STRATHMORE, Alta. – Mandatory age verification of cattle may be one way to keep the beef industry sustainable, says the Alberta agriculture minister.
George Groeneveld favours verifying birth dates in hopes that it would open markets in Asia and the United States, but said he also realizes there is considerable producer resistance to a mandatory program.
“They don’t like the word mandatory so we have charged the beef people to come up with a solution to bring the numbers up,” Groeneveld said.
“It has come to the time where we get as blunt as we can be. Keeping this beef industry sustainable is a market signal. We have to pound that message home to them that the time has come …. What we have been doing isn’t working so where to from here?”
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The number of registrations that producers have submitted to the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency is down considerably from 2006, mostly because producers saw no financial returns.
However, conversations with Japanese officials during a recent Asian tour convinced Groeneveld of the importance of birth dates.
He said meat buyers want beef from cattle proven to be younger than 21 months, and registering birth dates in Canada is one way to ensure cattle are eligible for that market.
“We have to have as many age verified cattle as we can,” he said.
At the same time Canada is hoping to convince Japan to accept beef from cattle younger than 30 months because that would broaden the number of eligible animals.
He also asked the Japanese if they wanted 100 percent BSE testing.
“They implied if we were going to test we should have done it at Day 1 when Japan decided to test its own animals,” he said.
However, Japan is moving away from testing its own youthful animals because BSE does not exhibit itself at such a young age, he added.
Groeneveld said the government has talked about possibly paying producers to age verify, even though it would prefer not to go that route.
The issue has been raised at Alberta Beef Producers (ABP) zone meetings and organization chair Erik Butters said producers aren’t interested in a mandatory program even if they were paid to do it.
They argue that it’s a marketing program, while mandatory animal identification is for food safety and public health purposes in case a disease occurs, he added. There is also concern that operations with few or no records might falsify birth dates.
“We are for age verification but we have fallen short of mandatory because if we get bogus information called out on audit, it discredits the whole system internationally.”
Producers complain cattle have been downgraded even when they had verified birth dates because bone ossification evidence indicated they were older. This is based on cartilage changing to bone and adult teeth emerging as animals mature.
“I have seen a situation where I have had cattle toothed by ourselves and the auction market and a grader calls them ossified bone. That trumps dentition and age verification,” said feedlot owner Ed Thiessen of Strathmore.
“With age verification there is no scientific way other than ossification or toothing to distinguish whether it is accurate or not. Other than that it is just somebody’s word.”
ABP estimates $8.1 million in revenue has been lost nationally since age verification began because youthful cattle were downgraded to mature when they failed the dentition test.
