PORTAGE LA PRAIRIE, Man. – Lyle McDonald isn’t old enough to know what you’re talking about when you mention the Crow Benefit.
But he knows what you’re talking about when you ask him about the sudden leap in elevator deductions in this area in late 1995, when the Crow was killed.
“Oh, that, the freight rate. That was a big deal,” said McDonald, a 25 year old who was working in his feedlot on a recent October afternoon.
And he knows what it meant to families like his.
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“A guy had to look at other ways of doing stuff.”
The McDonalds decided grain for export didn’t make sense without the Crow Benefit, so it beefed up its cattle operation.
In 1995 the farm could feed about 400 calves per year. Now it can handle 3,500 a year in two lots.
Instead of growing export grain and hauling it to the elevator, the McDonalds grow 300 acres of corn and 600 acres of barley, all for the cattle.
That’s made the low cost of prairie feedgrain in recent years a bonus for the cattle feeding end of the operation.
“For the last five years we’ve been growing barley and it’s turned into three, four dollars a bushel putting it through these cattle,” McDonald said while the animals loudly voiced their objections about going through a squeeze chute for injections.
“With this, you don’t have to worry about (freight) deductions or anything else.”
When the Crow was abolished, economists, politicians and rural leaders predicted a great swing on the eastern Prairies out of grain production and into livestock.
But while hog numbers in Manitoba have risen, the number of hog producers has dropped. And while cow-calf production has increased in some areas and individual families like the McDonalds have substantially increased their operations, there has been far less cattle feeding and finishing than many had hoped.
McDonald isn’t sure why that’s so, although the freezing air offers a possible explanation.
“Working all winter when it’s – 40 isn’t every guy’s fantasy,” he said.
“We’re living that dream.”
BSE is another possible explanation. It slackened the sails of many cattle operations and mixed farms, eating up a lot of investment equity.
Operations like the McDonalds survived, and this year, after expanding their operation away from growing export grain over the past 11 years, they find themselves in an odd position: their 600 acres of barley, which went malt, seems almost too good to feed to the cattle.
“We’re looking for cheaper stuff to put through them,” McDonald said with a laugh.
