Present by phone: Brett, John, Kathy, Chris, Bryce, Jeremy and Marc joined later.

Treasury: Chris has the checkbook and other financial records from Glen Jones.

APSA National Sale:

• Kathy agreed to be on the Polypay National Sale Committee
• The 2016 National Sale was discussed. Most of those that attended the sale were not happy with the sale itself, but agreed the meeting and banquet went well. It was agreed that the sale set up was not good. We did not have an easy way to run the sheep into a common area for the evaluation and sale order placement, and the sale ring itself was further away from the pens than we would have liked. That made it pretty hard to get animals to the sale ring in time. It was suggested that if the sale stayed in Springfield for 2017, it might be possible to have the APSA sale in the goat barn as it would be easier to get animals to and from the ring. In this case, the auctioneer would have to move to the goat barn for our sale. Chris Kaeb said he could check into this possibility.
• It was mentioned that the 2016 sale catalog had a lot of errors.
• Arlington was discussed as a possible alternative site for 2017, although we do not have a commitment from Todd Taylor yet. We discussed ways to relieve some of the work on Todd for an event like this.
• Bryce will look into alternative locations for 2017 as well as sale managers and advertising, we really need to get more buyers. A suggestion was made to contact Curt Overcash who manages the Sedalia sale. Overcash also ran the Arlington sale in 2015. Changing the date of the sale was also discussed.

Registration number options: There was a discussion on allowing an alternative number to be used for the registration number when registering sheep. Some producers on NSIP would like to use the unique number used by NSIP in place of the sequentially generated number assigned by APSA as both the flock number and registration number. It was mentioned that the APSA registration number is not often used to identify animals when breeders talk about their sheep, and that the flock tag is the number most often used so removing one of those numbers would reduce duplication and possibly reduce the chance of errors in record keeping. Jeff at Assoc Registry said the office could use the unique 16 digit number used by NSIP and it might in fact eliminate errors made by producers when filling out registration applications. NSIP producers could possibly send a spreadsheet with the information they used to enter their lamb crop into Lambplan, this information is error checked by Lambplan and thus would likely be less likely to contain errors. This might actually reduce the time needed to register animals. Jeff confirmed that there would be no additional cost if this system was used. Producers would initially have to write in the current registration number of the sire and dam of the animals being registered.

FEC Grant: There was a discussion of the FEC grant, and at the time of the meeting there were already about 600 of the available 1000 animals entered into the program.

Jerry and Mary Sorensen: There was a discussion of giving Jerry and Mary Sorensen an Honorary Lifetime Membership to APSA to thank them for all their work over the years. Brett made the motion for the Sorensen Honorary Membership and Chris seconded. All approved.

APSA Board Opening: Lowell submitted his retirement from the board of the APSA. The board discussed finding a current APSA member to fill the remaining year of his term.

Registration Fees: A discussion was held on whether to eliminate the late registration penalty. Apparently it does not take more effort from office staff to register animals “late” versus the current early registration time frame. Are we alienating some producers or discouraging producers from registering animals who do not want to pay the late fee?

Adjourn Notes taken by John Anderson