The Alberta government is adding $37 million more to its BSE recovery plan in the wake of a U.S. court decision that keeps the ban on Canadian cattle.
Alberta agriculture minister Doug Horner said the industry needs to increase Canada’s slaughter capabilities, thus limiting Canada’s dependence on U.S.-based slaughter plants. Producers also need help to deal with the continued ban and to find new customers for Canadian beef.
“I don’t think there are plans where dollars for producers are going to run out,” he said.
Read Also
Going beyond “Resistant” on crop seed labels
Variety resistance is getting more specific on crop disease pathogens, but that information must be conveyed in a way that actually helps producers make rotation decisions.
However, he added that Alberta has no plans to build packing plants even though there are more than 30 proposals on the table.
Dennis Laycraft of the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association agreed with Horner and said any new plants should be run by private industry. He added that help is needed to make sure the beef has a market.
“We want to make sure as we move forward in developing processing capacity that we sustain that,” said Laycraft. At this point Canada is capable of killing 86,000 animals per week and should be at 90,000 by year end.
“We need to have strong marketing efforts and strong competitive policies in place so Canada will become the more profitable place to process,” he said.
The latest strategy provides $30 million for a beef market development and retention fund to set aside cattle for orderly marketing.
The fed cattle set-aside program will continue until the border reopens, said Lloyd Andruchow, director of the rural services division with Alberta Agriculture.
Andruchow said the federal and provincial agreement was written so the program would continue, without changes, until cattle younger than 30 months can cross the border.
Bids submitted
About 500 producers from the four participating provinces, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec and Ontario, are registered to participate in the process in which cattle producers submit a bid on how much it will cost them to hold their fed cattle off the market for a set period of time.
In addition, $7 million is dedicated toward finding new uses for specified risk materials, the brains and spinal cord tissue believed to be the parts most at risk of transmitting BSE.
There is a proposal to ban these items from all animal feed. Some new uses could be tied in with biodiesel production or concrete mixes.
Canada generates as much as 65,000 tonnes of the material annually.
