by SUSAN MANN
Egg Farmers of Ontario will introduce a new way of allotting leased quota to farmers in the 2016 leasing pool.
The approach will give producers some certainty so they can plan ahead, says the organization’s general manager.
But, as is currently the case, just how much of the opportunity farmers can take advantage of will depend on the size of their barn and the amount of production quota they currently have, says Harry Pelissero.
The new layer leasing allotment, which the board recently circulated to farmers in a memo, proposes to provide farmers who have room in their barns the opportunity to lease up to 735 birds at $7.30 per bird, per year.
In egg farming’s supply managed system, a unit of quota equals one bird, so, for example, a person with 600 units of quota has 600 birds. Hens lay eggs on average for 51 weeks and produce about 25.5 dozen eggs each during their lifetime.
The new allocation approach will apply to an additional allocation of 274,611 birds the provincial organization recently received from Egg Farmers of Canada.
That amount was Egg Farmers of Ontario’s share of the past two national agency’s allocations that were made within the last 12 to 16 months, Pelissero says.
“This is new quota as a result of increased sales in the marketplace,” Pelissero says.
For the past three or four years, Egg Farmers of Ontario has put the additional allocations it gets from Egg Farmers of Canada into its layer leasing pool and “leased it out,” he says.
Pelissero says currently, farmers apply to get quota from the allocation, and if they have room in their barns, they can lease the amount they request – up to the lease’s cap, which is an amount equivalent to the amount of production quota the farmer owns.
So, for example, a farmer who owns a production quota of 700 birds would be allowed to lease up to 700 more birds, bringing the number of birds in the barn up to 1,400. By way of contrast, a farmer who owns a 500-bird production quota would only be allowed to lease up to 500 birds, bringing the total under the barn roof to 1,000 birds.
Pelissero explains the board decided to cap the number of birds producers could lease in this way to prevent producers from taking advantage of leasing to expand their operations without making at least an equal commitment to owning quota.
Of the new allocation from the national organization, 36,750 birds would be set aside for new entrants and additional quota holders joining the industry in future years, Pelissero says. The set aside also serves as a cushion as “we are only allowed to have 97 per cent of our allocation in our barns,” he adds.
Birds left over from farmers not able to lease their full allocation are put back into the pool and are distributed to farmers with room for them. Of the province’s 323 quota holders, only 223 have room to place birds, Pelissero says.
In the case of a farmer with quota holdings to cover the 735 birds, but who doesn’t have room in the barn to add 735 leased birds, “we will hold that number until they have room,” he says. They get those birds in the following year’s pool.
Farmers must let Egg Famers of Ontario know by the end of June for the next year’s pool whether they will be leasing quota or not, he says.
The way the layer leasing allotment is set up makes it impossible for the leased quota to get concentrated in larger producers’ hands, Pelissero says. “Each quota holder is treated the same regardless of if they have 200,000 birds or 2,500 birds.
“There’s no ability to favour larger producers or discriminate against smaller producers.”
Another plus of the proposal, he says, is that “when additional allocations are allocated to Ontario it’s simply a matter of adjusting the layer leasing number for each quota holder.”
Funds generated from the leasing pool go toward reducing Egg Farmers of Ontario levies that all producers pay. “The last couple of years we’ve reduced the levy by 1.5 cents a dozen as the result of money coming in from leased birds,” he says.
The current total levy in Ontario is 31.25 cents per dozen with the bulk of that being remitted to Egg Farmers of Canada for its work, Pelissero says.
The average flock size in Ontario is 25,000 birds, he says. BF
Comments
Reading between the lines of this article and it is quite apparent that Mr. Pelissero is realizing that the way to increase sales is to remove some of the monsterous burden of quota debt.
Who knew?
Raube Beuerman
My math says the egg marketing board instead of giving the quota which has a value just decided to get the going rate in interest
Rather than pick up a dozen eggs at $1.99 US (2.34 Can) before I crossed the border last night, I decided to humour the Egg Farmers of Ontario and bought Canadian eggs in my local supermarket at $2.89.
And yet, the fools in supply management don't get it, and, alas, never will.
