Benchmarking

[cowman]

Kernel is sure right about the income tax thing! Change that and the whole cattle feeding business would come crashing down.
Now it is all fine and dandy to bash the feedlots but lets not forget the positives. I'm old enough to remember when all the good calves went east a long with the feed barley. "Feedlot Alley" a long with many backgrounding lots through out Alberta provide about the best market in the world for our feeders and feed grains. Hog barns and feedlots employ a lot of people, buy a lot of grain, keep a lot of businesses going.
We can't go back to a simpler way of doing things. The economics just aren't there. Do you think someone like Cor Van Ray is going to go back to feeding 50 steers out in the pasture? He came to this country 50 years ago with the shirt on his back and today he deals in hundreds of thousands of cattle.
Do you really believe young farmers are going to settle for incomes that would make MacDonalds shudder? Why would any young person want a job that promised him $20,000/30,000 yr.? That just doesn't make it anymore!
I have a young Dutch neighbor who has a hog barn. 250 sows, farrow to finish. He rents the barns, buys all his feed, has his manure custom injected. He tells me after all expenses he clears close to $14,000/month. Now he wants to expand to 1000 sows and build a feeder barn farther from civilization. This is what the new agriculture is all about. A good income. The days when young guys will work for peanuts are gone.

[cakadu]

What makes me shudder is that everything comes down to money. Research has shown that as we get bigger, economies of scale actually work in reverse and the LESS efficiently we use our inputs. Therefore, if 230 sows nets $14,000/month, then 5 times as many sows does not necessarily mean 5 times the income stream.

Bigger is not necessarily better. And who says that we can't make a living being smaller? There are more and more people who are willing to pay to have their meat come from production systems other than feedlots. That's why there has been the growth in the natural and organic areas. Funny thing though, 50 years ago this is how it was done and we seemed to get along just fine. Who decided that we needed to go out and feed the whole world? Cowman, even you've said a time or two that we should just worry about feeding our own.

It scares me that here in Alberta what we seem to focus on is the almighty dollar and I'm wondering why. You can't take it with you and he who dies with the most toys and money is still dead.

[cowman]

Now Linda the fact of the matter is we all like to have the toys and the good life! There is nothing noble about being poor! Do you like to own a new car? Have a nice house with all the goodies? Take the vacation south every winter? Of course you do! You would be a complete idiot if you said you would like to drive a clunker, live in a shack, and vacation in Hanna in the winter(and my apologies to Hanna...you have a nice town even though it is out in the sticks).
Money does make the world go around and I would suggest to you if you have it you can afford to do all the noble environmental things. But don't tell people who don't know what they'll eat next week that they should be thinking about the future of the planet. For them the future is today! So you and I in our relatively comfortable positions can afford to take the high road. But it might just be a little different if our kids had empty bellies!

[cakadu]

Truth of the matter is cowman, I drive a car that is now almost 5 years old (according to the model year) and I bought it second hand. My house is almost 80 years old, so it is without all the fancy doodads that modern houses come with. We don't take regular vacations especially down south where it costs too much money thanks to our Canadian peso. I don't have a lot of money, nor do I care to. Money can't buy me what is important to me.

Those same people that you are talking about going hungry every day cannot afford to buy our beef etc., so we are growing it only for those who can afford to buy it.

I'm not saying that we can't have the feedlot alleys of the world, I just want there to be some accountability. How can we say with any certainty that there hasn't been some harm done when we don't know where we started from? To keep saying that there hasn't been anything bad happen so far (how do we know) and that with the new rules any potential problems should be taken care of is shortsighted to say the least.

To have the regulations set by the government and then have the policing of it done by the government is not quite cricket in my books and is more or less akin to the fox guarding the hen house, especially in this province where the only thing that seems to matter is more and more money. What is wrong with taking some precautions upfront instead of throwing money reactively at a crisis? If God forbid something happens in these bigger feedlots, who is going to be responsible or are we going to see a lot of buck-passing? If we start being accountable now, then we won't have problems in the future.

[cowman]

I am not totally unsympathetic to your whole attitude. I would hope there is a happy medium somewhere. Completely unchecked growth can be a problem. I don't think any of us wants things like they are in Holland and parts of the U.K. where the ground water is polluted with nitrates etc.
Hopefully technology can solve some of these problems. And yes Linda, sometimes I advocate the whole idea of stepping back and becoming a more sustainable type of industry.I suppose that is the idealist in me coming out! But the realist, in me, knows that isn't the nature of man!
I believe this old world will last just as long as it was supposed to and not one second longer. But I also believe we are here to tend the garden. These conflicting ideas are hard to reconcile at times.

