HALIFAX – Even the Alberta cowboys laughed.
On the screen in front of them was a Delta Hotels Atlantic advertisement about the corporate decision to promote Atlantic beef on its menu.
Two cartoon cows were in a field, one with a Stetson and cowboy boots grazing and one with a yellow Atlantic sou’wester rain hat and yellow rain boots standing beside him.
“Moooove over Alberta,” it read. “The pasture just got a whole lot more interesting.”
Dean Baglole, a Freetown, P.E.I., cattle producer and chair of the region’s only beef packing plant, was telling the summer semi-annual meeting of the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association Aug. 16 how he and 209 other producers have been trying to create local packing capacity.
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“We’re a very small player in this game,” he deadpanned as delegates laughed. “We are not going to push Alberta beef out of the market.”
Indeed, when the Atlantic Beef Products plant in Borden, P.E.I., was at its peak in spring 2007, it processed 550 cattle each week and filled just 15 percent of the market on the island, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
Now, the plant has cut back to 300 head per week and is fighting for its life.
Since it was born in late 2004 with high hopes that local, well-identified product would sell in the aftermath of the BSE crisis, the plant that is 90 percent farmer owned has lost $9 million.
Baglole said the next few weeks will make or break the plant, the only federally inspected plant east of Montreal.
“I would say we will know within 45 days if we have a future. I believe we do,” he said. “As farmers, we do not want to be in a position where we cannot pay our bills and leave others holding the bag. But if we go down, I would say 50 percent of the Atlantic cattle industry will go down too.”
If the plant closes, the closest practical slaughter plant for cattle from the three provinces will be in central Ontario.
“It just doesn’t pay to ship your cattle that far,” he said. The plant was created after Maple Leaf bought and closed the last Maritime packing plant in Moncton, N.B., in 2003.
Atlantic Beef Producers’ Co-operative Ltd., with loans from the P.E.I. government, owns 90 percent of the plant, which is not a co-op. The grocery chain Co-op Atlantic owns 10 percent.
The plant, which at its peak employed 90 people in the small town of Borden and gave the region’s producers a viable local market, offers consumers some of the most sophisticated traceability information in the country. A bar code on each product identifies the farm of origin. It clearly is labelled local product.
“Each steak can be traced back to the farm and the animal it came from,” Baglole said. “We were the first plant to be able to do that.”
