The first calves are being born on purebred operations across the Prairies as a new cycle begins in the cattle business.
I saw a few of these babies last week, their hair still crusty in places not yet reached by a mother’s tongue, and their soft hoofs barely marked by early forays across frozen ground.
The start of a new calf crop and a new year would ordinarily be times for cattle producer optimism, but the opposite is true in 2004.
This year there is an element of worry as producers watch the newborns take their first steps and ensure they have those all-important first meals.
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The calves born this winter and spring, no matter how healthy and well bred, may end up as costs rather than profits to their owners.
The Dec. 23 discovery of a case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy in the United States has thrown the North American cattle industry into fresh turmoil.
For Canadian producers, it represents a new plunge in fortunes that were showing hopeful signs of recovery after the BSE discovery here in May 2003.
There’s little doubt that every Canadian cattle producer is hoping against hope that the animal in question did not come from a Canadian herd, for the sake of optics as much as anything else. At time of this writing, the origin of the infected cow has not been officially confirmed, although it appears likely that a Canadian connection will be established.
Certainly the swift finger pointing from United States cattle producers and industry officials made it clear where they would prefer to lay the blame.
As I recall, a few fingers were pointed south after the Canadian discovery of BSE, although they were withdrawn once sound science was applied.
Yet sadly lacking in American producer comments and in mainstream media coverage so far is recognition that the Canadian and American cattle industries are so integrated that the origin of the animal and the fixing of blame are far less important than control measures and the maintenance of consumer confidence across North America.
One of our readers has the last word on the latter subject for this week: “The reality is that the U.S.A. and Canada border each other so closely that our cattle run side by side with nothing to separate them but a fence in some places,” wrote M. Woodward for the Producer’s BSE talkback section at www.producer.com.
“Therefore, instead of closing borders and bad mouthing each other, we should try to work together to solve the problem.”
