Former employee says squab production never a goal for PKI

Thursday, July 24, 2008

© AgMedia Inc.

by BETTER FARMING STAFF

“It was my idea to come up with the squabbling booklet,” says Mark Wolfe, who joined the company in March 2006 and worked there for nearly a year. Now 28, Wolfe had recently graduated from a business program at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo and worked overseas for a few months before Galbraith hired him.

Wolfe says he was motivated by concerns about the viability of the business. “I was getting really worried and my family was worried.” He says he researched the squab market, hoping to guide the business towards a market other than breeding contract holders for the birds.

Galbraith never seriously looked into the idea, Wolfe claims. “He told people he did. But it was just to show them that there was a market even though he really wasn’t considering it.”
 
“They’re not even the right birds.”

Instead, Galbraith viewed breeding pigeons as a form of currency or “printing dollars,” Wolfe says, recalling that his former employer had expressed ambitions to expand his pigeon-breeding venture across the world.

He learned soon after beginning work at PKI that police had visited the business and determined there was no fraud that they could prove. Their findings deterred Wolfe from registering his growing concerns with police, he explains.

Wolfe says that Galbraith initially told him he was grooming him to take over the business. “He wanted to make $10 million and then get out and that was to the point where I was going to continue the business,” he says. “I had no idea what really he was digging here, digging a hole; I was just excited to be having the opportunity to make some good money and that’s it.” Making his money in a venture that purported to help others also held a strong appeal, he adds.

He describes his relationship with his former employer as close – “he considered me like his adopted son” - and notes they often lunched together at a local restaurant and flirted with the waitresses there. Wolfe says he heard from contract holders that Galbraith had previously claimed his son would take over. Galbraith subsequently told him that his son, a lawyer, declined an offer to get involved.

Wolfe says questions about succession arose because of Galbraith’s age. He was born in 1947. “I think he wanted to show people that there was going to be someone to take over it, even though there wasn’t, to make people comfortable,” Wolf says.

Yet Wolfe says Galbraith convinced him that his desire to help save the world through pigeon breeding was sincere. “He thought he was saving the world almost on a small scale.”

Wolfe says Galbraith had a great amount of charisma and used “almost propaganda” in particular with Amish who were recruited as pigeon raisers. “He called it ‘pigeon religion’ and he’d hype this up almost like a little cult of pigeon growers and he really just convinced them.” At the root of the conviction was the idea everyone was in it together, believing in it as a success and that everyone would make money. Company get togethers, such as picnics and barbecues, helped foster the enthusiasm.

He says he quit because of long, grueling road trips to the United States that lasted two to three weeks at a time. “I had no life.” He is currently planning a return to university to complete a masters degree in business administration.

After resigning from his job at PKI, Wolfe says he spoke to representatives of the Canadian Border Services Agency and an arm of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, possibly the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, to alert them about the company’s practices. He could not recall the names of the people he spoke to or their titles. He says he is not aware of any attempts to follow up his complaints with him.

A statement in one of Galbraith’s guides for contract holders obtained by Better Farming appears to support Wolf’s claim that squab production was not a serious goal for the company.

On page 24 of the guide, obtained by a prospective grower in February, 2006, it claimed that “Arlan Galbraith has no meat type birds as the market price is low, feed is high and profit is low.” The statement, which appears as one of four points made under a subsection titled ‘feed costs,’ was removed from the section in an updated version of the book, published after Wolfe was hired in March 2006.

As many as 1,000 investors in four provinces and more than a dozen states, were caught with what bankruptcy officials say are worthless pigeons, when Galbraith’s pigeon breeding scheme collapsed in mid June.

Typically investors handed Galbraith or his company $100,000 each but in a few cases investments reached $1 million or more. Initial estimates put the amount owed by Galbraith’s company to creditors at $23 million and assets at $46,000.

Better Farming’s calls to Galbraith’s Cochrane residence Wednesday have not been returned.

In a May interview, Galbraith affirmed plans to go into squab production, noting that he had spent $30,000 to commission engineering plans for a processing plant. When asked about how he planned to make the transition from multiplier flocks to meat flocks, he noted the switch would be “gradual.”

“It’s not going to happen overnight. We’ll always be in the breeding stock business.”

When asked about suggestions that his birds were too small for the squab market, Galbraith said the smaller birds were being used “for cross breeding for their productivity.” Smaller birds are “just as edible as a larger bird,” he added. “Now if one bird is not sufficient for a meal, you would cook two, ok? Just in the way that you would eat quail.”
 
At the time Galbraith also denied that his son was ever involved in the business and dismissed mentions that his son had been named a successor as “gossip.” BF