Farmers give away cows to draw attention to BSE

BELLEVILLE - Three Hastings County farms said they would rather give their cows to families who couldn’t afford an adequate diet "than to donate to the profit of the meat processing industry."

Members of the county Federation of Agriculture, Dale Ketcheson, Kevin Durkin, and Anne and Richard Barbers also hit on an imaginative way to focus attention on gouging in the industry. After they donated the three cows to local food banks, they wrote a press release to local media telling them how much mad cow disease had ruined the market and how much they had been exploited.

Richard Barber, a dairy farmer, said that the cow he gave away, a four-year-old Holstein, would have brought him between $600 and $800 a year ago but now would bring between $50 to $100 at the sale barn. When trucking costs and the checkoff were paid, Barber would have been heading for ground zero. The same cow, however, was worth about $1,200 at the hamburger counter.

Barber, whose brother milks about 200 cows in England, said his brother did not have a single animal infected with BSE. But the compensation rate is much better than in Canada. In Britain, the government buys all the cull cows for about 45 cents per lb liveweight. "That’s better than the two cents some of the cows go for," he said.

Clayton Long of Shannonville trucked the Hastings cows for free while Chilvers meats of Foxboro, slaughtered them.