BARRHEAD, Alta. – When federal government officials showed up at Schmidt Livestock on Victoria Day, Walter Schmidt knew something serious was wrong.
“For the federal boys to work on a holiday you know there’s a problem,” said Schmidt, who operates the feedlot with his brother Gilbert and their families.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency officials were looking for 211, 800-850 pound calves the Schmidts had bought from Marwyn Peaster a month earlier to put in their 10,000-head feedlot.
“They were some of the offspring of his cow herd,” said Schmidt.
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One of them was very likely a calf from the cow that tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the first confirmed case in Canada since 1993.
CFIA officials were at the feedlot searching records even before the BSE case was made public.
But reporters soon tracked down the location after officials announced at a May 22 news conference that a Barrhead operation was under quarantine.
The feedlot’s pens cover almost a quarter section alongside Highway 18, between Westlock and Barrhead.
In 1995, Schmidt Livestock was given the Family Farm Award for building the feedlot from a small operation into a multimillion-dollar business.
“The Family Farm Award made us proud and we’re proud of our cattle,” said Schmidt, who never seemed to weary of answering reporters’ questions.
“We’re just caught personally in the middle.”
In the yard outside the feedlot office, reporters come and go with vans and large satellite trucks. Inside, CFIA officials have taken over the office to painstakingly match ear tag numbers from the cattle in the pens with the tag numbers of the animals that once lived on Peaster’s farm near Wanham, Alta.
Schmidt knows he’s only involved because he bought the wrong group of cattle, not because officials are worried about his operation.
“We didn’t do anything wrong.”
Added Gilbert: “We just got the roll of the dice.”
The search was lengthy because the heifers and steers that the Schmidts bought from Peaster were separated into two pens and more calves were added to the group to fill the 300-head capacity pens.
Every animal had to be brought into a squeeze chute, its ear tag scanned and the number entered into a computer.
After almost a day of checking tags and matching numbers, only one pen was done. It would be several more hours before the next pen was completed.
Once the cattle were sorted, the animals that the Schmidts had bought from Peaster were trucked to a federal government facility in Lethbridge to be euthanized so brain samples could be tested for BSE.
“We did not need this in the industry,” said Walter, who had no energy left for blame, even for provincial officials who took almost four months to test the head of the infected animal.
“It’s a big, big hit to the feedlot industry in the short term.”
The infected animal was sent to slaughter but rejected and sent to a rendering plant Jan. 31. Its head wasn’t tested for BSE until May 16, a month after the calves arrived at the Schmidt feedlot.
“If it was caught earlier they wouldn’t be here, but it didn’t go into the food chain,” he said.
