Question for Kato

[15444]

Does the Rancher's Choice Co-op have anything in place as far as insurance on slaughter animals is concerned? I know that if you pay an extra $6 per head to the Gencor plant in Kitchener, your automatically given $200 if the carcass is condemned by CFIA.

The CHA hiked their fees without any breeder consultations, so rather than give them $100, I think I'll put it into a Rancher's Choice membership.

[parsley]

Is CHA, Canadian Hereford Association ? If you don't pay the membership can you still register cattle ?

The Canadian Limousin Association is planning on hiking membership based on numbers of cattle enrolled in the Herd Program. The registration fees have been creeping up over the past few years, some very high profile Limo breeders on the Exec., that would really like the peons in the breed to disappear is my guess.

[15444]

Yeah, it's the Hereford Association. Paid the membership fee, although they hiked and changed the structure of that too. The fee that has ticked me off is the whole herd enrollment fee (WHE) to get epd's and weights administered and calculated. They started a few years back with a $3.25 per cow fee, which would replace the $3 per weaning weight reported, and the $1 yearling weight reported. So, it seemed like a good deal as you save 75 cents if you happened to keep everything till yearling, and if you didn’t, you weren’t out too much per head. Now they hiked the fee to $5.00 per cow. Paying the $5.00 doesn’t change the price of anything else like registrations or transfers. And this is being done while breeders go through the worst year yet for prices and the association slowly lowers its services and paperwork through things like online registering and bookkeeping.

It infuriates me because if they are raising the prices because breeder membership is going down, I think they should be cutting some of the staff at the top to save cash. I know cutting staff is the last thing on their mind because of the clique that exists among the staff. I was seriously considering revoking my membership this year, but I’ll stick around and see if I can raise hell over this. It should have went to nationwide membership vote, rather than being decided upon by the Board. Was comparing our fees to that of the Angus Assoc., and there is no reason why ours can’t be as low as theirs. One thing for sure is that I am glad I am not part of the Simmental Assoc., as their fees could choke a horse.

Another fee they added this year was the testing of all walking herd sires for blood type. At $50 bucks a pop, that’s another $150, while the Angus Assoc. only pays $38 for their testing.

Holy cow Emrald! Can’t believe the prices you pay on registering over a year of age!...At that point, the Hereford Assoc. has their fees into the hundreds of dollars. And your membership fees!! Wow!

I too get the feeling that the bigger guys want to get the smaller, insignificant ones out. For those of us trying to get the breed back to where it stood 25 years ago, these fees only make it more enticing to switch to a breed that doesn’t get hammered at the mart.

[kato]

I don't know if they have insurance, but it sure sounds like a good idea. I'll try and find out.

[grassfarmer]

You guys should start breeding Luings! We only charge $35 annual membership $15 to register under a year old, $20 over a year and $5 to record grade ups under a year old.
We don't have the empire builders in offices looking for things to spend our money on - and you don't need all that crap anyway to breed good cattle.
As a wise old breeder in Scotland said "the heritage we have been handed is the cattle not the rules"

[15444]

I agree with you totally grassfarmer. Personally, I would like to see a transition of all of the breed associations records be handled by the Canadian Livestock Records Corp. There is no need for the CHA to have 8 people being paid to sit in the offices. I have no idea who came up with the idea to have a National Market Development Manager for the CHA, but I think it is just another unneeded job.

Each breed association has a person doing the exact same job someone in another breed is doing. I am all for a General Manager for each breed to oversee the development of the breed and its membership, but do we need a separate records supervisor or a separate office manager for each breed? Seems like a huge waste of money, and it is starting to show as the breed associations start to raise their fees.