14 NEBRASKA CATTLEMAN December 2025 PEOPLE No Stranger to Leadership LISA BARD | NEBRASKA CATTLEMAN EDITOR Craig Uden has spent a lifetime in the cattle business, and he’s seen just about everything that can test an operation, a family or an association. Disease scares. Extreme market fluctuations. Drought. Weather events. Washington pressure. Consumer pressure. Activist pressure. Generational pressure. He’s dealt with all of it. In December, he steps in as president of Nebraska Cattlemen (NC). Uden served as National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) president in 2017 and was NCBA Policy Division chairman and Federation Division chairman before that. He served on the Nebraska Beef Council, the NC Board of Directors as a committee chairman and vice chairman, the NC Research & Education Foundation and was involved in the NC Feedlot Council. So why take on NC president now, after years of service on the national, state and local levels? He doesn’t give a political answer. He gives a cattlemen’s answer. “It’s just the passion for the industry,” he says. “This industry never stays stagnant. It’s always changing. And we’re going through a huge move – a full-on transformation from one generation to the next. It is not going to operate like it did 20 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago or even two years ago.” He’s blunt about another thing that pushed him back into state-level leadership; COVID-19 changed everything, and not for the better. “I’m not real happy with how COVID-19 changed the demeanor of not only everyday people, but people in ag,” he says. “We’ve gotten impatient. We’re reactive to whatever we hear in five seconds online. We jump to conclusions. We quit listening. We stopped being civil.” He pauses, then adds, “Time will heal a lot of our issues if we give it the time. But we have to quit acting like it’s all about me, me, me today. Let’s think long term, take a breath and quit tearing each other apart over sound bites.” That right there is the core of how Uden sees his role – not as a referee, but as a stabilizer. In other words, Nebraska Cattlemen doesn’t need just policy. It needs discipline, memory and a willingness to talk to each other like we intend to stay in business together. The Generational Hand-Off Uden talks about a big force hitting the beef industry right now: the generational transfer of land, equity and decision-making. He thinks most people don’t realize how big it is, or how fast it’s happening. “I’m a little bit scared to death we’re going to wake up and not recognize this business,” he says. “People think this cattle cycle is just like the last hundred years. It’s not. Something is different this time.” Part of that “different” is the growing role of the dairy sector in the beef supply. Dairy calves and dairy-beef crosses are showing up in feedyards in ways they didn’t 20 years ago, and with them comes a different mindset. “There’s a perceived threat that the dairy industry has become a bigger player in beef, and really it’s just … different,” he says. “They think more like a business. There’s more bottom-line thinking. They’re not as attached to the livestock the way multi-generation beef outfits are. They make decisions faster.” For a lot of traditional cow-calf and feedyard operators, that’s uncomfortable. Uden doesn’t pretend otherwise. But he’s honest about what it means: the time of treating ranching strictly as “a way of life” is changing. “I know people like it to be a way of life,” he says. “But going forward, we have got to think more as a business.” That shift is going to create friction inside the state, he says, and Nebraska Cattlemen will have to face it head-on. Not just in policy, but in exposure. People need to see what’s coming and decide how – or if – they’re going to adapt. “The marketplace is going to make a lot of this play out,” he says. “But people need to be exposed to what’s changing. You can fight it, or you can figure out what part of it you’re willing to bring into your own operation.”
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