They ride up on buoyant prices and expanding cattle numbers, only to succumb to the sheer weight of profit seekers. Then they slide back down the price hill again with increasing speed, shedding producers and cattle numbers during the fall. In all, the ride may take two years before they hit bottom, level off and start back up again.
The price fall is happening now, with slaughtered animal
returns taking a major drop since last fall. Calf prices are
also down 30 to 40 cents a pound, partly in response to the
slaughter animal fall, and partly because feedlotters are
bidding less for replacement cattle to fatten as grain prices
rose last fall.
Usually, it's a market signal for producers to cut calf production; more cows and heifers go to slaughter, further reducing the price.
"That's the free enterprise system we are in. That's what we chose to live with," says Harvey Graham, Blackstock, past-president of the Ontario Cattlemen's Association (OCA). "There's an up cycle coming. It always has and it will again." But this price ride down offers even more uncertainty than normal:
- World-wide meat levels are rising, but so is consumption.
Beef consumption is fighting its way upward. But it faces
struggles against tough competition at home, not from other
meats, but from exports.
- On the other hand, the industry is restructuring itself to
position Canadian producers better in the North American
market. Strong fights are underway to get Canadian beef back
a bigger share of the domestic market, which had been lost to
imports.
- The U.S. and Canada are each other's single largest trading
partners. In the U.S., a protectionist Republican presidential
candidate Pat Buch-anan has raised the level of anti-trading
rhetoric by linking his political opponents' trade policies to
job losses. There's potential to wreak havoc on Canada's
highly visible beef exports to the U.S., which eats up 40 per
cent of Canadian beef production.
The OCA didn't bother to invite the traditional price prognosticator to its annual meeting last month in Toronto to lay down an outlook for the industry. Graham couldn't see the point. "I can tell you what [market forecasters] see and it's not good news," he said. There have been five consecutive years of increased marketings, and now the market is oversupplied.
Overall, beef producers have done well in Canada. Beef production is at record levels and it will get higher in the next two years as breeding herds are turned into meat, says Orton feedlot operator Doug Gear, outgoing Canadian Cattlemen's Association (CCA) president.
Production has increased for eight years in a row, Gear says. Exports are running at all-time highs, with 44 of every 100 calves born ending up outside the country. But prices for grain leaped last fall as well. What will the effect be on the cattle cycle? Gear says no one knows, but certainly some producers will stop raising cattle and switch to cash crops, hastening the drop in cattle numbers and increasing slaughterings.
Along with other beef producers, Graham hopes to come out of the cycle quickly. He cites the strongest export market ever in North America, with Canada pumping more than 30 per cent of its beef production out of the country, 95 per cent of which goes to the United States.
Furthermore, Ontario farmers benefit as North American sales into Asia increase. Currently, seven per cent of the beef being produced in North America is exported to Asia, a market with growing potential.
There are some other positives as well. Consumer demand is strong. Per-capita consumption of beef rose by 1.8 pounds in 1994 over 1993. And there are hopes that when 1995 figures are added up a similar increase will be seen again.
Graham points out that during the previous down cycle, "we had consumer resistance to beef that we aren't seeing now." Consumption was actually falling, and the price was being driven down further as more beef came on the market when breeding herds were reduced.
In all the ups and downs, there are wild cards that will change how beef is marketed in Canada, but no one is quite sure how. One is the huge increase in kill capacity that will take place in southern Alberta in the coming 20 months. Both of Canada's largest packing plants, Cargill at High River, and Iowa Beef Processors-owned Lakeside Industries at Brooks, are going to double shifts, killing and packing 20,000 head a week by the end of 1997, double the current kill capacity of 10,000 head. This battle between two American beef slaughtering giants will result in the ability and desire to kill another 800,000 head of cattle a year.
This meat will go where packers can get their price. Today, there are 700,000 live, slaughter-ready cattle rolling down the highway into the Northeastern U.S. Rather than being killed south of the border, these animals will be slaughtered at home, and the meat will be shipped south. The effect on Ontario's cattle prices is anyone's guess.
"We may even see more and more cattle leave Ontario," speculates Graeme Hedley, OCA executive vice-president. A further exodus of animals would put pressure on Ontario packing plants, Hedley says: Beef will flow to the market that pays the most money.
He thinks some of the meat may even make its way into Ontario, instead of being exported to the U.S. He expects that Northwestern U.S. packers will have to bid higher to pull cattle away from those Alberta packing plants, making pricing even more competitive across Canada.