Stephen Thompson, Clinton ON
Shoppers Drug Mart,grade A Large $1.99/doz...and thats this side of the border !
yada, yada, $1.99 this week at Shoppers, $3.19 this week at Moore's Foodland in Clinton, $1.99 for the past three weeks at Kroger and Walmart in the US. No matter how any supply management supporter looks through his/her rose-coloured glasses, US retail prices, regular and on-sale, are consistently well-less than ours, and it's only common sense that they are, and only common sense that consumers get tired of dancing from store to store in Canada every week and opt, instead, to cross the border for the week-to-week reliability of US pricing
In addition, go figure, today's price for 2 litres of 2% Beatrice milk at Moore's was $4.99 while 4 litres of the same product was $3.97 - more product for over $1 less money and with no assurances that either was BST-free the way it would be at stores in the US. It's a shame that Canadian retail stores feel forced to price 4 litre packages of milk in a way so as to tempt people who live by themselves to deliberately waste milk because they can't use it up before it goes bad.
The only conclusions I can reach are:
(1) the pricing of 4 litres of milk in Canada and gallon jugs of milk in the US are both distorted by loss-leader pricing.
(2) Canadian dairy farmers are completely out to lunch when they decry American "BST milk"
(3) Canadian dairy farmers continue to be in denial about the harm farm-gate price gouging does to both consumers and the processing/distributing and retailing sectors.
(4) even when comparing loss-leader to loss-leader, Canadian consumers are being badly-screwed in comparison to US consumers.
Stephen Thompson, Clinton ON
One completely-surprising thing about your two weeks of cross-border shopping is how much it demonstrates about how little you understand dairy farming, processing and especially food retailing in general both countries.
First, your BST fixation is kind of amusing. rBST use had dropped to only 18% of US farms by 2010 and is likely under 15% of farms now. Its use is very regional. Virtually all of this goes into industrial use and none into fluid. Most fluid milk in the US can be labelled BST free for this reason.
The economics are not there or here for BST use and using it to cheat on production records here shows up in changing lactation curves and would be spotted immediately by milk recording.
On price comparisons, far from doing your "homework", your posts only prove the opposite as many posters have clearly stated.
Personal pricing anecdotes are funny, eh? On a recent Florida vacation, I found milk there nearly on par but beef, pork, peanut butter and coffee much less expensive down south. Supply management for those products in Canada most be to blame of course.
In fact, almost every food price I paid seemed much lower in the US. Then I remembered I don't earn a Florida salary, face their tax differences, health care, hydro etc etc etc. That's why I would not make uninformed, biased anecdotal observations about food prices.
Seriously though, a meaningful family food basket/exchange-adjusted/salary-adjusted basis comparison in both countries finds Canada and the US regularly trade places as having the cheapest food in any developed country at between 10 and 12 per cent of disposal income.
Those are StatsCan and USDA numbers.
Food is cheap and high quality in both countries.
, by defintion, supply management screws Canadian consumers and pits Canadian farmers against each other.
My "shopping" trip to the US enlightened me considerably, especially about the lack of BST in US milk (I wish someone would enlighten MP, Wayne Easter) as well as the observation that even though milk retailing on both sides of the border is fraught with the comparative perils of loss-leader pricing, US prices are reliably lower and are obviously the main driver behind cross-border shopping, as well as the reason why US milk consumption is increasing and why Canadian consumption is falling.
I didn't see any reason for me, or anyone, to go to the US to buy beef, pork, vegetables or even processed foods, but dairy and poultry products are a completely-different story as was evidenced by what I saw in the car beside me at the duty-free shop in Port Huron. In addition, my travelling partner insisted that, based on some 40 years of cross-border cheese-buying experience, and without checking prices at all, we stop at a US Wal-Mart to buy Velveeta cheese rather than buy it in Canada.
The fact of the matter is that instead of running to Shoppers Drug Mart here for $1.99 eggs and then to Wal-Mart for $2.54 milk and then to Zehrs for whatever special they might have on poultry, at $3.00 Canadian each direction for bridge tolls, it's going to cost the average Canadian consumer a lot less in gas and grocery bills to simply consolidate their grocery shopping at one store in the US, and even less if two (or even more) shoppers go in the same car, as my son and his room-mates did every week when he lived in Sarnia and made their weekly trip to Port Huron for dairy and poultry products.
