As a group, feedlot owners were the main beneficiaries of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy recovery program.
Yet many of them also expressed dissatisfaction with program’s design.
Jeff Ball operates Ballco Feeders, a 13,000-head feedlot outside High River, Alta., and is the vice-president of the Alberta Cattle Feeders Association. He said what started as an industry-designed program to help save feedlot operators from bankruptcy got twisted into a political game.
In the original design, the government program was supposed to calculate the price feedlot owners got for their cattle before May 20, subtract the price they received after May 20 and cover 90 percent of the difference.
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Under the BSE Recovery Program, payments were made to cover the first 50 percent of the drop in price once cattle were slaughtered, based on the difference between the weekly average United States fed cattle price and the weekly average Alberta market price.
“With the announcement that money would run out … all that did was instigate panic. (Feedlot owners) were offering cattle at any price just to get a kill spot,” said Ball, who blames the federal government for changing the program.
“The original idea was a well-thought-out one, but the one we ended up with sure handcuffed the industry to a certain extent,” said Ball.
The program was also criticized for favouring large cattle feeders.
According to John Ross of Agriculture Canada, one of the program designers, people suspected equity might become an issue, but no one had a solution to control whose cattle came first for slaughter.
“The equity issue was a problem right from the start,” said Ross.
John Knapp, head of rural services with Alberta Agriculture, maintains the program worked. He said that before the program, slaughter plants were not killing animals and feedlots weren’t willing to sell to packers at prices far less than it cost to feed them. The number of cattle killed in the province had dropped to 28,000 a week, down from the normal 80,000.
American beef was pouring across the border to fill the vacuum created by a devastated industry, he said.
The recovery program prompted packers to resume slaughter and the feedlots began to move cattle, he said.
“The program was well supported by the industry. One of the reasons the industry supported it so much was they helped us build it. They sat around tables very late nights. That’s why their leaders were willing to sit at a press conference and say, ‘this is what we need,’ ” said Knapp.
