One goal of Extension is to provide practical information that makes a difference to producers. Cow Herd Appraisal Performance Software (CHAPS) has provided beef producers with production benchmarks for 30 years, creating a large historical data set. Many such large data sets contain useful information but are underutilized. Our goal was to create a 20-year data set (CHAPS20Y) to examine trends in beef production from 1994 to 2013. In this article, we describe the CHAPS program and the process used to select herds for CHAPS20Y. We hope to publish additional related articles that will examine trends in calving distributions, reproduction, and growth and discuss implications for producers and Extension.