Something to talk about

[rkaiser]

Okay so --- everything happens for a reason right. We've been floundering around in this industry for how many years now without any clear direction. Cam Ostercamp, Ben Roberts book on the history of the Beef Cattle Industry and, more recently, the NFU study have all identified the problem so we can't say we don't know what we need to change any more. It's all about top heavy control by the "few".

We could take the approach that we continue to kiss the behind of Uncle Sam and his favourite little cousins, but the flatulence is a little too strong for me down there.

The way out for those of us left is definitely to take control of this industry once and for all.

I know that all of you know what 10 billion dollars looks like. It's a lot of mooola. Even if an out of court settlement was half of that, can you imagine how many plants the size of the Cargill plant at High River that would buy. And all of the infrastructure, management and wholesale and or retail as well.

This class action suit of Mr. Palette's is the key folks. It is the golden goose. It is the "chance" for those of us who have been preparing for. Those of us -- as in any of us who are left standing and hoping and praying for an industry that can not only support our families but put a bit of money in our jeans for those things that everyone likes to have in life.

If you have survived this long --- you don't need the 10 billion any more than I do --- but your industry does.

The plant in PEI does --- the plant in Neudorf Saskatchewan does --- and so does the one in Balzac. On top of that we could either buy Cargill's plant or send the good cousins packing south of the line where they belong. There business model stinks as bad as the flatulence I spoke of earlier. As far as the boys who bought Lakeside ---- gee whiz boys --- might have been bad timing. We won't buy them --- just put them under in a good business sense with our new Canadian Producer Owned Packing Industry Model.

No fear folks --- dare to dream..

[Willowcreek]

Hey there rkaiser- I thought someone had or would have shot you by now- LOL...Been so long since I've heard anything about or from you..
Good to see you're still rabble rousing and trying to stir up the troops- I wish you luck - but if history is any indicator of the future with this bunch of ABP/CCA/AMI cult followers you may as well be speaking to the wall...

But I do wish you Canucks would keep that 20-30 Below weather up there- its interfering with my sleeping thru calving.. And means I spend too much time between calf checks on these sites "twittering"....LOL

[kato]

Anybody seen any "ABP/CCA/AMI cult followers" around here? If they're here, they are laying low. LOL

Hey Randy, good to see you back!

I'm not sure how we could divert settlement money directly into a plant, but if it went to producers directly, I bet raising funds wouldn't be nearly the chore it has been in the past. Up to now it's been like asking the homeless to cough up the cash and build houses. How were we supposed to finance a plant when we were all busy re-financing our farms?

Ten billion........ mmmmm.... that's a lot of money. Might even pay last year's fuel bill. :-)

[vagabonddreamer]

hmmm...10 billion...i dont know if i would be prepared to go up against carghill with only 10 billion in my back pocket...but...it certainly would almost clear my wife's christmas visa bill...sigh...vs

[rkaiser]

Okay ---- so we don't use it all on the "plan" lol... Another warlock friend of mine suggested that we use it to buy cars and trucks and that way the feds could save both industries in one fell swoop.

He asked me what a farmer would do if he have a bunch of cashola in his or her pocket? Well I know I do would do every damn thing possible to avoid giving one red cent of it back to the feds in taxes after they gave it to me ---- so I guess I have to say that "I" would spend it. The big boys could get the Canada Gold thing fixed with a plant the size of Ranchers in Calgary. It would sure make our franchise plans for Second to None Meats move faster, and yes Vagabond --- paying for those Christmas presents would be nice and maybe even buying some early ones for next year.

Come on dreamers ---- any more thoughts. All the ABP guys could donate theirs to the office to pay for a bigger boardroom table.....LOL

And even the feds have an out besides the stimulus that it would give the economy.... The Liberals were in power when this whole mess started....LOL

It's the perfect dream come true.

[per]

Dare to dream... hmmmm Maybe we could all get our cows some extra furry coats so we can survive another of these nasty winters. I can go for our own packing house, again. How about a team of lawyers to figure out how to reel in the CFIA and all their roadblocks. Some would go to a few of the forward thinking producer voluntarily funded industry groups.

