Now he thinks the mad cow scare cannot help but to cut into that cushion.
What with Europe's mad cow scare, which has contributed to a 60 percent drop in his beef sales, he has enough problems, he said.
In the last two weeks, the British mad cow scare has humiliated the Government, agonized the $6.5 billon beef industry and turned carnivores into vegetarians.
A few months after the mad cow scare caused Europeans to shun beef in all forms, growing numbers of consumers are coming back - slowly and selectively.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob is the human form of the neurological disease at the center of the mad cow scare in England.
A lot of this material will be familiar to readers who have kept up with the newspaper accounts of the mad cow scare.
He said the mad cow scare "only highlights this.
Where's the beef after the mad cow scare?
Democrats have used the subsequent mad cow scare to press their case for the country-of-origin labeling, saying Americans want to know where supermarket meat and produce come from.
And she acknowledged that many in Canada had to stop either production or exportation of cream to the United States because of the mad cow scare.