Agristability Failed This Cattle Producer

I fed all of it and had to buy more.”

They estimated Proctor should have reported sales of over $100,000 based on his production report and wondered if other livestock producers were having the same issue.

The provincial office even suggested withholding any other benefits from the program if he couldn’t produce the existing sales figures.

He said that his cattle business today is very much in decline. Auction markets in the Interlake and beyond have many herd dispersals booked through to March, and not small herds. Big herds, small herds, all kinds of herds he said.

Many producers are aging and there have been many years with little or no profit. There is little incentive for younger people to get into the industry he said. Proctor said prices came up a bit last fall but many producers aren’t about to risk it again.

In 2018, 16 rural municipalities lobbied for financial support with the first round of drought but to no avail.

“Had we gotten that, things wouldn’t be so bad. But we needed support and it was so expensive. And no price for cattle, that put everybody in a huge hole,” said Proctor. “And then the next three years were almost impossible to liquidate and get out.”

Proctor’s herd dropped by a third and now he is taking it month by month. “Whether I stay or I go I still have a Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA) loan to pay back and I may have to liquidate the herd to pay that back by next December,” he said. “So I’m just taking it day by day.”

His herd is around 50 or 60 cows, but he lost a lot of cattle last winter with a bunch of cows that calved late that took sucking calves into the winter. “And with the hay quality, you just couldn’t get decent supplements,” said Proctor. “And the other thing that’s happened is because, with the Agristability program, you had to buy the feed and then seek the refund. I was to my credit limits; I couldn’t do that.”

He said that some of the poor feed had wild hemlock in it; combined with the poor weather and calving he had way more losses.

“I had lots of quantity of feed but I needed more quality in it. And so my strong cows did well. But, unfortunately, the ones feeding calves or pregnant for the second time suffered,” he said.

Then Proctor got COVID at the beginning of January 2022, keeping him down for most of January and because he was working alone, he lost a bunch of calves.

The prices on feeder steers are excellent up to $2.70 a pound for the 400 and almost 500-pound feeders. But the market discounted the heifers 80, 90 cents a pound from the steers.

“I got $2.70 for a group of steers and $1.85 for similar age-weight heifers which were just as good if not better than the steers,” he said.

“So that’s a huge discount.”

AgriStability has been a very tough program for livestock producers on two counts. One is the five-year average basis.

“Ever since the Mad Cow Disease in 2003, we have not had more than a year and a half of reasonable prices because of the depression, flooding, and crop failure.

All of those things resulted in no profit level,” said Proctor. “So to qualify for AgriStability, without any benefits, not only have you lost money, you’ve lost a pile of money.”

The cattle producer said it’s always this five-year average and for him, there needed to be more years of profit to establish a margin that gets close to covering expenses.

The second part is that almost every livestock producer he’s spoken with has received benefits from AgriStability but at some point has had them clawed back.