Cattle Supply Manager

📋 Description

• • Drive the future of sustainable beef: As the Cattle Supply Manager for Land O’Lakes’ fast-growing Beef Value Chain startup initiative, you will own the end-to-end supply strategy that moves cattle from dairy to harvest. Your leadership will directly shape how a Fortune 250 cooperative reimagines the business of food, creating traceable, profitable, and responsible pathways from farm to fork.
• • Build and scale a high-impact team: Recruit, coach, and inspire a cross-functional group of supply specialists, data analysts, and field representatives. Set clear KPIs around volume, quality, margin, and sustainability metrics; review performance weekly and pivot quickly to keep the pipeline full and flowing.
• • Own day-to-day value-chain operations: Oversee scheduling, logistics, animal welfare compliance, and plant alignment so that every head of cattle meets customer specifications and delivery windows. Anticipate bottlenecks before they happen and implement contingency plans that protect both producer profitability and customer satisfaction.
• • Identify and enroll new supply partners: Map the national dairy-beef landscape, segment prospects by volume, genetics, and sustainability practices, then craft tailored value propositions that convert fence-sitters into long-term partners. Expect to sign multi-year agreements that lock in supply and share risk.
• • Cultivate unbreakable stakeholder relationships: Serve as the primary point of contact for feedlots, packers, veterinarians, nutritionists, and sustainability certifiers. Host quarterly business reviews, negotiate pricing formulas, and co-develop continuous-improvement projects that deepen loyalty and reduce churn.
• • Translate market intelligence into action: Monitor USDA reports, futures markets, and consumer trends; distill insights into pricing strategies, inventory targets, and promotional campaigns. Present findings to senior leadership and influence decisions that affect millions of pounds of beef.
• • Champion data-driven decision making: Implement dashboards that track animal flow, cost per pound, greenhouse-gas footprint, and customer scorecards. Use the data to spotlight under-performing regions and replicate best practices across the network.
• • Navigate ambiguity with confidence: This is a green-field initiative—processes, systems, and playbooks are still being written. You will thrive if you can draft SOPs, test them in the field, and iterate without waiting for perfect information.
• • Travel to where the cattle are: Spend 50–75% of your time on the road visiting dairies, feedyards, and processing facilities from California to the Corn Belt. Your presence on the ground will build trust and ensure that commitments made in the boardroom are delivered in the barn.
• • Advance Land O’Lakes’ reputation: Represent the cooperative at industry conferences, sustainability roundtables, and customer audits. Position the Beef Value Chain as the gold standard for transparency, animal welfare, and producer profitability.
• • Create career-defining impact: Success in this role opens pathways to director-level positions across Land O’Lakes’ portfolio of dairy, animal nutrition, and sustainability businesses. Your fingerprints will be on a program that could scale to a nine-figure revenue stream within five years.