Plan B

[drill7]

Suppose we do go to "Plan B" and get rid of all our cows. Then what?

[jensend]

Feed prices drop, machinery sales fall way off, Brooks goes back to being a small prairie town and Saskatchewan reverts to a strictly grain economy and a bunch of old timers say they knew SK wasn't cattle country. Balance sheets would suffer as land values drop. A massive cull is way more damaging than Melenchuk or Serby can imagine. If people want out of cattle do it. But let it be attrition rather than a short-term massive exodus. There is no good way of turning back and we had better fix the situation without killing a good part of the W. Canadian economy.

[charliep]

From the crop side, the plan "B" you talk about scares the tar out of me. It is not only a matter of reduced feed grain consumption (which means more feed barley exports and entering into the CWB monopoly quagmire) but also bringing a lot more land into cropping that is currently being used as pasture/forage. This means finding new markets for crops in a very competitive world. It also has implications for sustainability and the environment as we reverse the trend to using land that is best suited for perenial crops/livestock back to cultivation/annual crops.

[Smithy]

Thanks for bringing those points up Charlie. Plan B scares the hell out of me too.
As well as the huge issue of what to do with all that feed and pasture land I feel that the public perception of us as an industry would suffer. People would be horrified by a group that would make an economic and political decision to waste a food source with protein hungry children all over the world. I think we would lose a lot of public support which is nice to have right now.

[jensend]

The science has been done (much to the chagrin of Bill Leiss who can say this was bound to happen but beyond that he has nothing for us). Our provincial governments should be doing what AB is doing plus embarassing the feds into doing something significant. The destruction of 40% of a good cowherd would be stupid in so many ways and would solve nothing in either the short or long terms. To solve the problem of the backlog in this manner has ramifications that reach so much further than realized by the people proposing it. Clay Serby is not a heavy thinker so don't accept his musings with anything other than amusement.

[drill7]

What about off farm jobs? Im to old to start a new career, to young(and broke) to retire, to dumb to retrain. I sure don't want to work at Wal Mart or McDonalds.

[cakadu]

Plan B scares me for not only the points that Charlie brings up, but also what the ramifications of a huge surplus of meat are going to be. I agree, with all the hungry that there are in this country and even closer to home here in Alberta, we need to be thinking about what to do with all of that meat.

We'll need to see some leadership in terms of talking with food banks and those agencies that deal with the less fortunate in order to ensure that as little as possible goes to waste. I don't think that global solutions exist, but maybe I'm being too short sighted. My concern is for the some 12,000 kids here in Alberta that don't have enough to eat and for those across the country as well.

What would you see as solutions to making the best of a bad situation?