The committee met at 5:06 p.m.

[R. Leonard in the chair.]

R. Leonard (Chair): Good evening, everyone. My name is Ronna-Rae Leonard. I’m the MLA for Courtenay-Comox, which is an agricultural community on Vancouver Island. I’m also the Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Agriculture, Fish and Food. I’d like to begin with the recognition that our public hearing today is taking place on the traditional territory of the Secwepemc people.

We’re an all-party parliamentary committee of the Legislative Assembly, with a mandate to examine matters concerning agriculture, fish and food in British Columbia. The committee’s first inquiry is focused on local meat production and inspection in B.C. This consultation is based on a discussion paper that was referred to the committee earlier this spring, which includes a number of questions asking about what’s working well in the local meat industry or how improvements can be made to better serve all British Columbians.

The committee is holding a number of public hearings in communities across the province, and British Columbians can participate in these public hearings either in person or by teleconference. There are other ways that British Columbians can submit their ideas to the committee, including completing an on-line survey or sending in a written, audio or video submission. More information about how to do this is available on the committee’s website at www.leg.bc.ca/cmt/aff.

We invite all British Columbians to contribute to this important process. For those of you in attendance, we thank you for taking the time to participate today. All public input will be carefully considered by the committee as it prepares its final report to the Legislative Assembly, which will be presented on or before October 1, 2018. Just a reminder that the consultation will close on Friday, June 15, at 5 p.m.

Today’s meeting will consist of presentations from registered witnesses. Each presenter will have ten minutes to speak, followed by five minutes for questions from the committee here.

Because there are a number of you who may be interested in speaking at the end, we will allow folks to come up for five minutes of brief comments and an opportunity to have questions, also, from the committee. I’d ask that if you are interested, just to help the meeting flow a little better, if you could go — in a minute, when Stephanie returns — to the back table and get your name on a list. That’ll just help us get through everybody’s opportunity to get on. If you don’t get your name on the list by the end of it, we’ll add you, but it just means you have to stay a little longer.

[5:10 p.m.]

All the meetings are recorded and transcribed by Hansard Services over here, and a complete transcript of the proceeding will be posted on the committees website. These meetings are also broadcast as live audio via our website.

I’ll ask now for the members of the committee to introduce themselves. This evening we’ll start over at Doug.

D. Routley: Hi. My name is Doug Routley, and I represent the area from Duncan up to about a third of Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island. So it’s pretty rural. Of course, Nanaimo isn’t, but it also includes four or five Gulf Islands and lots of ferry terminals.

R. Singh: I’m Rachna Singh. I’m the MLA for Surrey–Green Timbers.

N. Simons: Nick Simons. I’m the MLA for Powell River–Sunshine Coast.

R. Leonard (Chair): And this is the Deputy Chair.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Jackie Tegart, MLA for Fraser-Nicola. I live in Ashcroft, huge cattle country.

D. Barnett: Donna Barnett, MLA for Cariboo-Chilcotin, the heart of cattle country.

M. Morris: Mike Morris, MLA for Prince George, the future site of a federal abattoir, at the geographical centre of B.C.

I. Paton: Ian Paton, MLA for Delta South. I know a little bit about this, a dairy farmer for 25 years and livestock auctioneer since ’78.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you. Assisting us today are Jennifer Arril and Stephanie Raymond, from the Parliamentary Committees Office. They’ve kept us on track and created these meeting rooms so that everybody can participate in a smooth fashion — they’ve been just terrific — and making sure we get from place to place on time, and fed.

I’d also like to introduce Simon DeLaat and Amanda Heffelfinger, from Hansard Services. They’re here to record the proceedings.

Now we can move on to you. The first presenter that we have on our list is B.C. Chicken Marketing Board — Robin Smith and Alistair Johnston. Welcome.

Presentations on
Meat Production and Inspection

B.C. CHICKEN MARKETING BOARD

R. Smith: Thank you very much for this opportunity. I’m Robin Smith. I’m the chair of the B.C. Chicken Marketing Board, and my colleague, Alistair Johnston, is a member of the board. This is a great opportunity to tell you about the B.C. chicken industry, the largest meat industry in the province — $400 million in farm-gate receipts, just behind dairy and aquaculture in size.

We’ve got about 325 commercial chicken farmers in this province: 88 percent in the Lower Mainland, 12 percent in the Interior and some on Vancouver Island — about 2 percent. We produce 14 percent of Canada’s chicken. We have 33 processors in this province, of which 12 are federally registered. The total industry employment is about 14,000 people for the processing, growing and supplying industries.

We contribute approximately $1 billion per year to the GDP of B.C. All our chickens are raised without cages. They’re all free-run. We’re not egg producers. The system is regulated through supply management and regulated by the B.C. Chicken Marketing Board.