[Willowcreek]

Kato {Anybody seen any "ABP/CCA/AMI cult followers" around here? If they're here, they are laying low. LOL }

Kato-- well all I've seen on here and many sites are the Canadian Packer backers- that support the Packers with their control of the captive supply and ownership of the feedlots, monopoly slaughter houses, generic worldwide meat and refusing to want to identify their product while riding on the shirttails of the industry the US producer has built thru the years...

[smcgrath76]

I get pretty frustrated when I see the struggle that some of these plants have had. Competition has to be a good thing. Cull cows were 10 cents higher in SK when the pressure was put on NVF.
I worry about producer owned packing initiatives from the perspective that we are probably overbuilt and operating at 70% of current capacity. The only way to make producer owned plants work is to have one of the big two pull out. I doubt with their Canadian presence and new debt load that NB is going anywhere, so that leaves Cargill. Is that a possibility? I don't know, or do NB try to scoop that up as well.
Is there a structure we are missing where capacity can be taken over, rather than built? 10B would help with plants that already exist and with marketing and establishing the cattle supply to really make things work, but I am pretty sure we are not on the radar.

[kato]

Check this out

http://www.manitobacooperator.ca/issues/ISArticle.asp?id=97286&PC=FBC&issue=03122009

Good article. They toss a number of over $100,000 per member of the class. When I looked at that I thought "Wow, that's a lot!", but when I gave it a little more thought, I came to the conclusion that it doesn't even cover what we've lost in the past five years. It is not an exorbitant sum of money. I know for a fact that we've lost more than twenty thousand a year over the past five.

It's not an unreasonable amount.

[perfecho]

Actually Sean, there is. I was waiting to get more details,etc and was trying to find the time to put together a "local initiative", but damn, each day goes by way to quickly.
The Acheson plant, not complete, but probably could be within a year, is most likely now or going to be under AB Infrastructure control shortly for "file storage." (Creditor) Most of the equipment is supposed to be on site in containers and will be most likely sold off soon.
So those with Jack Hayden (Infrastrucure) as their MLA, start rattling. (And others as well.)
This plant is so close....and yet so far away.
To make it work, and not have the big boys push the place out, I was wondering if shares could be sold to the consuming public under the 100 mile diet scenario....(google Community Sustained Agriculture). This would help put pressure on the retailers to carry the 'Local" label and hopefully not have the same result as the Ranchers plant. Possibly later, certain branded beef programs, export programs could "rent" capacity to make thing viable. The timing is right for "local and ethically raised beef". People are getting tired of hearing of contamination throughout north America due to one plant screwing up. Just wait until terrorism finds a way to infiltrate one of these plants that supplies North America......the “concentration” model will change quickly.
50 mil would definitely buy, finish and operate this plant for awhile.....and perhaps not even that much pending capacity and the cost to buy back from the gov......or if we had a gov that truly was committed, they could lease back for $1/yr until things were running.....probably could start operating with some capacity at apporx. 20 mil. Not a lot when 25mil if being spent on "Alberta Rebranding."
Any ideas…….anybody ready to really “make a change?”

[grassfarmer]

Mr Palletts quote from the manitoba cooperator link Kato posted.

"Were it not for the BSE border closures, he said, "we would be pricing and selling (Canadian beef) as an elite product (into the U.S.) right now." As it stands, with cattle producers in a financial bind and aging with fewer sons and daughters stepping in to replace them, "this country's going to potentially lose its ability to produce cattle."

I suggest he read the NFU Livestock Crisis document under "false causes"
I think it is pure nonsense to blame all this stuff on the Government - how about looking in the mirror - did every producer in the country take the appropriate measures to prevent BSE happening on their farms?

Put another way if we were to suffer a hoof and mouth outbreak next week would producers be seeking to sue the Government because they failed to prevent it? What are the biosecurity standards like on most producers farms currently? Exactly - yet the Government would be to blame? What about personal responsibility and this desire not to have Government involved in our businesses? It cuts both ways.

It's great fun to speculate where we might spend this windfall sum but in reality if it were to happen I suspect most producers would @#%$ it away on F-150s as the article suggests before they put it down to build producer packing plant infrastructure.

This is not "free" money either - it is taxpayer money. Is it appropriate to spend this much in the depths of a recession and a fiscal deficit? It seems most writers on here have been against the bailouts of the banking and auto sectors - is it OK if it's coming into our pockets though?

