RED DEER – Like so many others in the livestock industry, Ann Marie Hauck remembers exactly what she was doing on May 20 when she heard Canada had a single case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
The Alberta goat breeder was in Monterry, Mexico, attending a livestock show and business meetings to finalize purebred exports.
Now she and her husband Ray are trying to figure out how they can keep an extra 300 purebred Boer goats on their ranch near Cochrane, Alta. The young bucks and does were destined for export to Mexico, but have been stuck in Canada since BSE concerns closed international markets to Canadian ruminants.
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The Haucks own Ram H Breeders where they raise about 1,000 purebred Boer goats and 500 Dorper sheep. A large part of their income was derived from purebred exports.
Drought and feed shortages in Alberta forced many seedstock producers to cull their herds heavily last year. Few want to see another cull of the core of their herds.
“The commercial sector of the industry will not survive without the purebred genetics,” said Hauck, who is chair of the National Goat Federation and a board member of the Canadian Boer Goat Association.
“I don’t see a window of hope for the seedstock industry right now.”
Goat breeders have asked the federal government why their exports continue to be banned. As far as it is known, goats do not contract BSE and the last reported case of scrapie in goats was in 1978.
While the United States and a handful of other nations have agreed to start accepting some Canadian boneless red meat products, including goat meat, nothing has happened so far.
A further dilemma for the goat industry is that before May 20, animals were always shipped live. Customers preferred to handle their own slaughter because many needed a ritual kill based on religious requirements.
Potential meat exports from goats and sheep must come from animals under 12 months of age but determining the exact age of a commercial animal is difficult. The Americans require age to be determined by checking the number of permanent teeth, but producers and processors argue that provides too wide a margin for error.
As well, no federally inspected plants in Western Canada handle goats.
Another problem is that Canadian goat and sheep producers depended on Mexico to accept older culled animals, a market that is now closed.
Before May 20, young meat goats sold between $1.25 and $1.50 per pound. Hauck said it is difficult to determine value with the loss of the export market, but she has heard reports of prices around 70 cents per lb. She estimated the closed borders could cost the industry around $7 million annually.
“It’s taken us more than five years to finally develop a co-operative to get producers to pool production and get into niche markets,” she said.
The pools helped producers sort their animals according to size and quality for ethnic markets in California, New Jersey and New York.
Frozen goat meat is being imported to meet Canadian demand, which producers want banned while the crisis lasts so domestic production can be absorbed.
The goat industry was promised compensation as part of the federal-provincial BSE recovery program, but so far no money has come and producers do not know how to qualify.