The Chicken Marketing Board. Our decisions can be appealed to the B.C. Farm Industry Review Board. Under the B.C. Natural Products Marketing Act, the board has the power to promote, control and regulate the production, transportation, packing, storage and marketing of chicken. Under our scheme, we have the authority to issue and transfer, revoke or reduce quotas, issue licences, regulate growers, cancel any licences for violations, inspect books and pre­mises and receive full information on the industry, and we set the live price for chicken.

A little bit about some of our policies. Out of the 325 commercial growers that own quota…. Those are people that have quota, and they produce more than 2,000 birds a year. We have 170 permit holders, who are people that pay $20 a year for a permit. They can produce up to 2,000 birds per year. So it’s an easy business to get into for that.

[5:15 p.m.]

Then there is an unknown number of small flocks that produce less than 200 birds per year. We don’t keep track of those. We do keep track of permit holders.

We encourage new entrants. More than 100 new entrants have come into this industry since 2005. We provide for them free quota, up to 20,000 kilograms of production every eight weeks. That’s 65,000 birds per year of free quota.

Now a new entrant can receive another 10,000 kilograms of quota if they buy another 10,000. It means they could, if they take advantage of all those offers, be producing 170,000 birds a year. That’s an excellent way to get into the business.

We oversee a lot of mandatory programs. These are national mandatory programs of animal welfare, of biosecurity and on-farm food and safety. We’re very big on biosecurity. As you know, we had avian flu a few years ago. Since that major outbreak, we’ve managed to escape it in the chicken industry.

We encourage innovation. We’ve encouraged the organic industry and speciality chicken, which is chicken produced just for the Asian trade, like black-skinned silkie chicken. We were the first people in Canada to produce that. Now Ontario has copied us, but fortunately, we have federal-inspected plants that can do it. We export that chicken. We export to California, down in the United States and some to Asia.

I want to talk a little bit about supply management. You know, the chicken-hatching eggs, turkeys, table eggs and dairy are all regulated industries, regulated nationally and provincially under a system called supply management, introduced by governments and industry in the 1960s to control the production of these products. The concept, of course, is that supply equals demand so that we don’t have more or less.

The three pillars of supply management are the control of production, of farm price and of imports. In chicken production, it’s allocated across the country by national agreements negotiated through an organization called Chicken Farmers of Canada. Prices are set by provincial boards, based on production costs in the market. Import controls are developed and administered nationally. There’s no government subsidy to any industry operating under supply management. There never has been, and there won’t be.

By ensuring that every province has production allocation, the consumer is assured that they always have access to local products and that farm-gate prices are maintained at a reasonable parity across this country. B.C., however, is the highest-cost province for chicken production because all of our feed products come in from outside the province. That constitutes…. Close to 70 percent of the production of a chicken is feed.

Without the protection of supply management, the B.C. chicken industry would be significantly reduced, as production would move to areas of lower production costs and maybe another country.

Trade concern is a big item for us. Supply management is truly a Canadian system. It’s provided protection from subsidized imports from the U.S. They’re heavily subsidized to the tune of about $9 billion in the farm bill. It’s a huge subsidy.

Under NAFTA, the U.S. can export to us 7½ percent of Canadian production duty-free, and an additional 2.1 percent has been granted under the new CPTPP. In addition to duty-free TRQ, an extra 7 percent of competitive chicken products enter Canada duty-free as other products mixed in sauce or from spent laying hens and so on. So we’re looking at here somewhere close to 18 percent or more of chicken that can come into this country duty-free and compete with Canadian production. We do not have a closed system.

The Canadian industry is one billion kilograms of production per year compared to 23 billion in the United States. It’s pretty hard to compete with that kind of volume. With such scale, with significant subsidies and a more favourable climate for feed production, Canada cannot compete with the U.S. without the protection of supply management. And it’s essential that the B.C. and Canadian governments resist more imports, as they slowly erode the Canadian chicken industry.

I was very pleased today to see an announcement from the Premier and Minister Popham that the B.C. government supports supply management and will continue to support supply management.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is my presentation. You’ll also be receiving the report on the economic impact of supply management in British Columbia. We have copies for you here.

[5:20 p.m.]

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you. Alistair, do you have any additional comments? You still have a few minutes before we barrage you with questions.

A. Johnston: The one thing I would elaborate on, because I think it has significant importance regionally, since we are in one of the regions of the province, is to reiterate the work that we’ve been doing over the last two or three years on new entrant growers. One of the elements that has driven us forward on this path is to find ways and means by which we can accomplish two or three things. One is to make small and mid-sized chicken farms, family farms, more sustainable from a commercial standpoint, for those who want to move from hobby farming into larger scale.

Secondly, to spread geographically the opportunities for people to contribute to the food supply chain. That’s a really important element, because there isn’t enough concentration in the whole food supply chain when you consider retailers and how that has changed over the last number of years — and to some degree, processors. So it’s fundamentally important in our mind that we take our mandate and interpret it in such a way that we can help support those who have an interest in getting in at a primary producer stage for the production, in this case, of chicken.

