SUNNYSIDE, Wash. – Sergio Madrigal watched in despair as federal officials hauled away his 449 calves to be killed after the nation’s first case of mad cow disease was discovered in a nearby dairy cow. A year later, Madrigal looks out at his rebuilt herd and smiles - just one of many signs that American ranchers suffered few long-term ill effects from the cow that ruined Christmas 2003.

Beef prices are high, and so are spirits.

“I’m at another level now,” Madrigal said in Spanish through a translator, as he sat in his kitchen after tending his herd now numbered at more than 500 calves.

But what a year it’s been for the country’s $44 billion cattle industry.
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Weeks of fear and uncertainty followed the announcement last Dec. 23 that the nation’s first case of mad cow disease had been found in a Mabton, Wash., dairy cow.

More than 60 countries closed their borders to U.S. beef products - everything from live cattle and cuts of beef to pet food and frozen potatoes prefried in beef fat.

Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman announced sweeping regulatory changes intended to bolster confidence among consumers and trading partners. She also increased the number of cattle to be tested to determine the prevalence of the disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE.

Federal authorities killed more than 700 cattle in three states as a precaution, including Madrigal’s calves. One calf in the herd had been born to the infected cow weeks earlier but was not tagged and could not be identified, so the entire herd was killed.

Many of the calves were just one week shy of being sold.

“Before that, I was thinking I was going to have a nice Christmas. After that, I spent nights awake,” Madrigal said. “It was the first time to ever have that situation in the United States, and I didn’t know what to expect.”

Madrigal, 35, said the Agriculture Department paid him fair market value for the calves in January before shipping them offsite to be killed. It took him five months and hundreds of miles in travel to fully rebuild the herd, but he learned valuable lessons.

“Now I keep control of what I’m being sold. I receive a number for each cow, and I make sure all have ear tags. Everything else is the same - the hard work is the same,” he said with a smile.

Already, his herd is larger than it was before mad cow disease was discovered down the road. And U.S. consumers barely missed a beat following the discovery.

Cattle prices were at a record high last fall before the mad cow announcement, at 97 cents per pound, up from the 2002 average of 67 cents per pound. They remain high now at about 85 cents per pound.

That was “reassuring,” said Jan Lyons, president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, an industry group representing cattlemen, processors and meat packers. “Before the BSE event on Dec. 23, we really had no way of gauging what might happen. Now, we have a historical perspective.”

From the time the disease was discovered in Britain in the 1980s, the United States had taken steps to prepare in case it was ever discovered here, said Beth Johnson, special assistant to Veneman.

“We are not going to stop,” she said. “It’s our key priority to make sure we continue to stay on top of this disease, as well as other animal diseases, to make sure we are protecting the public and the cattlemen.”

The Agriculture Department accelerated plans to create an electronic identification program geared at tracing an animal within 48 hours in the event of a disease outbreak. Many states are developing pilot programs to determine how the national program should eventually work.

And since the agency ratcheted up its testing program June 1, more than 140,000 cattle have been tested for the disease - as compared with roughly 20,000 cattle tested in each of the previous two years.

The program targets those cattle considered at high-risk for the disease: adult cattle unable to walk on their own, showing signs of a central nervous disorder or dead on the farm of suspect causes. That number has been estimated at more than 440,000 of the nation’s roughly 35 million cattle sent to slaughter.

The cost to respond to the lone infected cow, which was later traced to Canada, already has topped $31 million, but will go higher as the federal government continues surveillance and develops the animal identification program.

The cost has been great to the industry as well, said Greg Doud, chief economist for the cattlemen’s association. Doud estimated the added regulations and changes have cost the industry between $300 million and $400 million.

Additionally, while about one-third of the industry’s $3.8 billion trade markets have been restored, bans on cattle or products remain in place in more than 50 countries, making trade a key issue in the year ahead. The United States exports about 10 percent of its beef.

“In times of low supply, we can absorb that. But trade will become more and more of an issue as supply picks up,” Lyons said.

Supply is sure to pick up if the United States reopens the border to live cattle from Canada, whose industry has suffered greatly following the discovery of mad cow disease there in May 2003. The federal government is considering a plan to reopen that border.

Meanwhile, the United States has to work not only to regain trade markets that were lost to other countries, but also customers that were lost to other products, she said.

“The competition is coming from other beef producing countries, like Australia and New Zealand, but also from other protein products, like pork,” she said. “The trade teams have been very aggressive and have shown some progress, but we still have a ways to go.”