Self-preservation vs. industry preservation

[Muttley]

A price is set by what the demand of a product is. You can hardly blame anyone for charging a high price if one can receive it. I don't think there is to many farmers out there that have sent back to many grain cheques or calf cheques and said "no thank you the price is to high"

[jensend]

Cakadu: I had no intention of giving the impression that I was wronged or cheated by somebody paying a low price for feed. All I am saying is we live with the markets and to try to change the rules just because the market turns on you is no more fair. I speak to people in the drought-stricken parts of Alberta on an almost daily basis and I hear what they are saying and the tone of their voices. My point is that instead of my neighbours here subsidizing cattlemen by selling frozen greenfeed cheap the government should do any subsidizing. As cowman said why should a poor hay crop be sold cheap? People here can take off good lentil greenfeed but selling it won't make up for the frost loss. Cattlemen aren't the only ones hurting from all this.

[cowman]

pandianna:Over the last ten years or so when the American cow herd has been static(actually going down in numbers the last five)the Alberta cow herd was agressively expanding. So today we are rated as about the 3rd largest cattle"state"! We have more cattle than Colorado! Saskatchewan has also expanded although not at as high a rate.
Why has this happened? A lot of it has to do with the Alberta governments' encouragement but also the bungling of the feds in the grain business. When the Crow was scrapped it pretty well made us completely non-competitive in the export grain market. The federal government wouldn't protect the grain farmer from unfair competition from Americans and Europeans, so farmers piled into cattle and hogs. I remember the year after the Crow died seeing miles and miles of fence going up around land that was way too good to run cows on. A lot of new players got into the game and the rest expanded. The rise in hay prices was happening before this drought hit because of the demand for feed for this expansion! So here we are today with over 2 million cows in Alberta and only the ability to feed (maybe) 1 million? This drought really brings home the reality that we have too many cows. If, for whatever reason, the American border closed we would be in serious trouble! We've built an industry based on sand!
Now if we'd brought in a marketing board with quotas we would have only been producing for a protected domestic market. We wouldn't have had this huge glut of cattle to kill and export.If there had been a cost/price ratio we would have been protected from these natural disasters.