That’s yielded significant results in that, as our chair, Robin, has mentioned, we’ve introduced 100 new farmers into chicken farming since 2005. And with the most recent changes we made to the entrant opportunities, I think that provides us with an ongoing impetus to continue to attract the willing minds and the willing hearts and those who really want to stay in the farming business and contribute to a B.C.-made solution to the production of safe and convenient food.

R. Leonard (Chair): All right. Well, thank you very much for your presentation. Now I’ll turn it over, for questions, to the committee.

I. Paton: Thank you, Robin. Thank you, Alistair. A couple of quick questions. Basically, on this trip, we’ve been talking mostly about the different licences — A, B, D and E. Can you quickly explain to the group, here, your processing facilities, where they are in B.C.? I think most of them are in the Lower Mainland, and I take it they’re all federally inspected.

R. Smith: Well, the majority of chicken would be processed through the federal facilities. There’s one on Vancouver Island, there’s one here in Vernon, and the remainder are in the Lower Mainland. The federal facilities, of course, mean that you can process and sell that chicken outside of the province and export it. Secondly, the big retailers only buy from federally inspected plants. We have some, what I’d call medium-size, provincially inspected plants — one in Salmon Arm and one in Vancouver. But almost all commercial chicken goes through federal plants.

I. Paton: Right. Because we’re discussing, on this trip, different licences and different inspections, do you have an opinion, Robin or Alistair, on licences for poultry production on small farms in British Columbia — as far as licensing or inspection provincially?

R. Smith: You know, we don’t get involved with some of the very small provincial licensed operations. But you’ve got to remember that chicken is very susceptible to spoilage, and I think it’s absolutely essential that, whoever processes, it has to be done in a proper fashion and an inspected fashion. I think that’s a very important factor with any food product.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): What are the challenges…? If I’m a chicken producer and I need to book in the abattoir, are there challenges around times when it’s very, very busy versus times when it’s not, particularly if I’m a small producer?

[5:25 p.m.]

I live in this area. What would be the challenges for someone who’s producing birds in this area for the opportunity to have them butchered, or whatever you call it?

R. Smith: First, I would say that there’s no seasonality to chicken whatsoever. Well, some people do produce what we call pasture-raised chicken, which is outside, and of course, they don’t do that in the winter usually. Chickens don’t like rain. They don’t like snow. And other animals like to eat them. It’s not a seasonal problem except for that very small specialized idea.

The transportation of chicken to a processing plant is, of course, critical, which is why you don’t see commercial chicken production very far from the main processing plants. If you’re going to be a commercial chicken farmer, you need to be somewhere close to, or within reasonable distance of, a processing plant. In the Fraser Valley, that’s very easy. On Vancouver Island, there’s the one plant that’s centrally located. Up here, you’ve got two in the Okanagan area. The chicken industry tends to establish itself close to those plants.

A. Johnston: If I could just add to that. One of the things that’s important, especially in light of things like the new entrant grower program and the like…. We set out to give the growers the best opportunity to establish themselves by linking them up and hooking them up in a commercial relationship with a processor.

The processors and their operations are constructed in a way that, first of all, takes account of zero tolerance for quality issues, or lack of quality issues, in the food supply chain. They’re heavily regulated from a food safety perspective.

The other task or other duty they perform is that they work very closely with the farmers, with the growers, to ensure that the birds that come to be processed arrive there in the right condition and that they’re fulfilling all of the animal welfare and animal care requirements — regulations of which are being developed and upgraded on an ongoing basis.

The system is built, brick by brick, to ensure that those who are in the business to make a living at it have access to a credible and certified processor and that that relationship is one of longevity and is not tenuous in any way in that every cycle, they’ve got to go and try and find somebody to slaughter their chicken. By that means, you overcome any challenges of, “We’re too busy to take your chicken today,” because the relationship is already in place and the space is booked well in advance of the date that the birds are moved to the processing.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Just a follow-up question. Certainly we’re hearing, across the province, in regards to small producers…. For big producers, there’s a priority. The service is there. But for small producers, there is challenge, I think, throughout the province in regards to getting appropriate time to get their product processed. In your organization, what percentage of members are small producers?

R. Smith: We don’t actually have members because we regulate the industry. But of the 325 commercial producers, you wouldn’t have anybody with…. You produce chickens in cycles. So it’s eight-week cycles. They really are only raised for about six weeks, and then they’re gone. It’s a short life but a happy one. So those are regulated on an eight-week cycle throughout the year.

When we talk about somebody having 20,000 kilograms — or essentially, say, 10,000 birds — that’s 10,000 birds each cycle. So it’s six times a year. There’s no problem getting people who are commercial growers with 10,000 or more birds into a plant. There is no processor who would say: “I don’t want you.” Unless you happen to be one of the worst performers, at which point, we probably would take away your licence. Because we regulate, if you screw up, then you’re out.

[5:30 p.m.]

