It comes as no surprise that the constitutionality of North Dakota’s Beef Commission Act has landed in court. Ranchers who choose not to pay dues to the Stockmen’s Association have been advising the Legislature for a decade or more about their dissatisfaction with the law’s preferential treatment of certain select groups, yet the Legislature has ignored them. It would have been so easy to amend and correct the century code, yet here we are, to no one’s surprise.

The first mistake out of the gate was to assign oversight and governance of the state beef checkoff to the commission tasked with oversight and governance of the federal beef checkoff. After the state checkoff was implemented in 2015, it didn’t take long for the commission to start sending hundreds of thousands of our checkoff dol

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