Unfortunately, cross-border shopping to get around the price gouging effect of supply management hurts our pork and beef farmers because, all else being equal, Canadian consumers will buy US pork and beef while they are already in the US buying dairy and poultry products - therefore supply management screws Canadian beef and pork farmers twice, once because of unequal incomes, and twice because of lost cross-border sales.
Even if Ontario consumers and supply managed farmers haven't figured it out, BC consumers and supply managed farmers long-since have, what with at least one US border town grocery having a check-out line dedicated to only Canadian currency and BC supply management taking out fear-mongering ads to try to keep BC shoppers for dairy and poultry products on this side of the border.
Finally, the undeniable fact of the matter is that nobody needs to know anything about dairy farming, processing or even retailing to know that supply management is rotten to the core when a US retailer devotes a check-out line to Canadian currency and Canadian farmers take out ads to try to keep shoppers at home.
Stephen Thompson, Clinton ON
Editor: Comment modified to comply with our guidelines.
Read the two posts and most will decide there is only one pompous twit involved.
I get irritated (and so should everybody) when pompous twit, supply management supporters who don't know enough to sign their own names, use this site to anonymously claim, without providing even one scintilla of evidence to support their claims, that somebody who does know how to sign his/her name, doesn't know this, that, or the other.
In addition, for about the thousandth time, it is impossible, by definition, to engage in "name-calling" with someone who doesn't have a name, and that's why anonymous posters deserve, and get, all the abuse anyone can heap on them.
Furthermore, I quite-correctly detest the duplicity on the part of the Canadian dairy industry for never correcting anyone who claims that US milk is rife with BST and that, therefore, Canadian milk produced under supply management is somehow better and/or safer than the milk Canadian consumers buy when in the US. If the Canadian dairy industry, including Canada's dairy farmers, had any notion of responsibility, they would do their best to dispel this myth instead of doing nothing and, therefore, lining their own pockets by perpetuating it.
Stephen Thompson, Clinton ON
Those eggs could easily be US eggs . But it really does not matter if they want to sell them at cost or less . The problem is that CBS allowed him back in the country !! He probably told them of all the wrongss he found over there while visiting too so they were glad to get rid of him .
The wrong in all of this is the fact of not accepting that things cost more here . Food included !!
As usual, claims made by anonymous posters are dead-outright wrong - rutabagas, for example, at least in Texas, cost a LOT more than they do here in southern Ontario, thereby making the blanket statement that food costs more here just another baseless claim by those who see nothing wrong with hiding behind both anonymity and 200% tariff barriers in order to screw consumers and other farmers.
The problem is that the above anonymous poster, and every supply management supporter, continues to ignore and/or even deny the basic truth that people shop for dairy and poultry products in the US, even going to the point of making a stop at a US Wal-mart (as we did), to buy nothing but Velveta cheese, because they/we are tired of being screwed by supply management.
Stephen Thompson, Clinton ON
You must be correct, as usual.
Food can't cost more here if rutabagas cost more in Texas.
Yikes.....
Thanks for the laugh !! That one will be useful for WTO talks !
Now was he sure he was looking at rutabagas or were they turnips ? Were they inseason or not ? Imported product of Canada or from where ?
I am sure you can go south of the border and buy Canadian pork and beef cheaper than you can here in Canada .
I can buy many things made in Canada cheaper in the USA by 2/3 of the price that I have to pay here .
But hey if rutabagas are cheaper here than Texas then we better get in line and not question . After all as was stated Ritz hasn't passed Kindergarten yet !!
I love this forum . Makes me laugh & giggle more than a comedy show . Too bad it has been rendered useless by so many because of one .
The one(s) taking themselves so serious seem to have NO idea how ridiculous and funny they come across. Or often just sad. Others toy with them cruelly.
Maybe they just fell off a rutabaga truck???
LMAO
ROFL
and it's cheaper than a comedy club!!!!
The turnips (labeled as being a product of the USA) in Kroger in College Station, Texas, were right beside the rutabagas which had no label.