R. Leonard (Chair): I just have one last question before we move on to the next presenter.

Under the quota system with supply management, do you have quotas? We’ve heard a few small chicken farmers say that this is an issue for them — that they aren’t able to get enough quota to be viable on a small scale.

R. Smith: Well, as I said, if you have less than 200 birds, we don’t regulate you at all.

A Voice: Two thousand.

R. Smith: No, less than 200; 200 is anybody. Anyone can have 200 birds but then….

R. Leonard (Chair): At it, per year.

R. Smith: Per year. Or if you go up to 2,000, which is about 170 permit growers, they…. We’ve never had any one of them come to us and say: “I don’t know where to get my chickens processed.” Then we’d probably help them. But they, too…. We have certain regulations for them. Once you go over 2,000 birds per year, you have to have quota. Yes, you have to buy quota. Or you become a new entrant, and you get it for free.

We have people that go onto our list to become a new entrant. We have regional areas, and what we try to do is to ensure that we have enough producers in an area to supply a chicken farm processor. So we try to maintain everything in balance. You can buy your way into the industry by buying quota, or you can apply to be a new entrant and get a quantity for free. Seems like a good deal to get free quota.

A. Johnston: One last thing, if I may, Madam Chair, is that we’re very empathetic to those who aspire to become chicken producers. That empathy, however, has to be tem­pered by the absolutely urgent and kind of unshakeable belief and need to make sure that the food supply chain is safe.

It’s great to have people who want to make and grow less than 200 birds a year and perhaps sell them at farm markets and the like. But our job as an industry is to make sure that if Madam and Mr. Consumer come and buy chicken, they can eat it and consume it with the absolute certainty that it’s coming from a place where it’s safe. The correct practices….

The opportunity to acquire quota for those who want to be in the business is more compelling than any other place in Canada, I would suggest.

R. Leonard (Chair): Okay. Thank you very, very much. Appreciate it.

Next on our list we have Spray Creek Ranch, Tristan Banwell. Hello, Tristan.

T. Banwell: Hi.

R. Leonard (Chair): I just want to welcome you. I understand you’re one of hers.

T. Banwell: I’m a constituent.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): You bet.

SPRAY CREEK RANCH

T. Banwell: Great. Thank you all for serving us, as the public of British Columbia, and especially for undertaking this trip around the province. I tend to be an optimist in terms of my thinking that, hopefully, this process will get our feedback in and move things forward. And thanks, to everybody else who’s here. It’s really encouraging to see this level of support out here for agriculture and everybody’s interests.

My name is Tristan Banwell. With my wife, Aubyn, we operate Spray Creek Ranch, which is based in Lillooet. We provide local markets with diverse meats of known provenance and unparalleled quality. That’s the mission statement at my business. We market our products throughout our regional district, which is the Squamish-Lillooet regional district. We currently sell our products at the Squamish, Whistler, Pemberton and Lillooet farmers markets.

We raise beef, chicken, turkeys, laying hens, pigs. We process these animals in our on-farm slaughter facility. I have a class D slaughter licence that I operate under, primarily for my poultry. We also work with some of the class A abattoirs, people who are in this room, for processing our beef and pork.

We’ve been on our farm for…. This is our fifth season of operation. We’ve just seen tremendous support in our customers for the type of products that we’re raising. We’re certified organic. We raise our animals out on pasture. We also have a third-party animal welfare certification called Animal Welfare Approved, which is really the gold standard for animal welfare.

We have a strong customer base that’s looking for this type of product. They care that it’s produced locally. They care that it’s produced on a small farm, that it’s raised ethically, that the animals have access to the outdoors — all of these things that you might consider. People want their food to come from this type of system.

[5:35 p.m.]

Of course, there are challenges with that. We have difficult-to-access markets. We’re geographically isolated. We’re far from abattoirs. The class A abattoirs that we access are 2½ hours in one direction, and our markets are 2½ to 3½ or four hours in the other direction, of course.

In our province, we have unique challenges related to meat production and processing, yet around the Lillooet area, we have huge amounts of agricultural land that could be brought into production. We see lots of land sitting fallow, lots of land on the reserves and private land that could be put into production and serve these markets.

The couple of things I want to talk to you about today are really on the point that I’m at in my business. We’re in production in these different species. We’re poised to increase our productivity and meet demand. And we have a lot more demand for our products than we can meet right now. We’ve had to turn down larger buyers who are looking at our products because we simply can’t supply the amount that they want.

I want to talk to you a little bit about some of the barriers to growth that we see. We’re not limited for our growth by our land base. We have plenty of farmland. We’re not limited by our access to capital right now. We have good business partners. Even labour — we’re sorted right now. We have the people that we need to do the work. We feel like we have an effective business model, and we want to continue to grow it.

I was enthused to hear from the Chicken Marketing Board there. With our turkeys, laying hens and broiler chickens, we’re beholden to three different marketing boards. You can imagine that for a small, diverse farm, the regulatory overhead starts to become somewhat burdensome. But we feel like we can meet those demands. We can get all the paperwork in. We can do the things we need to do.