[ianben]

I have problems with this idea of fixing a right level for natural values.
We have know real idea of what they should be. The nitrates in water issues over here are supposedly based on data where someone made a mistake with the decimal point and the evidence present levels are harmful is suspect. Also are levels rising because of todays methods or ploughing up pastures during world war2.
Changing lifestyles must have greater impact on the enviroment than anything we do as farmers.
Burning fossil fuels, radio activity, sitting in front of a computer screen using a mobile phone, flying, air conditioning but don't think people are going to give any of them up.
Isnt the real problem that there are just too many people.
Isnt antibiotic resistance enevitable or some other natural or unnatural way to get us back into balance.

[countryguy]

Ianben I don't think that the problem is that there are too many people.Instead there are just too many people living too close to each other in the big cities these days.It is very easy for little problems to become epidemics.

I also don't feel that antibiotic resistance is inevitable.We have to start treating antibiotics as a last resort and use them only after all other precautionary methods have failed.I see no reason other than economics that we have to put tens of thousands of animals together in one spot to raise them.If we spread these animals out in smaller numbers on larger parcels of land we wouldn't have near the illnesses we have now therefore decreasing the need for antibiotics.

I see alot of antibiotics being used in both people and animals these days as a preventative measure against sickness.Building natural immunity is a thing of the past.Wouldn't it be easier for us to identify and treat the cause of medical and veterinary problems instead of just treating the symptom of the problems when they occur?

[rodbradshaw]

Cakadu
Cowman is right on the fact that farmers are no longer willing to work hard and live poor. We have been to the bright lights and enjoyed it. That is not to say that we want to **** and pillage the countryside to do it.
Cor Van Ray has been mentioned, take an opportunity to go visit one of his new lots. It probably is more enviromentally friendlly than some lots that are twenty or thirty years old and one tenth the size.
The genie is out of the bottle for large scale CFO's. With the cheap food policy, farmers have been driven to what we have today. Organic or natural production will take a certain portion of the market,but not every one can afford the prices that are presently being charged and if the producers don't receive those prices they will not be in business either.
Rod

[Deb]

I don't think food is cheap because of any cheap food policy. Food is cheap because it is being industrially produced on large farms where the profit margin is tiny, and because of vertical integration, and because the only real farmers are the ones that liked the lifestyle of being on their own farm and running the show themselves and they've been squeezed out by the large corporate farms. There are mega-hog-barn janitors now but I wouldn't call them farmers.

Nowadays, the rural area is evolving into an industrial zone with food processing as the main industry. The farmers that are left, and the corporate-owned land grows the raw material for the factories and little else. The Alberta government just slashed another 40 plus% of the agr. budget and now only have specialists that must cater to the food processing industry.

[cakadu]

Rod, I agree that the genie is out of the bottle and we will never get it back in. I keep wondering where on earth this cheap food policy is written and where it actually exists. Sure the lots of today are likely more environmentally friendly than they were 20 years ago, but does that make them okay? Hopefully everything improves with age and time!

Ianben, I also agree with you that we can't fight nature, nor should we predict how the grand old lady is going to act and/or react - because as you've pointed out, we're sure to be wrong. There is nothing natural about the feedlots down in feedlot alley, which you cannot get a full appreciation for unless you see them. Putting 50,000 animals in a space meant for 1/20 of that is not natura no matter how you try and define it. Deb can probably give you a better idea of lot size because she lives down in that neck of the woods. She certainly gave a pretty good description of the day-to-day goings on down there.

I just wonder if at the end of the day, it will all be worth it.

[cowman]

I sometimes wonder how much food would cost if we didn't raise it the modern way? Are the organic prices a reflection of what it costs? For example the organic eggs are $5.49 doz. while the conventional eggs are $1.89.
Now if we raised cattle and pigs in an "organic" way would our pork chop or steak cost three times as much? would we get $3.24/lb. for a fat steer instead of $1.08? Or $450 for a pig instead of $150?
And this sounds pretty good to me but we must remember who could afford to buy meat? If you go to say the Keg and have a $20 steak now would it go up to $60? No problem for the wealthy but I would suggest the Keg might find the clientele a little slim at times. And how about young families? Some of the wages are pretty poor here. $8/hr. doesn't buy a lot of steak or even hamburger...now triple the price...and we have created another vegetarian!!!
Meat isn't necessary for a healthy lifestyle. My daughter and her husband are vegetarians. My grandson is about a year and a half and has never had meat or eggs. He is one going little concern; walked three days after he turned six months! Can't keep him off the tractor!
They don't eat meat because they can't afford it but because of religious or political reasons(he's a damned Zen/green party Englishman!)

[Deb]

Lucky you, cowman, to have a blessed (not damned) Zen-Green Party Englishman in the family!! I've been thinking of running for the green Party next time around except I'm too lazy to walk around knocking on all those doors.

Consider what price the raw material for food processing brings in. Consider the price paid for finished beef or wheat or peas or lentils. Would the consumer afford that? Of course! Because it is the processors and the advertisers and the retailers that make all the money! If we could connect the consumer with the farmer directly, food would be cheaper for them to buy and if it was organic (which contrary to popular belief is not always more expensive) it would still be cheaper than it would be after the processors, advertisers and retailers took their cut.