The federal government is expected to soon announce a cull cow assistance program that could be worth $200 million if all the provinces contribute their 40 percent.
According to federal and industry sources and Ontario agriculture minister Steve Peters, the program will be retroactive to Sept. 1 and run for one year.
As outlined last week, the program will provide producers with a payment of $159 per head once the animal is slaughtered, plus $1 per day to help cover feed costs between Dec. 16 and the day of slaughter, up to July 15, 2004.
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Federal officials have told their provincial counterparts the goal is to move 665,000 cull cattle out of the system by the end of next summer.
Estimates are based on a cull rate of nine percent in the general herd and 15 percent in the dairy herd.
Federal agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief last week refused to divulge details, saying the announcement was just days or weeks away.
“We need to develop a program that could be as retroactive as possible, one that could assist the producers, one that could be bankable so the producer would know there is assistance, but there also would be the necessity that the animal has to be slaughtered,” he said Oct. 31.
However, he said negotiations on details were still under way.
“There’s always some steps around here that you have to go through.”
This week at a meeting in Ottawa, beef and meat industry representatives will propose a strategy to enlarge the Canadian processing capacity for older cattle and to increase domestic use of meat from these animals.
“I think this will be an important piece of the puzzle to go along with the compensation,” said Dennis Laycraft of the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, a key member of the national meat industry round table.
Peters said provinces will not have to join with their 40 percent to trigger the federal 60 percent.
The federal-provincial cull cow program comes little more than a month after Vanclief and provincial ministers rejected a request from the cattle and beef industry that governments spend $170-$200 million to help cattle producers deal with over half a million head of older animals.
The industry said older cows could not be sold at break-even prices because international borders were closed to Canadian cattle after the May 20 announcement of bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
The industry proposed that the money be paid to all producers on the basis of the size of their herd, estimating culls at 10 percent. It would be up to the producer to decide when those cattle would be sold.
Last week, Vanclief said that was the basis for the rejection.
“What they asked for at that time was a specific payment with no necessity to slaughter cattle. I told them that wasn’t acceptable.”
However, at a Sept. 22 news conference after the meeting, the federal minister offered a different explanation.
Vanclief said then that ministers agreed producers should take advance payments from existing agricultural policy framework funds rather than ask for a new program.
“I think it was a general consensus of the table not to make a specific per-animal payment,” he said.
Laycraft said industry lobbying since then convinced governments that help was needed.