Since you’ve just heard from the Chicken Marketing Board, I’ll speak maybe more to the small-lot permit process for the eggs. We do have a permit, like they just mentioned. We raise 2,000 broiler chickens per year. The maximum you can do for laying hens is 400 under a small-lot permit. For turkeys, it’s 300 turkeys. So we have all of those permits, and we raise that number of birds in each of those categories.

If you look across the border to Alberta…. This year their turkey marketing board just reduced the small-lot permit number from 300 turkeys to 100. For me, that was really concerning to see — that in 2018, we’re limiting access to small producer’s growth at a time when the market demand for these products is exploding. That’s really worrisome to me. I would want to see those numbers going up.

I will say that getting the small-lot permit for the broilers was an easy process. It was not difficult. It was doable. For the laying small-lot permit — onerous and difficult. It took me several years to find out exactly what two week window they open for their application process for a permit every year. It costs over 12 to 15 times as much to get my small-lot permit for 400 laying hens as it does to get one for 2,000 broiler chickens. It really felt obstructionist to me.

If you wanted to go to the next level in laying hens, the process to become a new entrant, which we were hearing that a little bit described…. For the laying system, for the Egg Marketing Board, the process is to do your application. First you have to be a small-lot permit holder, like I am. Then just last year they opened the new entrant applications for the first time in four years, I believe — five years. To my understanding, there were about 85 applicants, and they accepted four or five new entrants. So it’s something to look into a little bit more — whether there actually is access to get into these markets.

I don’t know what the solution is, whether it’s increasing the small-lot permit numbers. I certainly would not want to see them go down. But ensuring that there is actually an active flow of producers being able to get in at those small levels…. I’m not talking about a medium-scale producer. Then those people who access that quota are given 3,000 to 5,000 laying hens of quota. But a producer in my situation, with 400, doesn’t want 3,000. I could see 1,000. We sell out of eggs every single time we go to the farmer’s market. But I don’t need 5,000, and I don’t want a barn.

I thought that was kind of an interesting story to share with you. Something to look into a little bit more.

Then I want to talk a little bit about processing. I think you probably hear everywhere you go that there is not enough capacity. I think that there are a lot of people in the room who are going to speak to the perspective from a class A or B facility.

[5:40 p.m.]

From my perspective, my on-farm slaughter licence — I’ve been operating that for several years now. It has made it possible for us to enter this market. The overhead costs have been relatively low, which has been excellent for us to be able to access markets.

I want to point out to everybody that a lot of people who are operating a class A or B facility all started off the same. We all started off killing a pig in our backyard, you know. It’s really hard. You are not going to start off by stepping into building a $1 million abattoir. That’s just simply not how it works on a small-scale farm. There need to be opportunities for farmers to do this type of on-farm slaughter and be supported to do it in a safe and effective manner.

I want to also point out the paramount importance of food safety for all of us. When we think about the food safety concerns all of us have, you can understand that probably nobody feels it more strongly than a small-scale meat producer. I sit across the table from my customer, and I hand every piece of meat to the person who’s going to be eating it. If I were to provide a compromised product into the marketplace or have any sort of quality issue with those whatsoever, imagine the impact on my business, my family. We need to overall, above all, ensure that that food going out of our facilities is safe, and we need to be supported in a way to do that.

In our class D slaughter facility right now, the limit of 25,000 pounds, live weight, of animals, to me, seems a bit arbitrary. We are pushed right up against that limit with our small-lot turkeys, our small-lot chickens and then culling our laying hens. That pretty much takes us right to that limit. We don’t have any more capacity for pigs. We don’t have any more capacity for beef, even if we wanted to do it.

The other thing there is that we’ve been waiting to hear if the cut-and-wrap portion is going to come under the Ministry of Agriculture. I would definitely urge the consideration that all slaughter facilities in the province — regardless of where they are, where they’re located and what their scale is — should all be regulated under the same agency. I don’t really understand why we’re under a regional health authority, whereas a class A facility is under the Ministry of Agriculture.

I also don’t really understand why the Ministry of Agriculture is regulating slaughter and the regional health authority is regulating cut-and-wrap. I really believe we should bring it all under one roof so that we’re talking to one person, looking at one face and dealing with one set of rules.

Just as a super-simple example, Interior Health — totally fine with the nice big wooden butcher’s-block cutting table that we have. The Ministry of Agriculture, with the provincial meat inspection agency — absolutely not. Why? I don’t know. I don’t know the science behind it. I don’t know the reasoning or why there are two different…. I’ve got two different people walking in that building with two different opinions, and I think that creates unnecessary risk and uncertainty for people trying to grow a business.

