Cull cows a big problem

Desperately low prices has turned Canada’s cow and bull cull into cattlemen’s biggest problem.

Brian Coughlin, a Cobden beef farmer, says many farmers are selling young heifers and holding the older beef cows and breeding them again. With prices as low as 10 and 20 cents per pound and the need for a cash flow, it doesn’t make any sense to sell an older cow, he reasons.

Normally, between 15,000 and 17,000 culls hit the market the last week of September. But in 2003, the number had dropped to between 3,000 and 4,000 culls. Unfortunately, the U.S. border won’t be open to cull cows for at least a year.

Charlie Gracey recommends that "farmers bite the bullet, because they haven’t much choice." In order to have a healthy beef herd, Canada must cull a minimum of eight per cent. As important, to maintain our own market for culls, there has to be a steady supply on the market. Threats by some angry farmers to shoot the culls and bury them is not the answer, he said. "People who think that can’t happen are living in dream land," he said.

As a member of a task force committee on Ontario culls, Gracey recommended the federal government provide deficiency payments, the difference between the market price and a fair price, for cull cows and bulls. However, the government argued that the new NISA (Net Income Stabilization Account) would do the job. NISA is based on the income of the whole farm rather than on a specific commodity.

At the same time, some light has to be shone on who is making the profits. He says no one has investigated this with any vigour. What’s more, Canada probably has insufficient plant capacity to handle our domestic cow kill. Gracey says that 41 per cent of the cows for slaughter in Canada and 74 per cent of bulls went live to the U.S. Moreover, in 2002 about 203,000 tonnes of cull cow and bull slaughtered at home went to the U.S. market. "We had about 45,000 tonnes of beef left for the Canadian market," he said. "We’re shooting ourselves in the foot."

In 2003, Canada imported 132,000 tonnes of off shore beef, but had only agreed to import 76,000 tonnes. We have doubled the amount we said we would import when the agreement was signed in the mid-80s, he said.

The Canadian beef industry has to learn to market again, he says. "We could market most of the meat we process here," he says. But the government has to stop issuing permits to import beef. He called the government short of vision, saying it has to try to understand this problem. The problem of marketing culls is going to be with us for a long time, he said. It won’t be solved this year or next.

In Ontario, there has been talk of re-opening the MGI plant that closed several years ago. "It could be operational in short order," he says. "But there are issues right now on ownership."