BSE damage
Just who is being affected the most by BSE in Canada, cattle producers or other “ruminant” livestock producers?
We raise sheep here in southwestern Saskatchewan and primarily sell feeder lambs in the fall direct to the lamb feedlots.
Sometimes they are fed in Canada and shipped to slaughter in the U.S. and other times they are exported as feeder lambs.
As of Sept. 29, the selling price in Billings, Montana, for 85-pound average feeder lambs was $124 in equivalent Canadian dollars, while the current market price at auction last week barely made the $60 average here in Western Canada.
Read Also
Agriculture needs to prepare for government spending cuts
As government makes necessary cuts to spending, what can be reduced or restructured in the budgets for agriculture?
Who is hurting the most because of the closed border?
Calf prices aren’t 50 percent of what they were last fall and neither are the yearlings currently being marketed.
People talk about shutting down all foreign beef imports into Canada to improve beef prices. No one in Ottawa would dare suggest limiting imports of New Zealand or Australian prime lamb into this country to improve lamb prices.
I am getting really tired of hearing how tough it is on cattlemen and how we should support them. Try being a sheepman during all of this BSE B.S.
– Dwane Morvik,
Eastend, Sask.
Back to roots
It was a pleasure to read about the certified organic elevator in Ernfold, Sask.
Joe and Edna Perry, my grandparents, farmed just east of Ernfold and had a house “in town” as well. I was born in Herbert and have lived in B.C. most of my life.
However, we lived on the farm for a while when I was about four. My earliest memories are of the old elevator, the train whistles and grain in the back of Grandpa Joe’s pickup. I actually got to do some swathing when I visited the farm as a teenager.
I had a five-acre farm in the Fraser Valley for 17 years. I raised free range pork, beef and poultry. I am now involved in Glen Valley Organic Farm Co-op in the Fraser Valley.
I am happy to hear that there is a strong organic presence where I consider to be my roots.
– Lynn Perrin,
Abbotsford, B.C.
Just dust
I see here in Alberta we have a lot of drilling for natural gas and oil, also laying of pipelines, large 32 wheeler trucks going by making noise, dust seven days a week.
Because of lack of roads, most of the traffic is funneled past our farm. Governments see this as a pleasure and are increasing the property taxes.
It seems to me that governments and oil and gas companies see farmers as nothing more than dirt and treat us as such.
Schoolchildren standing along the roadside waiting for school buses are left in the dust by speeding trucks, while in town no one is out on sidewalk and cops are sitting there enforcing 30 km-h speed limits. Think about it.
I am fed up with this …. I will take a pie in the face anytime in exchange for this … handed to us by governments and oil and gas companies, and by the way it is not dusty where the 30 km speed limit is.
– John Pokorney,
Tilley, Alta.