There is some packer expansion going on in Ontario, Gear says. Toronto-based St. Helens Meat Packers Ltd. is expanding its kill floor. And Better Beef in Guelph is adding to its cooler space, to age beef more before grading and get more carcasses in the higher marbling category. There will be a trend towards packers paying premiums for higher-marbled beef going towards higher-quality markets, he says.
Right now, the Ontario beef price has already moved down at the sales yards and at the further processor level. But it isn't dropping in the retail stores, something which leaves farmers furious. They want to see beef retail prices down so that consumers will buy more and eat more and clear out the stock that is waiting to be eaten as breeding herds are cut. Studies by the Beef Information Centre, a national producer-funded beef promotion group, show that more beef gets eaten when it is heavily promoted in supermarkets.
There seems to be little that cattlemen can do to get more meat on the supper table. Retailers don't like price fluctuations. And another past president of the OCA, Ken Summers, Kirkfield, says cattlemen have no clout with them. "They sell shelf space, and they put in that shelf space any product that will move.
"We cannot tell them to feature beef."
When he's asked about it, Max Rodenberg, Canadian Retail
Grocers Association, concurs. Pricing is based on costs and
standardized margins that retailers use. "That's the way it
is," he says with a shrug.
Summers says it's hard to get anywhere with retailers because they have their own complaints with cattle producers. "Before we are in the meeting five minutes they are beating us up on carcass sizes."
This communications breakdown somewhere between the producer and the consumer has always been one of the weaknesses of the industry. With a constant eye on market signals, producers perceive that they get their best returns selling bigger cattle. But huge steaks and roasts aren't what cooks want, a point that retailers have stressed for about four years. Meanwhile, with packers still paying top dollar for huge carcasses, there's no incentive for producers to change. The OCA's Graeme Hedley notes that average carcass sizes increased again last year.
The dismissal of Canadian beef has been especially felt in restaurants. In Toronto, Canada's largest consumer market, American highly-marbled beef is the steak of choice, to the consternation of Canadian producers.
The fact is, consumers want taste and tenderness. The other players in the market chain are concerned with volume and putting meat through their systems.
The recently-launched Five Star Canadian Beef with Attitude, marketing high-quality cuts to upscale restaurants, holds promise, but it's barely off the ground and it will be a long time before it makes much of a dent in the imports of American beef coming into Ontario and being consumed in Canada's largest market. Some 7,500 cattle will likely go through the system this year.
back
Lobster liberators crunch cockroaches
When Mary Tyler Moore came eyeball to eyeball with a 16-pound lobster in a Malibu restaurant, she offered US$1,000 for the animal to spare it a sudden death in a pot of boiling water. Now she has become a leading campaigner for the movement of lobster liberation.
I know just how Mary felt when she stared through the glass into those unblinking eyes, but as a grower of crayfish, a freshwater lobster, I also know how the crustacean feels. Given the opportunity, he'd first like to eat those gentle eyes and then, for afters, he'd nip open her stomach to consume her liver. And all this without a second thought, because the lobster has no central nervous system and consequently no brain.
He also has rather boorish habits. T.H. Huxley, the great Victorian biologist, described his voracious cannibalism as "sinking to the depths of utilitarian turpitude" (baseness), for he'll happily munch away on his own kind, even his own children. That was just about to happen, in fact, to the weaker of the two animals that Mary saw walking claw-in-claw. The lobster certainly does not suffer, as Mary claims, from complex social interactions, a long childhood and awkward adolescence as, alas, we do ourselves. A few years ago, I suffered from one of these social interactions when being interviewed by a formidable lady from the BBC's Woman's Hour.
We were standing by one of my stew ponds when she asked me what crayfish eat. I explained that they were omnivores and would happily consume anything from lettuce leaves to mothers-in-law that might fall into the pond. My interviewer sprang to her full height, and jerked her recorder up into the air so violently that the tape flew off and landed in the pond. "That is a sexist remark," she screamed, her face as red as a boiled lobster, "and is not appreciated by the BBC." Shamefaced, I hung my head and, by way of apology, mumbled, "I meant to say fathers-in-law." But it was far too late to rectify this particular social reaction and the lady stormed off across the field, leapt into her car and disappeared at high speed down our farm track.
