Pool debuts amid protests and dissension
By D. STONEMAN & R. IRWIN
A long discussed six province milk pool (P6) came into effect this month, amid as much controversy as any time during its turbulent 20-month-long negotiation."It's a go," said a pleased John Core, Dairy Farmers of Ontario (DFO) chairman early October. Under the arrangement, prices for milk delivered to processors will be pooled across six provinces: Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. All- province pooling takes place two months after milk was produced, beginning with the August shipments.
Ontario producers' October milk cheques will be adjusted to reflect how processors used milk delivered in August. Fluid milk brings a better return than a processed product. Milk used in each processed product class has a different price. But the same day that Core announced the pool was a certainty, Ontario Dairy Council president Tom Kane, who represents large processors in the province, expressed displeasure with the plan and said a processor position would be ready in a week. Meanwhile, pressure was growing on provincial Agriculture Minister Noble Villeneuve in his home riding in eastern Ontario's dairy belt, often a simmering pot of unrest as far as Dairy Farmers of Ontario policy is concerned. Late September, after a series of hot producer meetings in the east, the Glengarry county dairy committee urged Villeneuve to block the deal. The minister's spokesman said Villeneuve asked Farm Products Marketing Commission (FPMC) director Jim Wheeler, who has the authority to sign the memorandum of understanding putting the P6 into effect, "to review the proposed agreement to ensure that it doesn't pose any problems."
There are a number of concerns that are shared by both processors and concerned producers. One is the relationship between prices in one province and those in another. There are fears that the pool agreement leaves the industry open to be taken over by Quebec.
When the P6 was signed, Quebec prices, determined by arbitration, still hadn't been officially released. If Quebec prices aren't as expected "we will all re-examine our prices," Core says.
"There is no doubt that some of the processors are not at all happy" with the agreement, admitted Sue Gillespie, marketing analyst for the FPMC, pointing out that there are outstanding issues that need to be worked out in the next six months. "I'm not happy with the situation because we didn't get milk allocation and that's certainly the way it was sold to me," said DFO board member Lorraine Lapointe, Martintown, in a rare break from DFO board solidarity. She expected milk would flow to the highest-paying class from all the pools, a principle she says has been agreed to by all provinces except Quebec. If a province doesn't release milk when this happens, the pooled returns are lowered for all producers.
Lapointe steps down as a DFO director at the end of this year.
"It's really going to be an uphill battle now," says Glengarry dairy committee chairman Peter Van Sleeuwen, Lancaster. At press time he was hoping letters from producers to Villeneuve and the DFO would stall the agreement until the issue could be debated at the DFO's annual Geneva Park conference mid-month. Stormont dairy committee chairman Brian Powell is less hopeful. "I assumed DFO would push hard to get it passed before Geneva Park. There would be a lot of vocal delegates opposing it there," he predicts.
Powell and other Stormont producers are still angered by what they claim was a misleading portrayal of the agreement tendered by DFO board member Gordon Johnson last month in Avonmore. There, Johnson insisted that even though Quebec buys Ontario quota, the resulting milk produced would remain with Ontario processors.
In an interview following the meeting Johnson confirmed this was the case. "We've had a gentlemen's agreement about this but now it's written in the new agreement," Johnson explained. Russell county dairyman Leo Brisson, Embrun, replaces outgoing director Lapointe in January 1997, having been unopposed for the nomination.
"We need more information before I can decide," Brisson told Farm & Country following a heated Prescott meeting in Vankleek Hill.
A flashpoint in eastern Ontario has been the circulation of a translated Quebec Order in Council which stipulates that Quebec will bow out of the agreement if it isn't in the best interests of that province.
Gillespie says the Quebec Order In Council is mirrored by all the provinces taking part in the pool. "Anybody can do that realistically," she told Farm & Country. "If you want out, you can get out.
"Realistically, any province can pull out at any time if it's not working."
If Ontario decides to quit the deal in six months, she said, "we won't get all of the $10 million" coming to the province's producers for sharing the fluid milk quota with Quebec.
