Renderers charge $100 per head to remove dead stock
EDMONTON — There is a saying in the livestock business: you have livestock, you have dead stock.
Trying to figure out the best and most cost effective way to handle dead animals is the goal of a new Alberta Beef Producers’ working group.
Howard Bekkering, chair of the dead stock group, said it is gathering information from cattle producers and renderers on how to im-prove the economics of removing dead stock.
Before BSE was discovered in Canada, rendering companies travelled the province picking up dead animals for free and turned them into byproducts.
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“They were picked up and made into a valuable product for the renderer,” said Bekkering of Vauxhaul.
However, renderers now charge $100 a head to remove dead animals and don’t travel to all areas of the province.
“The extra cost of disposal kicks you one more time.”
Bekkering said the committee is in the initial stages of gathering information on possible new technologies that could add value to end products.
“We’re primarily looking at working in concert with the rendering company and making the process more economical,” he said.
Any new technology must be economical and destroy the prions that cause BSE, he said.
Gordon Graves of Iron River, Alta., said livestock producers must keep air, water, soil and disease in mind when disposing of animals that aren’t picked up by a renderer.
“Theoretically they get buried,” said Graves, who tries to compost his dead animals.
“It kind of works.”
Graves said the dead animal disposal hasn’t functioned properly since BSE was discovered.
The committee hopes to have information to present to ABP’s annual meeting in December.
