Compensation for BSE?

[cowman]

It looks like our fat trade is going to be okay. We'll be able to probably handle the backlog until they open up the border for young stuff. Our real problem is the 30 month stuff.
What would happen if our government made it mandatory to test anything over 30 months? Then certificate in hand we could tell other countries you either take this totally clean meat or we no longer take any of yours and to hell with the international agreements. Raise the whole thing to a higher level instead of trying to find the lowest common denominator. Europes done this for years! While we were at it we could do a test for E.coli and Johnes disease. Why we would have the best meat in the world and we could PROVE it! Japan has already clearly stated that is what we need to do. And without all the imports we might just be able to eat up a lot more of our cow beef here at home? No more garbage from South America or Australia? The deli owners in Toronto might be a bit upset tho! No more cheap kangaroo and rat meat!
Now who pays for any cattle that fail the test? I suppose you do but how is that any different than now? If you haul a cow into a packing plant and she is condemned you don't get paid.
I wonder how they did it in Europe? Did the farmers get paid for the cows that had to be incinerated because of BSE? How about foot and mouth? Did they get compensation? I think there was compensation of some sort for cattle that had bangs or TB in Canada so maybe for BSE too?
If it became totally necessary to kill all our 30 month old stuff here we might just get some new packing/fabrication plants up and running and that has to be a good thing?
What happens when our next BSE cow shows up? And she probably will! If we're testing everything it won't be a problem but if we're only doing it hit and miss it will make this little nightmare we're going through now, look like a sweet dream!

[grassfarmer]

Yes Cowman we were compensated in the UK for both BSE and hoof and mouth. Since March 1996 every over thirty month animal in the UK has been incinerated and compensation paid. In the best tradition of clueless politicians the initial compensation was well above the prevailing prices for cull stock but after a few years the tax payer started to complain and the prices were dropped well back. They plan to start selling over 30 month cattle into the food market again on 1st Jan. next year and the farmers are a bit worried how this will go.

I sold my cows with calf at side in the fall of 2000 and got one of the best prices around for them that year - averaged $1650. Moved to Canada and was amazed when hoof and mouth broke out in Feb 2001 - base compensation was $2400 per cow, whether she had a calf or not and pedigree stock were valued a lot higher. I suppose this is one "advantage" of having a Government that knows nothing about agriculture. In both cases however people that had the diseases and were compensated did a lot better than the guys that never had the disease and still had to live with the restrictions.

[carebear300]

Funny thing in this country this federal government appears to know nothing about agriculture as well. The only thing is that the one thing they do know is that they aren't going to spend one more penny than they can help on agriculture. Like I said before in this country the government does not have the wherewithal to step up to the plate and actually help farmers it is not important enough to them. I guess it is up to us as farmers to convince the rest of our society that we are worth saving

[cowman]

grassfarmer: When they start selling the over 30 month stuff next year will it have a test? It seems to me that is the way to go if the test price is reasonable. I mean why spend $750? to incinerate when a $50 dollar test clears up the whole mess? Will the people even eat the meat without a test?

[grassfarmer]

cowman: I don't think they are even thinking about testing every animal - just the percentage that they test normally in Europe. To be honest I think people will eat the meat just fine,BSE is old news in the UK and anyone that was frightened of it stopped eating beef a long time ago. Truth is the wholesalers have been buying meat from any corner of the world as long as it was cheap so the cow beef in the UK now will be comparitively safe.

There was an interesting court case recently where a company was discovered to be buying waste meat product(scraps)from other food factories and
"remanufacturing" before selling it onto a wholesaler. Their factory had raw sewage on the floor and a rat problem. Strange that the wholesalers who bought this and sold it on to leading supermarkets and old folks homes didn't do a proper audit of their suppliers. The same wholesalers and supermarkets insist that the farms they buy beef from are audited and inspected.
Seems if it is cheap enough they don't care - how lucky we are that many people were not killed by their greed.

