Cattle Call

Cattle Call

Renee Strickland quit smoking cigarettes years ago, save for the rare drag.

Then she decided to get into the cattle exporting business as an international livestock broker. That's when the nicotine urges came roaring back, a response to the stress involved in the risky and unusual business.

For Strickland, who runs a family cattle ranch in northeastern Manatee County with her husband, the job revolves around coordinating the transport of tons of livestock by land, sea and air to far flung places, from Cuba to Macedonia. It's a complicated, paperwork-heavy business filled with plane delays, language barriers and government bureaucracy.

"Exporting is just a lot of balls in the air," says Strickland, whose father was once the lead rancher for Babcock Ranch, a 90,000-acre tract on the Lee-Charlotte County border. "You have to make sure they all come down at the same time."

So far, the business hasn't raised much in the way of profits for the Stricklands. For instance, she and her husband have yet to recoup the money they spent on trying to do business in Cuba. Says Strickland: "We are too far into our investment to give up now."

Plus, the possibility of a big payoff is tantalizing: Strickland estimates that a deal to transport a 1,200-storng cattle shipment to Russia, for instance, could be worth about $150,000 in broker fees. While she hasn't completed a deal of that stature yet, she has done some smaller deals.

Strickland began feeling her way around the cattle export business a few years ago, initially as a way to soften the blow for what she thought would be the end of the real estate boom. She had been doing well running her own title research business, but she feared that income source would dry up when the market turned.

"I didn't want to work for someone else," Strickland says. "I'd been working for myself for 20 years."

Since Strickland had been around cattle and ranches her whole life, she thought the export business would be a logical step. But she literally took a few steps backward when she went to her first meeting of the Livestock Exporters Association in Virginia in 2006.

Other for Strickland, there wasn't a single woman in the room. By her count, there was also very few people under 70 years old.

But Strickland, relying on her ranch-raised work ethic, stuck with it. She would go on to attend dozens of trade shows and meet many people on both sides of the business, from Pakistani government officials looking for exporters to Ohio ranchers looking to sell excess cattle.

Strickland recently returned from a trip to Thailand, where she met with representatives from that country's agriculture department after getting a tip that the government is considering reopening the country to American livestock imports. She also recently closed on a deal to broker a 100-cattle sale to a government-run ranch in Guyana.

"This whole world is based on trust," says Strickland. "Right now, I'm out there getting my face known."

-Mark Gordon