At the height of a previous animal welfare controversy, I was
asked by the Universities Federation of Animal Welfare to
produce a paper on painless killing of crustaceans. The only
answer, I had to conclude, is to take them straight from cold
water and plunge them into fast-boiling water. Almost
instantaneously the heat penetrates the shell and every
separate nerve ganglia is destroyed. It is the most efficient
and kindest way to kill an animal that has no brain, no spinal
cord and no heart. Kinder, in fact, than squashing a cockroach
underfoot, which, I guess, is the usual fate of any found
scurrying across the kitchen of a Beverly Hills mansion.
Ken Richards raises crayfish and sheep in Dorset, U.K.
Learning safety the hard way
It happened on May 31, 1964, in a weed-choked corn field
thousands of green, straight rows from the farmhouse. The boy
was a month short of his 10th birthday; his father, closing in
on 40. Neither foresaw trouble.
Because of the spring in the kid's legs, the father had asked the boy to accompany him while cultivating. "The corn is thick with sweet potato vines," the man explained. "Yesterday I climbed off and on this tractor a hundred times to clear them from the cultivator. Today, you'll do the climbing and the clearing."
And the boy did, dozens of times in the first few rounds. Each tug-of-war with the vines on the rear-mounted cultivator meant the boy had to climb down, then up the man-sized steps toward the big Case tractor's left rear wheel. Soon he too was tired of the big steps.
Finally, to avoid the steps, the boy clambered onto the tractor's drawbar to ride it until the next inevitable stop. His feet found a purchase: left foot on part of the drawbar assembly; right foot on a nearby piece of flat, solid iron. The father watched patiently.
Finally the boy said, "This'll work. Let's go." The father pushed the hydraulic lever to release the single action cylinder that held up the cultivator. Instantly, the massive cultivator dropped and just as swiftly, the boy screamed. The flat, solid iron surface where the youngster had placed his left foot was the cast iron base of the vertical cylinder. When the cultivator dropped, the boy's foot was smashed between it and the cylinder's stop plate.
It was an accident; serious, yet not life threatening. The boy would lose two toes and a summer of baseball. The father would lose faith in himself. How could he have placed his young son in harm's way?
It happens all the time in America. According to the National Farm Medicine Center in Marshfield, Wisconsin, an estimated 300 children die in farm and ranch accidents each year. For every death, 42 other farm kids are hospitalized and 1,120 more children require emergency room care.
None are planned. Each makes little sense. Every one causes pain; pain of the flesh that, if the child survives, will heal, and pain of the heart that, if the child dies, will never heal.
Marilyn Adams knows that pain. In late 1986, her 11-year-old son Keith suffocated in a gravity flow wagon of corn after he had been assigned to watch it unload on their Iowa farm. He was alone; no one knows why he climbed into the wagon. A year later, Adams launched Farm Safety 4 Just Kids, a non-profit organization that alerts, and informs parents and children alike of farm dangers. Currently, the group has 44 chapters and over 2,000 members across the U.S. and Canada. My father learned the lesson that sunny May day long ago. I will never forget the look of utter horror on his face as I screamed when that fat cylinder smashed my foot. And I will never forget that I did not cry. Nor will I forget that he did.
I suppose that's the way it always is when a child dies
needlessly in a farm accident. Parents are the only ones left
to cry.
Alan Guebert is a farm writer from the Corn Belt. The theme
for the 1996 Farm Safety Week, which wraps up this week, is
Child Safety.
At least cuts will pay civil servant severance
For agriculture, the chickens from the 1995 federal budget
have come home to roost.
Farmers should have started to lobby for agricultural support when the federal government cut Ontario's transfer entitlements for 1995-96 from $10.7 to $9.7 billion. Now it's March, 1996, and the Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA) and the Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario (CFFO) are realizing that the promise not to cut provincial farm support wasn't worth the paper it was written on.
The CFFO position is to get an apology and then it will help identify cuts. Meanwhile, it's been a government cheerleader in the downsizing of GRIP. With friends like this, who needs enemies? The OFA is attempting to meet with an aloof Premier Harris and explain the importance of agriculture in creating jobs.
Toby Barrett, Norfolk MPP, told farmers he and several other Conservative rural caucus members have asked Harris to respect his word to Ontario's farm community. Bob Speller, his federal counterpart, tried to help rural landowners in the federal gun debate and was removed from the chairmanship of the federal agriculture committee to a political black hole.
