Dave Bolduc knows the value of marketing.
A partner in family owned Cudlobe Angus near Stavely, Alta., he has sold beef cattle genetics around the world and learned the importance of building relationships. His biggest coup was presenting the Queen Mother with a Cudlobe bull in the mid-1980s.
Bolduc said a $2.58 million grant from the federal government will go a long way in developing new markets and opening doors for Canadian breeders.
Agriculture minister Lawrence MacAulay made the announcement March 2 in Calgary with a promise to help support international and domestic market development activities for Canadian beef cattle genetics. The funds come from Growing Forward 2.
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The Canadian Beef Breeds Council will use the money to build a market development strategy, attend international trade shows, lead missions to raise awareness of Canadian beef genetics and further expand into the United States, Mexico, Europe, China and Kazakhstan.
The council is an umbrella organization for purebred breeds and supports the seed stock sector in international marketing and breed improvement.
“Initially, I think the development is going to be for emerging markets,” said Bolduc, who chairs the council.
“With our dollar changing relative to the American dollar, there will be significant markets for us in the next few years.”
He said he joined an Alberta trade mission to Turkey last year where considerable interest was shown in Canadian cattle.
“Right now, the beef in Turkey is feeder cattle brought in from Uruguay, and they are looking at building a cow herd and producing their own beef,” he said.
“Canada will be one of the places they look to.”
China also has potential, but Canada needs to get more beef into that market and then the cattle will follow.
“Those types of markets require relationship building so we have to have some groundwork down,” he said.
Cattle purebred breeders sell semen, embryos and live animals around the world. Last year, those export sales totalled $31 million. Many of these are private sales, mostly for semen and embryos.
barbara.duckworth@producer.com