Furthermore, my long-time friends, clients, and former neighbours at G.L Hubbard and Sons Ltd., long-time rutabaga growers and packagers in Blyth ON., advised me, when I went there this afternoon, that they ship a lot of these "pee-wee" rutabagas to Texas and that, therefore, these rutabagas could easily have been theirs. In addtion, the Hubbards were somewhat miffed that their company logo was no-longer on these rutabagas.
The point is, as always, that blanket claims by supply management supporters to the effect that "food always costs more in Canada" are nonsense, drivel, and outright-stupidity, especially when the food on both sides of the border could easily have a Canadian origin in the first place.
In addition, this example of what could easily be Canadian rutabagas on grocery shelves in Texas, as noted by "Ricky" of the "Trailer Park Boys" is "killing two stoned birds at once" in that it demonstrates why supply management and local foods are, all at the same time, idiodic public policy ideals.
In conclusion, this example demonstrates, once again, why supply management supporters hate what appears on this site and why supply management opponents love it.
Sigh! - why are supply management supporters as well as local food enthusiasts so grindingly-opposed to reality?
Stephen Thompson, Clinton ON
And the laughs continue. If you ever showed a sense of humor, people might think you were joking. As it is, they might joke that you are thinking.
OMG - The price of rutabagas in Texas proves nothing.
You seem to be arguing with only yourself that "food always costs more in Canada". In fact, posters have said that food is cheap and high quality in both countries.
Anecdotal examples are meaningless. You can probably find high and low prices on any given product in various regions in either country on any given day. So what?
For example, you often find potatoes cheaper in Ontario, milk higher in Nova Scotia, sugar higher in the US, lower milk prices in Ontario, high rutabaga prices inTexas (!!!), higher milk prices in south Florida and often very different prices at nearby stores in all those locations. Milk in the US is always cheapest within 100 miles of the Canadian border. All prove nothing.
That's why I would not make uninformed, biased, anecdotal observations about food prices.
Meaningful family food basket/exchange-adjusted/salary-adjusted basis comparisons in both countries finds Canada and the US regularly trade places as having the cheapest food in any developed country at between 10 and 12 per cent of disposal income.
Those are StatsCan and USDA numbers.
Food is cheap and high quality in both countries.
But on the bright side, maybe your fixation will mean we replace the standard old quip about tea prices with....
"What does that have to do with the price of rutabagas in Texas?"
Yours truly,
Still LMAO and ROFL
The fact that the supply management is a support system of tariffs, and tariffs raise the price of those products is all that matters.
Raube Beuerman, Dublin, ON
Funny a custom pig feeder guy trashing a support system . Some needs to play mirror mirror who gets the most support of all ?
Yes the site has slipped below HeeHaw for laughs !
The hog industry receives diddly-squat compared to that of those on the receiving end of tariffs.
It's why I don't mind signing my name.
This poster is afraid to sign their name for a few reasons. 1) They are ridden with guilt in the huge amount of monies they have received for, well, since supply management has existed. 2) They don't want anyone to know how much they were given in handouts from their parents. 3) This poster has no balls.
And lastly, this poster is he/she still watches HeeHaw re-runs.
Pathetic.
Raube Beuerman
Deletion by editor in accordance with our guidelines.
Raube,
Ontario Livestock programs are not transparent for obvious reasons (countervail). Want proof? Call up Agricorp and ask for the RMP target price (COP) for pork or beef.
Sorry, but it is difficult to take seriously the claims from a secretive poster, that Ontario livestock program numbers are secretive.
If this was true, would not all hog producers have survived the low prices from years back? They did not.
Raube Beuerman
The hog industry has recieved more than it's fair share of money from Gov which would then also class it as a legislated entitlement . No sense though in listing the program names ( my arm is not long enough ) since it will be denied any way .
I am not a supply managed farmer so there is strike one .
I bought what I have from my parents and others at fair market value so now we have strike two .
My balls are mine & fine thank you . I don't share them with the same sex sorry to tell you so strike three .
HeeHaw was better back in the day than Trailer Park Boys could ever be .
Any one who has ever recieved any payment from the Gov needs to check the glass house they are living in . Note I said any payment ! All Gov payments are tied to some sort of legislative entitlement be it baby bonus , pension , subsidy payments etc . Are all of these entitlements/payments fair ?? I would say not .