Tony Morris, OFA president, says the federal government has not signed any of the memorandum of agreements on NISA. Wealthy Alberta wants a different version while Quebec wants a bi-lateral agreement giving it a special deal. Surprise! The last time this brinkmanship occurred, the federal safety net package shrank from $850 to $600 million. If Ralph Goodale doesn't get his act together, Paul Martin will shrink the pot even further from the current Ontario share of $114 million. If the feds give to Ontario, then the provincial Tories can reduce their budget contribution to agriculture. Setting budgets and departmental distributions is all about the lack of trust between federal and provincial agriculture ministers over who takes the credit and who pays.
Budget negotiations are also set against a background of a national crop insurance review. Financial largesse to Prairie producers has put the program up for an overhaul. Imagine Alberta talking of giving tax cuts while getting such a huge share of federal agricultural assistance compared to Ontario, which gets the lowest share of agricultural assistance.
This message allows Harris to shrink infrastructure support for Ontario's second largest industry. Under the NDP, total provincial spending grew by 11 per cent, while OMAFRA had a budget cut of 24 per cent.
The cuts proposed for agriculture may at least help provide
increased severance packages for striking civil servants.
Comforting thought, isn't it?
Hugh Zimmer grows tobacco and corn in Oxford county.
Internet grudge pages can hurt agriculture
McSpotlight:
http://www.McSpotlight.org/
is the latest Internet grudge page
to light up my computer screen. Grudge pages allow anyone, to
harness the power of the world wide web (WWW) to vent their
spleen.
The name says it all; McSpotlight organizers have targeted McDonald's restaurants. But by wailing about McDonald's alleged responsibility for cruelty to farm animals, they've taken a swipe at agriculture too. I've watched Internet grudge pages springing up for almost a year wondering how the phenomenon would affect farming.
Until recently, freedom of the press belonged only to those who could afford a press. Now almost everyone can afford to rent space on a server and reach millions of computer owners through the Internet.
McSpotlight boasts: "McDonald's own customers and employees may well find it impossible to ever walk through the Golden Arches again after visiting the site." OK, the rhetoric is excessive. But after exploring McSpotlight last night, my egg McMuffin still tasted the same this morning.
McSpotlight's published numbers show 35,000 visitors viewed the vitriol during its first two days of operation. That kind of drawing power can, if managed properly, undo a lot of carefully-crafted, big-budget, image-building ads on prime time television.
Internet is built on rapidly shifting sands so there may already be anti-agriculture pages I am not aware of. Should we care if someone takes direct aim at milk or eggs, a genetically engineered crop or perhaps one grown with a particular herbicide?
If you believe you or your farm are immune to pressure tactics like this, think of BST. It's only been a few months since opponents finally overwhelmed the normal Health Canada approval process preventing BST's scheduled release in Canada.
Redmond Rose:
http://www.halcyon.com/redrose/joan.html
These days, it seems everyone watches Microsoft Chairman Bill
Gates for coping strategies in the world of computers.
An obviously troubled woman named Joan Brewer has used her
adequate graphics skills on this web site to tell the world
things such as: Gates had her beaten up and Microsoft has been
infiltrated by a religious cult. Why hasn't Gates with all his
money shut her down you ask? Did I hear someone mention libel?
Brewer has been operating apparently unhindered for a year or
so. No doubt libel laws will eventually slow some grudge pages
down. In most cases, however, lawsuits won't work because,
unlike well-heeled well-insured newspaper and magazine
publishers, most perpetrators have no assets worth going
after.
Brewer claims she supplements her social assistance money by panhandling. Remember: someone with a few HTML programming skills can operate a grudge page for little more than what one of our urban friends pays for cable television.
If police or courts in Canada or the United States ever crack down, it's not hard to find the Internet equivalent of a Liberian ship registry. There are servers all over the world accepting business from anonymous clients.
If there is a way to beat the grudge page, I suspect either McDonalds or Gates will find it.
Will farmers create their own grudge pages? Perhaps someone is already building a farm survivalist home page or one exposing right-to-farm-abuses.
Ontario Farm Machinery Board statistics suggest our farmers are generally satisfied with equipment dealers and manufacturers. However, if it hasn't already happened I suspect it won't be long before some farmer, somewhere, builds a grudge page telling the world about the lemon he got stuck with.
If you have a hot computer topic or favourite farm BBS or web site e-mail: rirwin@hawk.igs.net or Farm & Country On-Line. Robert Irwin is Farm & Country's computer guru.