Nice to see McDonalds supporting Canadian beef, A&W still hammering away.

[littledoggie]

My response was directed at ProFarmer in regards to where his hormone free premium might be.

[grassfarmer]

Profarmer - do you sell fat cattle, feeder cattle or beef? The people paying the premiums are the consumers and they only buy beef. If you aren't selling the beef don't expect the premium.

The high priced markets of the EU are yesterday's news. Expect to see the first Irish beef arriving soon - we are the high price beef market in the world until cattle inventories change.

[DGoodrich]

Profarmer, what makes Alberta or Canadian beef the best beef in the world?

[Happytrails]

GF and DG you'd best belly on up to A&W to test your ideas. If Canadian beef isn't the best then who's is??

[grassfarmer]

HT, Not sure which ideas you think I need A&W to test for me? I've been selling hormone free, grass-fed beef direct to discerning customers for the last 12 years and know how to capture the premium they are prepared to pay for it.

I just find these claims of "the best beef in the world" hollow, arrogant and lead to complacency. I've had excellent beef in Alberta, but I've also had cow beef from Botswana that would easily be ahead of 95% of the beef I've tasted in Canada. There is good and bad just about everywhere and to claim otherwise is foolish.

What about Argentina that had a reputation for exporting high quality beef before Alberta was a province? or Scotland that was exporting the same reputation 200 years prior? I know both of these nations claim to have the "best beef in the world" too. I've been around long enough not to buy the rhetoric.

Here is a thought though: if Canadian is the best beef in the world why isn't it labelled as such and priced as such in our leading export market the US? rather it's shoved in the back door hoping no-one notices it wasn't "born in the USA" ?

[Happytrails]

GF there is no doubt excellent beef in many countries. I do think that our average quality is the world's best but I suppose that is debatable. A word of warning tho, don't go to Argentina expecting outstanding beef.

I don't hate aussies or aussie beef. I do take issue with A&W promoting aussie beef as superior to our's.

[grassfarmer]

You could certainly debate whether we have the highest average beef quality in the world. You are not going to convince me though as I disqualify both Canada and the US commodity beef automatically on the grounds that it is all loaded with hormone implants and then there is the little Zilmax/Ractopamine issue. When 160 countries in the world wouldn't import your beef because it contained these products how could you seriously be a contender for the worlds best?

[smcgrath76]

For the most part I actually tend to agree with GF (Did I just say that - LOL). I think we could change that pretty quickly based on the size of our industry, but it is pretty hard to argue we are the world's best when most of us operate in a disjointed market system with limited consumer signals and very few seedstock providers are even ultrasounding sale bulls for carcass quality. Very few feedlots are scanning to sort feeders into outcome groups. We don't even have a large scale research and development program in comparison with our competition.
I am not sure what we are doing extra special to produce this "world's best" label. Basically the way our industry works is to kill extra cattle and sort them after the fact to fill orders. Best is subjective to the buyer, but we don't even do a very good job of pre-sorting live cattle to outcome. How many extra days are some cattle fed to hit a grade? Or how many cattle are fed that will never hit a desired end target. I think we do as good a job as anyone, but I sure couldn't claim we do the best. Perhaps the greatest thing we do compared to a lot of beef producing countries is to have winter so we don't have Bos Indicus as a player in our industry and we solve a lot of health issues.
Not to be negative, I think based on our size, if we were to get serious we could do a lot of good things in a hurry, but $2.50 calves are not going to provide that impetus any time soon.