CHARLOTTETOWN, P.E.I. – The nation-wide drought has thrown Canada’s cattle industry off its normal cycle.
Instead of retaining cows and rebuilding the herd, as industry analysts had expected to start in 2001, cattle producers likely will be selling off more than usual this year and over the winter because of the lack of feed.
“We are delaying any movement to the next phase of expansion that we would expect to be in,” Anne Dunford, a market analyst with the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, told the summer CCA meeting Aug. 16. “We’re on hold right now.”
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She said the traditional beef cycle likely will not start until 2002, assuming the effects of the drought have worked their way through the system by then and rain comes.
“We were expecting it to be happening by now but there is no evidence of it,” she said. “It isn’t happening.”
For producers at the meeting, it was no surprise.
Greg Conn from Innisfail, Alta., chair of the Alberta Cattle Commission, said his own area is producing enough feed because it is just outside the drought zone. “I think we’ll be all right.”
But just a few kilometres away, farmers are buying expensive feed, looking at parched pastures and wondering whether to hang onto the herd or start to sell.
The corridors of the Charlottetown hotel where the CCA meeting was held were filled with tales of farmers from Prince Edward Island to British Columbia facing uncertainty about whether they should run up the expense of buying feed or start culling the herd.
There was no talk of herd expansion.
“Producers here are feeding their winter feed already and I’ve never seen that before,” Prince Edward Island agriculture minister Mitch Murphy said in an interview.
Later, CCA president and British Columbia rancher John Morrison said the nation-wide wave of heat and dry weather will have several effects.
“In view of the drought, you’ll see producers selling their calves earlier, culling their cows and wondering whether even more drastic action is needed,” he said. “It will definitely delay expansion of the cow-calf herd.”
And for those who decide to winter their herds, it will mean significantly higher feed costs.
“That certainly will cut into the bottom line of producers,” he said. “Higher feed costs mean less profit.”