[kato]

The way I see it, yes the government has blame here. They knew the facts when they first started monitoring the imported cattle way back when. At a minimum those cattle should have been kept from the rendering plants, but they were not. This is negligent. They chose to just sit back and hope nothing would happen when it would have been so much easier to just deal with it at the time.

They knew the facts, and still sat on them rather than implement the total feed ban like we have now. I would think this was due to pressure from certain 'corporate' interests. No one wanted to give up profits back then on the thought that there might be a problem in the future. They'd rather wait until there was a problem, and let us pay the price if need be.

I don't think a farmer who went out and bought milk replacer back then should be expected to know what cattle were involved in the production of the product. I would say it's safe to assume that most people, myself included had no idea that milk replacer ever came close to contacting anything that had come from a rendering plant in the first place.

We were operating on the wrongful assumption that we had a safe supply for our cattle feed. We were mislead.

As for the taxpayer's money, quite frankly I don't feel guilty about cattle producers accessing a bit of it. Our government is bending over backwards right now to find ways to stimulate the economy. History has shown many times over that every time a dollar goes into a farmer's pocket, it turns right around and goes right back into the economy. We are very good at stimulating our economy with our spending, and have always been so.

There are five years now that we can all honestly say we have not been contributing much to the economy. I don't know about everyone else here, but on our place, since BSE, we only buy what we absolutely need, and don't buy anything just because we 'want' it. Bare minimum on everything.

The other thing is that the government is more than happy to shovel money at other sectors of the economy that are suffering due to the economic downturn. In fact they are looking for things to spend stimulus money on.

It seems to be the right thing to support other sectors who are having trouble due to no fault of their own or the government. So why is settling with cattle producers not the right thing to do? We're not in bigger trouble than normal due to any downturn of the economy. We're in bigger trouble due to negligence by our own government.

I totally agree that the other problems mentioned in the NFU report are real and need addressing, but the fact remains that things are much much worse than they would have been for us if this BSE thing hadn't happened. It's just another load we can't afford to bear, and it was preventable. If BSE hadn't strapped us so badly, would the strengthening of the big corporations happened in such an accelerated manner? I doubt it. They cashed in on our troubles and that made them even stronger, quicker.

The BSE debacle put us right in the palm of their hands and set us back light years. And the government was right at their sides, enabling them.

[vagabonddreamer]

actually grassfarmer i wonder...i think the problem is that we as polite canadians are FAR to transparent and honest...i KNOW for a fact...that the BSE problem hit the US before it showed up in Canada...there were FAR more cases there and the US government was either complicit in or irgnorant of (yeah right)..allowing the problem to be "literally" burried...we on the other hand bent over backwards to show the world our laundry which shifted the focus FULLY on us...and away from a far greater problem to the South...

not to say we should have covered up as did the US...but...i dont think it is a TOTALLY producer born problem...

rkaiser...how about some new RESISTOLS all round?? vs

[farmers_son]

Rkaiser...

Although I am uncomfortable about using the courts to address industry problems (really not the cowboy way) the fact remains that the class action suit opens the door for the federal government to inject a significant amount of much needed cash into the cattle industry without triggering any countervail challenges.

Bottomline, is the present government behind cattle producers or not? If the cattle industry was centered in Ontario and Quebec instead of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Manitoba I think we would be seeing a different response from Government without using the courts.

There was a cost to the cattle industry, that is clear. In hindsignt government clearly was negligent. I am not sure if that is proven in court if it opens the door for further trade challenges from the U.S. and what if any are the trade implications of this class action suit.

Still I wish there was another way to get governemnt to take action...We may rue the day the cattle industry took governemnt to court. Years from now it may come back to bite us in the behinds. Not a great way to solve problems but if the suit is successful the cattle industry will be glad to spend the money. Just wish we did not have to do it.

[rkaiser]

"Because of our humanitarian ideals and desire to be helpers in our emerging world, be careful not to fall into old patterns of helping others fulfill their needs rather than taking care of our own."

Time to take care of our own folks. We could be afraid of American trade action even though legal payouts are not countervail-able (if that is a word LOL) or position ourselves with this money to not worry about the Americans. Whether it be the boys who get the big cheques putting the final piece in the Canada Gold puzzle, or Canadian Celtic signing that natural beef patty deal with them there fellows in Dubai, we have the knowledge and capability to use this money wisely as well as buy them new Resitols and "Toyota" (LOL) pickups.