I guess I’ll try to cut and wrap it up for you. I believe that it should be brought under one roof, and I also just don’t see the justification for preventing farmers in some areas from accessing the same options for on-farm slaughter. I really think that there should be a standard across the board that we can produce safe food in a small-scale on-farm slaughter situation. Our traceability is excellent. We know every single one of our customers. Our ability, in the event of a recall, would be so much more effective than in a Maple Leaf Foods–type of situation, where it’s going on CBC. If it’s safe for one producer to do it in one area of the province, it’s safe for another producer in another area.

Let’s look at how we can standardize it across the board, bring it under one roof and then provide these opportunities to farms around the province. I think that we would see, growing out of that, facilities like mine. I hope to eventually attain a class A slaughter licence, but I can’t do that over­night. I have to start with this small-scale on-farm slaughter and build it from there.

Those are a few things I wanted to share with you guys. I’m happy to take any questions.

R. Leonard (Chair): You can absolutely bring in a submission as well, provide a submission, if there any further comments. In the meantime, we have an opportunity for questions.

T. Banwell: I thought maybe you wanted to try my chicken. That was the submission.

R. Leonard (Chair): Well, that could come too.

D. Routley: Thanks a lot, Tristan. I really appreciate the information.

You mentioned multiple standards of inspections. Some of the facilities that I represent have had that problem, where one inspector comes in and says, “You need a three-inch drain,” and with the next one, it’s a four-inch drain. The floor gets hammered out, and all that kind of thing happens. When the ministry spoke to us before we started this tour, I asked them about that. They said that they sort of keep an eye on what the inspectors are doing and try to keep control of it that way.

[5:45 p.m.]

I used to build houses. I know we had the same thing with building inspectors, you know. If you got a certain building inspector, you were essentially screwed for a while. So maybe we should change that.

R. Leonard (Chair): The lesson is: speak less, and ask questions faster.

D. Routley: Yeah, okay, but do you support some way of reaching out to the supervisory level and being able to get some feedback on individual inspectors?

T. Banwell: That’s an interesting idea. Let me tell you the honest truth about the inspections currently, the situation for a class D slaughter facility. We had a visit from inspectors from Interior Health when we took our SlaughterSafe training. It was incredibly well attended. We had over 20 attendees in our Lillooet area. There’s a massive interest in this type of opportunity for places that are really geographically cut off like ours. To my knowledge, only one of those other producers, thus far, has gone on to attain their class D, but the others are looking at that option.

They visited our farm at that time. They looked at our systems and made some recommendations and things. Then we submitted our food safety plans. They came back out one more time. We submitted our water test. We’ve never seen them since, and I don’t expect that we will. That’s the honest truth of that.

That’s disappointing to me, because I actually found the relationship with having an inspector there, looking at the facility, was really useful. We learned things from them that we didn’t know. I thought that was really important. I don’t expect that we will see them again because of our geographic location and the way the system is laid out. So as far as having different relationships with individual inspectors, we just haven’t had them. I think that that’s a big challenge.

I’ll just tag on to that that we do think that there’s room for additional regulatory oversight of this type of slaughter. An example I’ll give you, which I gave to this fellow over here for a recent article in Country Life, was that I think it would be really valuable, for a small producer — even if it was going to continue in an uninspected fashion on slaughter days — that at least a test kill be inspected to ensure that the operator actually knows what they’re doing. That’s a great opportunity for feedback that’s going to improve the operations of that farm.

Does that answer your question?

D. Routley: It does, yeah. Thanks.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Well, Tristan, it’s great to see you. It’s great to have you in Lillooet. I visited Tristan’s farm as an MLA and learned that you can name hogs and you can whistle and they’ll follow you as you walk around. It’s a very, very interesting place to be.

I guess the thing for us is: as a young producer, what are the kinds of things that we should be considering to make it easier for you to do your business? Lillooet is an up-and-coming young farmer’s area, and it’s great to see the interest in agriculture. What are the barriers? What are one or two things that you could recommend to us that could make that difference, besides the one ministry being in charge of inspections?

T. Banwell: I think anything that you can do to support something like apprentices or new labour on farms. We have hired, this year, two students from the Thompson Rivers University applied sustainable ranching diploma program. We’ve also looked at working with a young woman who graduated from the Thompson Rivers University meat cutting program, the commercial meat cutting. I think that anybody who has trained new workers knows that there are additional risks associated with that. There’s a lot of time and overhead.

I can tell you for sure that they don’t come out of these university programs…. I kind of bugged my wife about how it didn’t seem like there was that much practical knowledge there. She said: “You’re missing the point. This is the applied part of the applied sustainable ranching diploma. It’s them working here on our ranch.”

Supporting apprenticeships, with either some sort of help in connecting producers with a wage-matching program or something to absorb some of the overhead of trying to train these new people…. Those are the people who are going to go on and turn those other adjacent, abandoned lands beside me into farms. That would be my one, right there, that’s kind of outside of the realm of the slaughter-facility stuff.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you for all your comments and giving us that perspective.

Next we have the B.C. Cattlemen’s Association — Mr. Kevin Boon. Welcome. How are you today?

