CALMAR, Alta. – Shirley and Wayne Forsberg insist that since a dairy cow diagnosed with BSE in Washington statewas traced to their Alberta farm, their life hasn’t changed.
Like other farmers, they struggle to pay the bills with low-priced beef cattle and must deal with the mundane tasks of income tax deadlines and figuring out government aid programs.
The central Alberta farm couple played an important role in the year-long BSE saga that has gripped farmers across the country.
Wherever they travel, they are recognized as the couple who sat at the front of a packed news conference at the beginning of January and explained how a dairy cow born 61/2 years earlier on their central Alberta farm likely contracted bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
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The evening they got home from the news conference there were 15 messages of support on the answering machine, including one from federal agriculture minister Bob Speller.
Recently, a farmer at an Edmonton hospital waiting room recognized Wayne and sat down to talk. A person asked their daughter if she was related to National Hockey League player Peter Forsberg. When she said no, he asked if she was related to the Forsberg familythat owned the second animal diagnosedwith BSE.
The couple still gets calls from across Canada wishing them well in how they coped with the attention of owning a cow diagnosed with BSE. In a drawer is a pile of cards and letters from Canadians saying the same thing.
“Most of what they said is that they thought we handled the situation well. We got more cards than Christmas time,” said Wayne, who added many of the cards question whether the animal even came from their farm.
“An awful lot of people believe it wasn’t our cow. We would still like not to believe it was our cow,” said Wayne, but the combination of their almost 40 years of detailed herd records and a conclusive DNA test make the belief far-fetched.
When Canadian Food Inspection Agency officials arrived at the Forsberg farm on Boxing Day, they were able to sift through records and rebuild the dairy herd on paper between April 1996, a year before the cow was born, through to April 1998, a year after the animal was born.
The search could then focus on a small group of cattle that may have eaten the same feed, believed to be the most likely source of infection, as the cow diagnosed with BSE.
Not long ago their children were cleaning the dairy barn when they came across some old herd records, including a stack of calendars. They wanted to know if they should throw them out. While Wayne was pondering what to do with them, the children put them in a cardboard box that had once held motor oil and labelled it “Holstein stuff.”
It was that box of old calendars that helped officials rebuild their herd.
Wayne and Shirley say their good records were a result of their poor memory abilities. Whenever a cow was bred, calved, sold ordied, they made sure the ear tag number was recorded on a calendar hanging on the wall of the milking parlour. At the end of the year, Wayne took an official inventory of his cattle to ensure accuracy.
“The calendar was what they really liked,” said Shirley, about the CFIA officials, as she sat at the kitchen table of their Calmar farm home.
The detailed records allowed investigators to avoid another mass slaughter of animals. Eight months earlier, when the first animal was diagnosed with BSE at a farm near Wanham, Alta., more than 2,700 cattle in three provinces had to be slaughtered and tested because investigators didn’t have a clear picture of the animal’s origin.
The memory of that massive slaughter and the intense media search for the owner, Marwyn Peaster, led the Forsberg family toask friends in the National Farmers Union to help organize and co-ordinate a one-time news conference to announce their ownership of the animal.
“We were afraid people would turn on us like they did on Peaster,” said Wayne.
Now five months later, when life has returned to the mundane routine on the farm, the couple is glad their years of record keeping helped contain the fallout from the discovery of a second case of BSE.
“For the sake of the country, I was glad we could help,” said Shirley.
