Beef: Quebec ups the ante on its beef stabilization program

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Quebec is raising the bar for minimum calf weight to meet its revenue stabilization program, ands the effects may spill across the border to
Ontario producers

By DON STONEMAN

Quebec has changed how it pays out on its Assurance-stabilization des revenues agricoles (ASRA) program. And that is likely to change how some Ontario beef producers, like Earlton's Allan Aitchison, do business.

Aitchison has been buying Quebec cattle in the 400- to 500-pound range in the fall, feeding them over the winter on homegrown hay and corn silage and selling them to cattle feeders in the winter and spring at the Keady Livestock Market near Tara in Bruce County.

Aitchison says the cattle industries in northeastern Ontario and northwestern Quebec are highly integrated. Many Quebec operators calve their cows on grass in late June and July and wean 400-pound calves in the fall. Ontario cattle producers in nearby Timiskaming district are eager buyers because they have grain and hay crops to feed them. The ASRA program used to provide a payment to Quebec farmers who weaned calves of just about any weight off their cows. That changed this year.

Producers won't collect an ASRA for calves that fail to meet a minimum 500 pounds at sale this fall, according to a document posted on the Internet, written by Guy Lapointe of the Québec Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, a beef production advisor for Outaouais-Laurentides, based in Gatineau. The bar will rise in succeeding years. The minimum weight for calves to draw an ASRA payment will be 525 pounds in 2010 and rise to 550 pounds in 2011.

The modifications to the program encourage producers to maximize the number of calves sold as well as their weight at sale, Lapointe wrote.

Aitchison says producers are holding back their lightweight calves to try to feed them to that weight over the winter, and statistics appear to prove that point. Eve Martin, feeder cattle development and marketing officer, Fédération du Bovine Quebec, says there are fewer cattle coming to market weighing less than 500 pounds than before. There are about 50,000 calves sold through five sales yards that she monitors and 10 per cent of them this fall weighed less than 500 pounds. In previous years, about 18 per cent of calves marketed weighed less than 500 pounds. Martin wouldn't say that changes to the ASRA program, which came into effect last Jan.1, are the only reason for that.

Lapointe wrote that farms should evaluate their feed resources. Farms that have been feeding cows and calves to 550 pounds may have to reduce the number of cows in order to have enough feed for the remaining calves to reach 750 pounds, a target weight to maximize ASRA returns. In 2011, he wrote, maximum compensation will be available to producers who wean calves weighing a minimum of 750 pounds from every cow in the herd.

With fewer 400-pound calves coming to market in Quebec sales barns this year, Aitchison went south, to the stocker sale in South River, south of North  Bay, in early fall, to fill his barns. He says those cattle have already put on 150 pounds apiece and he thinks they will be ready for sale in southern Ontario in mid-winter.

If the Quebec sellers are going to be offering their calves for sale at 650 pounds or more, he plans to start producing short-keep cattle, growing them to around 1,000 pounds before he sells them at auction barns in southern Ontario. BF