Oct. 1, Ontario producers got a two-per-cent increase in quota. The DFO's Core says the small increases add up to 1.6 per cent. "We rounded it off to two per cent because fluid sales have been strong. It's a signal to producers to milk the cows they have."
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Here's how they build barns stateside
By DON STONEMAN
Brothers Mike, Peter and Shawn McMahon scrutinized the state-of-the art in freestall dairy barns in the northeastern U.S. before they built their own last year."We ended up building something that we hadn't seen," says Mike McMahon, general manager of EZ-Acres, at Homer, south of Syracuse, New York.
The McMahons opted for a 420-stall, six-row, drive-through barn, with 14-foot sidewalls that open wide to catch the breeze.
Agricultural engineers agree that 10-foot sidewalls provide enough ventilation for four rows of stalls, but in a six-row barn there are half again as many stall spaces and cattle. More air to cool them off and prevent condensation under the roof is critical.
The chimney on the ridge of the barn is 40 inches wide, 40 inches high, and runs uninterrupted for the length of the barn, allowing heat to escape from the barn.
The roof is supported on four by 14-inch laminated rafters 62 feet long to avoid the use of roof trusses. It's 34 feet from the floor to the barn peak, with no obstructions. Trusses would impede air flow, and give birds a place to perch. The McMahons are concerned about the possibility of salmonella contamination.
The same amount of bunk space is available to cows regardless of the four-row or six-row configuration. The four-row barn has 24 inches of bunk space per cow; the six-row barn has 18 inches.
The freestalls are 7.5 feet long in the rows where cows face each other, and eight feet long in the outside row of stalls. The neck rail is 66 inches from the back of the arch and 47 inches from the top of the mattress to the centre of the neck rail. Mike McMahon says he looked hard at stall dimensions before he settled on the dimensions.
Cows lie on 48 by 62-inch mats, made of industrial felt filled with pelletized rubber and covered with canvas.
McMahon says he has heard criticism from farmers who say there is nothing to prevent cows from going straight through into the other row of stalls. That's true, he says, but there is also nothing for the cows to get hung up on either.
"I wouldn't change one thing," he says. "I don't understand why you think you have to confine the cows. Leave it so they can get out themselves."
A year ago the McMahons were milking 350 cows in four tiestall barns. "We had hired help all over the place, animals everywhere, and much less than desirable conditions," McMahon says. Some of the animals were still housed in old-fashioned, bank barns with poor ventilation. "It was a 10-year program to get to this point."
The brothers spent two years driving around upstate New York and Pennsylvania looking at freestalls. They even put up a windsock and watched it for a year to determine the direction of the prevailing winds. The new barn is located perpendicular to the wind.
The new facility has boosted average production per cow from 59 pounds per cow to 74 pounds just three months after the move. That's with 2X milking and no BST.
More comfort for the cows was only one goal for the expansion. Another concern was cutting from six milkers to one. The McMahon operation has been built slowly, with almost steady expansion, over two generations.
The 843 head in the McMahon herd are all the descendants of eight heifers bought by McMahon's father in 1958, when the farm was 150 acres. The McMahons have been developing family lines and "spend more on semen than any herd of this size I know," says Mike McMahon.
There were 10 children, and three of them take part in the current partnership. Another brother is a contractor who took on the barn building project and is now building a heifer calf raising facility.
The three brothers bought the business in 1985 and the real estate in 1991. The dairy complex, including the freestall barn and the milking centre, was built last year.
The McMahons have been systematically consolidating the operation over the years. In 1985, they bought a computer to keep herd records with. In 1986, they put all the calves into 60 hutches at one location. Feeding was also consolidated in 1988 and the McMahons started using dump trucks.
Construction of the new barn was delayed until "our balance sheets were such we felt we could do this," McMahon says. Winter warmth is not a concern. Cattle with shelter can take care of themselves, McMahon says. "We didn't spent one nickel on insulation."
The Homer area is far from being balmy in the winter. Northwesterly winds sweep down from Lake Ontario carrying heavy snow with them. Last year the McMahons got 172 inches of snow on top of "unbelievably cold temperatures." The new barn "came through with flying colours."