[cowman]

Well I guess it is comforting to know that at least we are not the only ones that that feed our citizens road kill and other assorted trash (Alymers). Where were the inspectors? I just assumed Europe had a little higher standards than here. And with the BSE disaster in Europe why wouldn't they test every animal? Is Japan the only country in the world that is actually concerned about what they feed their people?

[cowman]

To clarify a couple of things ......... compensation is based on whether the cow is a purebred or commercial and then two private industry people selected by the animal owner and one government official negoitate the compensation. The maximum value for purebreds is $2500 per head, commerical cattle are basically based on the value of bred females at the time in auctionmarts. Many owners who have been through this are very disgruntled at the returns, the animals are never evalauted at the level which they assess them.

Meat inspection at the federal level here in Canada is stringent and probably the one of the highest standards in the world ......... CFIA is constantly being taken to task for being too stringent ...... the basic problem is the provincially inspected facitlies, the cost of being up to date in technology, equipment and standards for these smaller facilities is too much in most cases, however, politically it is totally unpalatable to the local community and politicans to close them out by demanding/legislating the upgrades. For example look at the resistance to CCIA from the grassroots sector!!

There are indications that we be testing 60,000 cows per year in the future (previous seven years of tesing did 11,000 head) this I have heard is the maximum present facilities can test (true or not I do not know) .........so now what are the odds of finding more positive animals ........ what happens with the discovery of the next animal ......... extended border closures and with the next animal, further closure or complete as it was this summer??? Harvard determined that Canada was at minimal risk, even lower than the US prior to May 20th ....... I would like to hear what the same group now says!!!! And you can bet your bottom dollar, the Americans have done this!!! We have held ourselves up to the world in declaring the discovery of BSE ......... they reacted as we would have and we do not like it, but in truth and hindsight, we did an incomplete risk assessment, we accepted the fact that we were minimal risk and left it at that, but we should have assessed the impact in the eventuality of discovering BSE ....... we may well of moved in advance to minimize the impact of such a discovery through various actions! But we did not ....... so here we are.

[cowman]

I truly believe if and when they find another BSE cow we are toast unless we test everything! The Canadian consumer bought into the isolated one cow theory bigtime and pulled our bacon out of the fire...maybe not so when the next cow turns up? I mean then the one cow fluke sort of goes out the door? The government is going to do a whole lot more testing and I suspect more will turn up. What then? How many old cows that got shot and hauled to the coyotes might have come up positive for BSE? No more of that they say! Now they want to know of every death on the farm. Shoot, shovel and shut up may not be an option soon! With the CCIA in place you may have to account for every animal on your farm...with the micro chips coming down the road they might just know where she's buried!
I suspect our government will dither about and do nothing until the ship goes down! And our cattle associations will do little because the big packers and Americans don't want the trouble and expense of having safe food. I think valuechain has it right...we need our own packing house that tests everything and states very clearly that this product is certified BSE free! Then let Cargill and IBP try to sell their unsafe product.
I don't know about you but I'm not real keen on eating a steak that's going to give me some kind of disease and kill me!

[kato]

I totally agree!

[ValueChainFX]

So far equipment costs for this lab start at about $50,000.00 American and go up (depending on automation) The catch is we need a level three lab to do this in. We have a facility that may be able to make some conversions but I'm an optimist and have been told, they will set the lab up, train our people, stay on to add additional education activities and partner with us to expand testing, better our trace forward / trace back system.

Now these people have also said we need to deal with the government to get lab approvals (from this I can already see the red tape) I would think in our present position the government would be right here working with us to make this happen. But to my surprise (not really) they believe we need more studies and feasibility!!!

As far as cost goes, we have discussed this a little before. Inspection service is provided at no cost (it does cost in other ways, office space, overtime for inspectors, etc. etc. etc.)We believe a system can be set up to spread the cost, and interesting enough when you look at costs in a processing plant owned by producers you look at costs and charges in a different light. Do you think we may be able to pass some of the costs on, what is the product acceptability in the market with certified testing?

Whatever Compensation for BSE, does anyone really think the present structure for compensation is really fair?