GOULDTOWN, Sask. – Nature painted the perfect picture of the West one day as Neil Jahnke escorted a group of Japanese beef buyers on horseback to see the heat waves rise over the hills and coulees on his family’s ranch in southwestern Saskatchewan.
The guests were awed by the beautiful peacefulness, prompting the Japanese tour leader from the Canada Beef Export
Federation to turn to him and say, “sell
more beef from this hill, Jahnke-san.”
The gravely voiced cowboy from Gouldtown with an ever present cigarette devoted more than 25 years to selling beef to the world and now sits back raising cattle, Quarter horses and getting to know his neighbours again.
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During his time spent in cattle politics he was among those who guided Canada from being a beef importer to the third largest
exporter in the world.
There were disputes over marketing plans, learning to get along with a changing parade of agriculture ministers and the unpredictable spectre of BSE nearly undoing a quarter century of work.
Always a stoic, he looks back with no regrets.
“There was always something. Some years are more exciting than others,” he said.
No one knows when the first Jahnke arrived in Canada, but once his grandfather came out west, they were in the ranching business.
The ranch was established in 1879 by two surveyors from the railroad who decided to leave the line and head northeast from Swift Current to found the ranch and raise cattle.
It changed hands many times until his grandfather bought it in 1930.
Neil took over in 1970 working with his wife Marilyn and son, Shane.
The family makes its living from cattle and grazes as much as possible. Long-term annual rainfall averages 180 millimetres per year. There was hardly any rain during the 1980s and he was forced to move cattle off the ranch to greener pastures and sent some to feedlots.
The ranch is in the Chinook belt so winters can be mild and open, which works well for year round grazing but can also be difficult when the 1,000 cows depend on snow for water, forcing them to move to nearby Lake Diefenbaker.
Those tough years taught the family to manage pastures carefully and keep a three year supply of feed on hand.
“For the last 15 years we have had virtually no snow,” he said.
Depending on the markets, they may background about half the calves and finish them at the ranch. Calves are pre-immunized and age verified. While no one was interested in the extra efforts early on, he calculates it brings them a five cent a pound premium now.
He attended his first Saskatchewan Stock Growers Association meeting in 1976 because he had some concerns over federal positions on supply management for the beef industry. As a free enterpriser, Jahnke spoke up at that first meeting and found himself on the board of directors. He eventually became president and was hoisted from there onto the national stage.
He was especially interested in the work done with the Beef Information Centre and joined its board in 1980 and became its chair for three years starting in 1993.
The next big step occurred when he joined the fledging Canada Beef Export Federation serving as CBEF chair from 1992-94. That job opened his eyes to the challenges and opportunities of selling beef in Asia.
Canada had been struggling to sell beef to the Japanese but met with little success until CBEF was charged with promoting Canadian beef in the Asian and Mexican markets.
“Canada has got the best genetics and knowledgeable producers, whether it is grain, cattle or sheep, but we have been damned poor marketers,” Jahnke said.
Before CBEF, he believed there were too many government receptions and not enough conversations with the meat buyers. So the buyers were invited to Canada to see the ranches, meet the producers and feel the fresh air and quiet.
The personal touch opened the doors.
“With the Japanese, if they don’t like you, they won’t be back,” he said.
He never imagined himself in downtown Tokyo. His first time there he was exposed to high food and drink prices where coffee was $7 a cup. For his first lunch, he and two companions ordered two sandwiches and three shots of Scotch.
“I picked up the tab and it was $64. Welcome to Tokyo,” he said.
Over the years he lost count of the number of Asian trips he took, but they paid off in the number of sales made, the tonnage shipped and dollars earned.
CBEF members knew it would take patience to get into that market. Once criticized at a beef producers meeting that they were not doing enough in Asia but just fobbing off offal products like tongue, liver, hearts and kidney, Jahnke had a quick retort.
” I said, ‘sonny, when you take a tongue that costs 85 cents (a lb.) and you make four cuts with a knife, put it in a box and sell it for $22, that’s offal. That’s awful damned good,’ ” he said.
The tonnage may not have been high, but the value was there for products that in
North America would be used for pet food or fertilizer.
His next national position was on the board of the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, becoming its president in 2002.
The following year, the unthinkable happened and all the work from two decades was nearly eradicated when BSE was discovered in Canada and borders immediately closed.
Looking back, he feels the BSE episode was blown out of proportion partly because of the way it was handled when the disease reached epidemic proportions in England a few years before.
“Really the British mishandled theirs.”
The British public was told beef was safe and then people became ill and world opinion changed.
“The biggest thing with BSE was the fear of the unknown,” he said.
Luckily, Canadians did not overreact and beef sales remained strong. Then the United States reopened to boneless beef by September 2003.
“Thank God for the Americans for opening the border so soon to boneless beef.”
As a rancher, he had no sense of his own future in those early weeks.
“In May and June of 2003, I just wondered how I was going to dig a big enough hole to kill them (the cows) because no country had ever exported again after they had a case of BSE,” he said.
During his term of office he probably spent 200 days away from home. He made countless visits to Ottawa, Washington and at the CCA board table to work through the government process of resuming trade.
“If we had to do it over again, maybe I would have been a little nastier with government,” he said.
While trade with the U.S. is strong, returning to Japan at the same level as 2002 means regaining confidence and changing Japanese attitudes after their own food safety scares following Japan’s cases of BSE.
One thing that helped Canada regain its position was having a national identification program in place. It speeded up traceback of all the cases found here.
“It would have been a lot tougher without the tagging system. There was a lot of criticism from a lot of people because we pushed hard to get that,” Jahnke said.
His hope is for government not to interfere in the system because it could end up being too costly. Now retired from beef politics, denying he was ever a politician, he can sit back as the elder statesman and observe.
His efforts have not gone unnoticed.
In 1994, he received an honourary life membership in the Agricultural Institute of Canada, followed by the Saskatchewan Order of Merit in 2002 and last year was named stockman of the year at the Denver Western National Stock Show.
In 2005, he was inducted into the Saskatchewan Agriculture Hall of Fame.