B.C. CATTLEMEN’S ASSOCIATION

K. Boon: Good. I’m kind of disappointed that Robin left. He and I like to take digs at one another every now and again, so I’m going to do it even though he’s not here. It’s a little story about two coyotes that meet in the middle of the field. One is turning circles looking at his hind end. The other says: “What happened? Did you get shot?” He says: “No, I ate a chicken down the road, and I’m trying to get the taste out of my mouth.”

[5:50 p.m.]

N. Simons: That’s on Hansard now there, Kevin.

K. Boon: I’d first of all like to thank you for the opportunity to present to you today. I’m Kevin Boon, general manager of B.C. Cattlemen’s Association. We represent over 1,100 cattle producers in British Columbia, which represents about 82 percent of the beef that is raised here.

One of the challenges I have here in presenting to you today is the fact that for pretty much every one of the classes, our members utilize the different ones. So to come forward and give you one definitive answer is extremely hard.

I think that what I want to try and concentrate on is some of the things that will make our industry stronger and some of the things that we would like to present to you for consideration in whatever you decide on the licensing aspect of meat inspection.

First off, I’m going to talk about…. Primarily in B.C., we have about 15 percent of the land that is utilizable for agriculture, and about 85 percent of that is utilized by the cattle industry. We are the biggest stakeholder as far as land use, and the reason is that we primarily use forage. We’re not a huge grain-producing province, and that has its limits, which I’ll address in a little bit here.

Forage production and enhancing that is primarily our main focus in how we can grow our industry. It is extremely important to us. Actually, it’s beneficial to the province. If you think about it, we turn a cow out with a little calf at its foot in the spring. It grazes its way up a mountain, and it grazes its way back down in the fall. It brings back with it about 600 pounds of protein. That’s pretty efficient and pretty good when it comes to the carbon credits on that.

We are seeing an increase in the populations in rural British Columbia, causing what we refer to as an urbanization mindset and a lack of understanding of some of the aspects of rural life. To accommodate this, we not only need to look at things like meat inspection and that; we have to look at some of the aspects around the Trespass Act and fencing requirements. It’s because as we see more urban people move into rural, we’ll see higher conflicts, and it will restrict our ability just to produce livestock and food products for the general public.

As I addressed earlier, we primarily utilize grass. While it’s a good form of protein and it’s essential to what we do, it is also one of the things that is limited, and we have a real challenge if we want to finish cattle. It’s part of the reason why the grain industry and grain feeding has become a big and important factor in cattle production. Not only is it efficient, but the other aspect of it that we have a little bit over grass-fed is the fact that we can create a more consistent product. With grass-fed, various types of grass create different flavours, and one of the things that we know is that consumers like consistency. They like to know what comes.

Grass feeding is a very important part. Finishing is a very important part of our industry here in British Columbia. But it has its limits and is a niche, so we have to be able to accommodate that while being able to understand the other aspects.

One of the things we really need to do is increase our capacity to actually finish cattle. The only way we can do that is by developing a better feedlot system. We have currently about a 50,000-head capacity of feedlot. However, it is not utilized for finishing the cattle, only for backgrounding them, for the most part.

One of the challenges with a lot of our provincial packing facilities is consistent supply throughout the entire year. They have real opportunities and are very busy during the fall run, when we see these grass cattle and finished cattle coming in. But a lot of the rest of the time of the year, they’re challenged. It’s very hard to run a business when you’re only running at a limited capacity.

In the same aspect, our capacity for slaughter is very restricted and limited within the province, partly due to the supply. The supply chain has to come up for us to really properly utilize it. In British Columbia, roughly, the numbers we work on is that about 10 percent is processed here in the province. It might be a little higher. I think that some of the others will have better stats than I do on that.

[5:55 p.m.]

In that 10 percent, it’s very limited. So 90 percent of our cattle tend to leave the province, either to the U.S. or Alberta, to be processed and then come back in. Another portion of this, which I’ll address in a little bit, too, is the lack of a federal facility. So we can’t cross those borders. However, when we stop and take a very close look at what that does to us, it leaves us with an inability to add value to our product and to really capitalize on what we are doing in the product that we’re creating here within the province. So this is part of what we want to do.

When we go forward too, we have to look at the fact that while we would like to feed all of British Columbians B.C. beef, the fact of the matter is that our province consumes more than we produce. So there is a huge opportunity for us to increase our production here and actually make that happen.

When we stop and look at the different classes that are out there…. As I say, I’m going to be very careful, because no matter what I do, I’m going to tick off one of our members and make another one happy.

R. Leonard (Chair): Welcome to our world.

K. Boon: I sympathize.

In this, there are different factors. Number one, we cannot deny the economics. The fact is that in a class A, B licensing system, we’re going to have a much larger investment in infrastructure, in training, in staffing and in running it. We also have higher costs in things like waste disposal, so operating costs go up.

