GUELPH, Ont. – With strike action involving nearly 1,000 Cargill workers nearing a month, local beef farmers are having to consider their options: send cattle elsewhere or hold onto market cattle in case the strike ends.
But the issue is where to send this amount of cattle. According to Cargill, the Dunlop location can process 1,500 head of cattle a day.
“There really is no other plant in Ontario, really in eastern Canada, that can handle that kind of volume,” Joe Hill, the past president of Beef Farmers of Wellington County said of the capacity at the Cargill plant on Dunlop Drive.
Hill said he hasn’t heard what farmers are doing in the meantime, but assumes some have turned to western Canada and parts of the United States for beef processing.
But that option also comes with added cost.
“That transportation cost ultimately lands on the producer, and really it’s a large number to put on long truck rides,” he said. “It isn’t real reasonable to be able to absorb that many cattle indefinitely.”
In that, there is also the issue of capacity at other plants.
Hill said it is very difficult for processing centres in North America to absorb this many cattle for an extended period of time. In addition, he isn’t sure if the local area even has trucking capacity to move this many cattle out of province.
But what is the alternative?
Hill said he and others have turned to feeding market cattle for a longer period of time, with the hope the strike is resolved soon and the plant opens up again.
“We’re not at peak in terms of the number of cattle that are coming to market,” he said. “There’s some fluctuation throughout the years. Fall is the peak, when the numbers are high, so if (the strike) happens to stretch out that long, it becomes a real problem.”
Even holding onto cattle, the extra feeding cost tends to fall on the producer, he said.
Hill added there isn’t really a health issue. Cattle tend to tolerate an extended feeding period. But there is worry on the economic issue to come.
“We went into this year with basically record-high prices, so the value of the inventory sitting on farmland is extremely high,” he said.
“And if we’re not going to get the prices we expected, losses can be quite substantial quite quickly.”
No meetings are currently scheduled between Cargill and the union.