Cows drink from a pressured water system. The McMahons found that gravity systems would be drunk faster than they could fill, and sometimes an air lock develops. Their system has eight valves to maintain but McMahon isn't worried. "We used to have 200," he says.
The eight-inch-deep water tank is made of precast concrete, and lined with epoxy.
Cows eat from ceramic tiles that are embedded in the concrete floor of the feed bunk and extend three feet into the feed aisle. The feed bunk is raised 4.5 inches from the freestall floor.
The McMahons found this was the ideal height for cows to get the maximum reach for feed. They built a series of portable feed bunks of various heights from the floor and watched cows to see what height they were most comfortable with.
The headlocks are tipped 15 degrees forward. The McMahons had noticed that with vertical headlocks, cows have their shoulders rubbed raw.
The 20-foot-wide feed alley is sloped into the centre so that rain from the chimneys puddles there, rather than running into the feed.
Before the cows were moved in, the McMahons took great pains to smooth the concrete in the freestall areas. They dragged a one-ton concrete block in the alleys to smooth them, then, for nearly two weeks, brought in the local village street sweeper to clean up the dust.
The inclined walk up to the milking area has parallel grooves. The McMahons had noted that cows' feet seemed to slip to the side, rather than backwards. The return alley is six feet wide so that there is enough room to get at the cows with the Bobcat if they go down. Most return alleys are 36 inches wide. The holding area holds 125 cows at a time.
Cows are milked in a double 14 parallel parlour. It was favoured over a herringbone parlour because it is 27 feet shorter. There was a bonus for the cows. McMahon says there are strong similarities between a parallel system and tiestalls. Cows "seem to like that privacy."
A single milking in the parlour is an eight-hour shift with prepping and cleanup and scraping afterwards. There are two milkers working six days a week. A weekend reliever milks both times on Sunday.
The parlour area is heated with supplementary heat ducts from the utility room into the parlour. As well, there is a radiant floor heat.
After eight weeks, throughput reached 85 cows an hour, where it has remained, with one person milking. "The cows adapted tremendously. In four weeks, they were coming in and out of here like pros," McMahon says.
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NAFTA trade panel hears new submissions
By DON STONEMAN
The final decision of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) panel has been delayed again. Canadian dairy and poultry producers won't know until the end of November if they can continue to use tariffs to keep out American imports and save their markets.The Clinton administration is under tremendous pressure on the issue. Late September, congressmen in Washington grilled Clinton administration officials about the apparent loss to Canada, as suggested in the leaked interim report of the panel in July.
But the congressional agriculture committee hearing, where Canada was criticized by its chairman, Republican congressman Steve Gunderson of Wisconsin, is just froth. The real action has been taking place at the NAFTA trade panel. Inside U.S. Trade, a highly-respected publication out of Washington which did not name its sources, reported the U.S. has filed charges with the trade panel that Canada unfairly tried to increase the protection of its dairy and poultry sectors by expanding the list of supply-managed goods that would be protected by tariff-rate quotas in the Uruguay Round at the World Trade Organization.
The U.S. says this happened after the NAFTA deal was negotiated but before the Uruguay Round was completed. Inside NAFTA, a sister publication of Inside U.S. Trade, says the international panel decided Aug. 31 to allow both sides more time for responses to each other's comments in the confidential proceedings.
Sept. 12, the U.S. made its final submissions to the five-person NAFTA panel, and five days later Canada stated its final position.
Politics in the U.S. are playing a key role in these developments. Richard Doyle, executive director of Dairy Farmers of Canada, the milk producers' national lobbying arm, says the congressional hearings in Washington drew a lot more attention in Canada than they did in the U.S. "The people who were there said it was a pretty boring exercise." The special hearing was a forum for congressmen in the middle of an election campaign. "It's pure politics. The committee was there to kick the can, or the cat, or whatever."
Meanwhile, the President's Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations urged the administration to place top priority on eliminating the remaining market access barriers to dairy poultry and egg trade with Canada "through aggressive bilateral negotiations." Doyle says negotiations will only happen if Canada loses the trade panel decision, and he says he isn't losing sleep over that.
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