July 2025
It’s early summer and across Canada I expect barbecues are being heated up — except at our house. We kind of lost our hunger for barbecuing a few years ago when we had regular infestations of mice building nests in our barbecue.
For many barbecue fans, however, I suspect that pork or chicken may be the meat of choice this summer. Beef prices are up 16 per cent over last year so fewer people will be putting steak or hamburger on the grill.
Sylvain Charlebois, professor and researcher of food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, explains that the beef herd is the same size as it was in 1989 when there were 13 million fewer people living in Canada than today.
As well, beef producers in general are getting older. In my neighbourhood we have four beef producers, all at, or past, retirement age. And according to a recent article in Farmers Forum, that’s a trend. The farm newspaper reports Auctioneer Preston Cull of Renfrew Pontiac Livestock Auction in Cobden, Ontario, that “beef farmers are selling out and no one’s taking over.”
Yet according to Cull, at a recent Cobden sale, 250 farmers crowded the stands around the show-ring and lined up to get in. “People still want to see live auctions,” he said.
At those live auctions prices reached $4,000 for a yearling in a recent Huron County sale. At another sale, cow-calf pairs started at $7,500 and sold as high as $8,500.
The beef industry has always been a volatile market. I recall beef producers railing against supply management, at meetings back in the 1970s when I was covering meetings and auctions, yet suffering through boom and bust cycles themselves when supply management had kept dairy and chicken prices stable.
There were also other hits. I co-wrote, with Anne Chislett, the play Another Season’s Promise at the Blyth Festival, dealing with the farm crisis of the early 1980s when farmers were caught in the high interest rate crisis, with loans suddenly costing 20-plus per cent. That play was a hit with farmers from far and wide travelling to see their story told over two seasons and the play touring widely.
We dealt with a different crisis, the BSE infection, in Another Season’s Harvest, when another generation of the same family was hit by the closure of borders to beef and prices cratered before exports were gradually resumed.
But even in the early 2000s, before the BSE crisis, a beef heifer might sell for $500 or $600, “and you would work hard to get them sold for that,” according to auctioneer David Carson of Listowel. “Now they’ll bring $4,000 to $5,000.” Most of the extra cost is eaten up by higher feed costs, he says.
I’m not sure what the future holds for food production. Only a couple of my neighbours have sons or daughters taking over, or trying to take over, family farms.
Meanwhile, as I watch television, I see “experts” with university degrees complaining about how supply management is leading to higher prices for milk, butter, eggs and chicken.
Farming has always been a difficult business, not only with hard work but varying income. Meanwhile, we have a provincial government that is quite happy to see farmland disappear to provide space for new highways and more suburbs for an apparently never-ending growth in population. Nobody in our increasingly urban population seems to realize we need good farmland to grow the food people need in our booming world.
We can’t just keep going, with more people to feed and fewer and fewer farmers with less and less land to produce the food. Something’s got to give, or our children and grandchildren will suffer. ◊