at least twice next year.
As for Josefina, she attended the Annual Conference of the Global Agenda for Sustainable Livestock in Ireland in October. GASL is a partner of GRSB, and we have a strategic alliance, which we will continue to strengthen, at both the Global and Regional Levels. We shared in preparing this.
In the same month, she also organized the first strategic planning meeting of Latin America in Santa Cruz Bolivia, together with the newly founded Roundtable.
In November, after the GRSB Conference in Denver, she attended the CoP27 in Egypt along with me, representing GRSB in various panels.
Finally, she went to Uruguay to meet Sol Dorado (GRSB new Board Member) as well as meet local stakeholders to support the creation of a new Roundtable in Uruguay.
In Argentina, Josefina attended several events on Sustainable Beef including Congreso AAPRESID where she did a presentation of the GRSB and National Roundtables progress and priorities, the European Union event “Team Europe” where their funding strategy for the Chaco Region was released and finally the FEWSUS event held in Buenos Aires on December.
Thank you for all you have done and contributed to GRSB over the past year. We appreciate your time and energy, without which GRSB would not exist.
Happy Holidays!
