|
|
Drought-stricken B.C. ranchers forced to slaughter breeding cattle
Drought-stricken B.C. ranchers forced to slaughter breeding cattle
Cattlemen's Association: Herd in steep decline over last five years
VANCOUVER - The beef cattle herd in B.C. has been in steep decline over the past five years and ranchers are selling off breeding stock for slaughter, mainly due to persistent drought in the province’s Interior and the North, according to the B.C. Cattlemen’s Association.
“The herd dropped by seven per cent between July 2009 and July 2010 ... and I would bet it has dropped another seven per cent since July,” said B.C. Cattlemen’s Association general manager Kevin Boon.
“A lot of guys have been losing money since BSE [mad cow disease] and are selling in bigger numbers or their whole herd,” Boon said. “We are getting down to about half what we had from our peak time.”
The association worries a shortage of breeding stock could leave the industry years from recovery once conditions improve.
“It takes time, money and effort to build a breeding herd, over years,” Boon said.
Years of drought and fire damage to grazing lands in the Cariboo and Chilcotin this past summer are forcing ranchers to forgo profit and reduce their herds, according to rancher Judy Guichon, president of the cattlemen’s association. Guichon reduced her herd in the Nicola Valley by 15 per cent last year, down to about 650 cows.
“The lack of water is the straw that breaks the camel’s back and some people are just letting the whole works go,” said Guichon.
Guichon’s neighbour Agnes Jackson had already reduced her breeding herd from 250 head to 190 in recent years, but even that was too much for her 6,000-acre ranch to support. She sold her entire herd earlier this year.
“You can stickhandle your way through one or two years of drought, but it’s going on eight years since we’ve been able to put up hay,” said Jackson. “We just ran out of environment; we had to give the land a rest.”
“The Peace River got hit extremely hard this summer,” Boon said. “We have faced drought in some part of the province in each of the last four years.”
Poor grazing conditions in the Interior and northern grasslands earlier this year forced many ranchers to pull their herds off pasture and sell calves and yearling cattle at least two months early, underweight and into a low market.
Most of the young animals will spend several months on a feedlot eating grain to gain weight before slaughter, but ranchers profit only when the cattle have time to put on weight while grazing on grass.
“Those are market animals that were going into the food chain anyway, so ranchers will sell them off first in order to maintain their breeding herd,” Boon said.
With so little grass, ranchers are having to use their winter feed supplies to support their breeding stock, an expense few can afford, he said.
“So what we are starting to see now is ranchers selling off their breeding cows and most of [those adult animals] will go for immediate slaughter,” he said. “Those are the ones we are worried about, those are the cows that produce new calves every year that bring money in. And you don’t just lose next year’s calf when you sell a cow, you lose years worth of calves.”
During the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease) scare of 2005, B.C.’s beef cow herd peaked at 342,000, according to the Cattlemen’s Association.
But as ranchers struggled with drought, the herd went into free fall, dropping by seven to 10 per cent each year until 2009 when the decline accelerated to 15 per cent in a single year.
Boon fears 2010 could be the worst year yet. The true figure will not be known until January.
Many of the haying fields and pastures near Oliver and through the Christian Valley, in south-central B.C., are empty and untended, according to Bill Freding, owner of Southern Plus Feedlots. Freding said his business is off by one third over the past three years.
“I haven’t let any employees go, but there are fewer days of work for every one,” Freding said. |
|
發表於 2010-10-26 00:36
| 