Now that you have struck out , head back to your dug out and check if they are still there . Heck you didn't even have a tick foul ball . Didn't even have to think of getting Henke out of the bull pen for this one !!
This is like fishing with a BIG net at the pet store gold fish aquarium . Sighhhh !
You continue to deny that tariffs are the worst type of support.
We can argue all day long about cross border price differences on this, that, or the other, but at the end of the day the one thing for sure is that a support system based upon tariffs raises the price of that product, wherein a support system from taxpayer funded monies does not.
Raube Beuerman
Ever since the 1840s when England repealed the tariff-based Corn Laws, one of the most-basic and most-undeniable principles of economics has been that if any sector of the economy is deserving of support, that support should come from the public treasury where everybody, including corporations, pays according to their incomes, instead of saddling the poorest group of consumers (as well as not encumbering corporations at all) with a disproportionate share of the responsibility.
In addition, nobody needs to have studied economics in order to be able to figure it out - it is common sense and should be immediately understandable by any intelligent layperson, including any high-school student.
One of the most-striking failures of our education system has been to eschew the teaching of basic economics as a compulsory course. For example, it is a tragic waste of an education to allow someone to obtain a degree or even a diploma in Agriculture without ever having learned about the absolute evils of tariff-based protectionism.
Stephen Thompson, Clinton ON
It has been said America was built on Tariffs,even now the International Trade Commission lists over 12,000 specific tariffs on imports to America. Hundreds of agricultural, textile, and manufacturing items are highly protected.
When you are as wealthy and powerful as the US it seems you can have Tariffs and spend billions in subsidies at the same time.
Other Countries are not so fortunate.
Whether it be a tariff or a subsidy it really comes down to support and the splitting of hairs and further to the Gov letting things run amuck and not stepping in to correct their own lack of oversight mistakes .
Support should be given when things get out of balance because of programs that affect global prices and the ability for producers to compete on a level scale with other countries farmers . It will likely not ever be totally even but it should be close . Many payment and support programs that other countries have do make for other countries producers to be uncompetitive in the global market . An example program to not get caught up in the WTO is to do the buy local buy fresh . Good as it is it does not include all sectors of agriculture . The correct way for our Gov to do support programs is to match other countries programs and where those program dollars are targeted .
When it comes to SM products it should not be that the retail price here should be wildly different than what it is across the border but it will never be exactly the same . Exchange on the dollar is one example that will not allow for the price to be the exactly the same .
Support is support be it tariff or subsidy . It is high time that Gov in this country do a review and revamp the Ag support dollars and tariffs . If for no other reason than to make sure that we have farmers here for generations to come . Not just a handful of corporations who control Agriculture and its production .
The claim that "Milk in the US is always cheapest within 100 miles of the Canadian border" is exactly the sort of unprovable-nonsense supply management supporters believe with the same intensity that three-year-olds believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
I need offer nothing more than Kroger's price of $1.79 for a gallon of 2% organic milk in College Station, Texas, a city some 2,300 kilometers from the Canadian border to refute the emptiness of the above anonymous blowhard's claim.
The undeniable fact of the matter is that 200% tariff barriers on dairy and poultry products but on nothing else we eat, compels Canadian consumers to flee to the US to the benefit of the US economy and to the detriment of every aspect of our own.
Stephen Thompson, Clinton ON
Points well made. Anecdotal price observations prove nothing. Game, set and match.
Hilarious that the response is to attack the point using...an anecdotal price observation.
The price of milk is just like the price of rutabagas in Texas - meaningless.
And yes, milk, gas and others in border cities are definitely loss leaders for attracting Canadians.
I have US friends who head north into Niagara Falls, New York a couple of times a week on business and make a habit of taking advantage of the "Canuck Catcher" pricing always on a few products - prices that they can't get 75 miles further south.
Give up on trying to communicate with some people - they know it all and can't even think about other possibilities.
Sorry for the next tirade tangent that these outrageous comments will cause.
Do what most of us do - consider the source and laugh.
Just to reiterate what has already been said on here,those eggs at Shoppers may very well have been US eggs but the eggs bought south of the border are pretty much guaranteed 100% US ! ... And Supply Management is the greater protectionist ??
The US has the most tightly closed borders to food imports.
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