In that, we have a real investment in a business that a lot of those doing it really depend on, and it supports the community. Some of our class A and B licences are actually developed by guys…. One of them here today, Paul Devick, is in the process of building his own facility. They have developed their own markets for their own cattle, and they’re doing a real registered gate to plate but on a larger scale.

I listened to the previous speaker, and I have to take my hat off to him. These are the types of producers that we need out there and that are willing to go to work and do it. Paul and family are doing it on a larger scale, and they’re making it so that their ranch can be sustainable. They are longtime ranchers in the province, and they found a way to add value. And at the end of day, that means sustainability. How do we add value, and in what manner?

That cost of investment…. When the small guy with the class D and E will have limited investment, the guy down the road that’s got an A or B has a major one. But if those little guys or the A or B have a disease outbreak, an E. coli, some sort of a food safety issue, we’ll all pay, including those of our producers that are shipping those cattle out of the jurisdiction to be slaughtered and processed. It will hurt the entire cattle production area, so we need to be careful.

That brings me to the point of one of the paramount things that you have to really consider in this: food safety. In that, there needs to be an inspection, and there needs to be a process of training, education and constant assistance to any class in there to ensure that it’s being done properly and being done safely.

Along with that comes animal welfare. In today’s age, where we are scrutinized for everything that we do, it’s extremely important that we do it right. So animal welfare — how we process these cattle and the visual of it — is extremely important to us. We need to make certain that that is all done accordingly. I would also agree with the fact that it needs to be under one roof. Having it split up between different agencies and different ministries is nothing but confusing, and it creates an opportunity for inconsistency. The more we work under one set of rules under one roof, the better opportunity we have to create a consistent and quality product.

When I go back to the fact that we want to keep B.C. beef in B.C…. Primarily, we know that our best market is always at home. However, we also know that the cutability of beef is determined…. The profitability is determined by how we cut it. In a lot of ways, I consider our industry and processing our cattle as a chop shop. We take and we cut that product into a couple of hundred different cuts, and we market that to the best market that’s available.

You know, we can….

R. Leonard (Chair): Just to let you know, half a minute left.

K. Boon: Half a minute. Well, I’d better hurry.

The big thing for us in this is knowing that that inspection is there, knowing that we can do it.

[6:00 p.m.]

A federal plant is there. You asked a question in the submission about how we can align with federal. Do we really want to? If we do, then maybe you just make everybody federal, and that’s going to put most of these guys out of business because they won’t be able to comply and they won’t be able to do it — economics to scale. It can’t be different. We have to have the same food safety, and we have to have the same inspection criteria for animal health and welfare. But let’s look at how we can create that here at home as well.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much, Mr. Boon. Now we have five minutes of opportunity for members to ask questions.

D. Barnett: Thank you for the presentation, Kevin. I really don’t have too many questions, because we seem to talk quite often. But in listening to the young gentleman before you, it really warmed the cockles of my heart to see that the sustainable ranching program was being a big benefit to young people. How do you foresee the future of this program? We’ve had it for three years now. It took a lot of work to get it. Do you feel that it’s being a real benefit to our young people?

K. Boon: Absolutely. I think that there’s no denying that any education we can get, the better. I think he also pointed out that it’s not all learned in the classroom, and that’s one of the things that is a major benefit to that program. It gets them out and about.

There’s no denying that the passing down from generation to generation has always been there. But as we lose some of our producers, as they amalgamate and make bigger operations, we lose some of that. I always say that the older I got, the smarter my dad got. It’s a matter of…. We have to realize that when we’re young, we know it all, and we’re constantly learning. I think that that’s a very important factor in here.

R. Leonard (Chair): Any other questions?

M. Morris: Just one, Kevin. Capacity in British Columbia — are we at 60 percent, 80 percent? How much room do we have for growth in B.C. with the cattle industry?

K. Boon: To give you some stats, our highest number of cows that we’ve had breeding stock was in 2010, and we hit about 320,000, a little more than that. Our current numbers are 200,000, but our average, year over year, is about 260,000. It’s about what we average sustainably. We have the potential to grow back to that 300,000, as far as what our grass allows us to.

When I talk about developing, though, the feeding indus­try — and you mentioned a federal plant — we are in the pro­cess of trying to facilitate that going through. If we were to develop that feeding industry and keep those at home, actually, our economic impact would nearly double to what we are right now.

The added benefit to that is we would give the grain industry, especially in the Peace and in the areas to the west of Prince George, a real opportunity to vary what their rotation of crops are. Instead of just growing all canola, it would give a value to that barley to do it. It would be a multifaceted way of improving the agriculture that’s here. But we have lots of room to grow yet.

I. Paton: Thank you, Kevin. I apologize. I really wanted to get up to Smithers last week, but it just didn’t work out for me. I hope you guys had a really good convention up there.

K. Boon: We had a great show up there.

I. Paton: When we talk — and you and I have spoken about this — there’s a heck of a pile of land in the ALR in B.C. that’s Crown land and a lot of land that’s sitting in forestry. I think you guys have admitted that in order to increase the herd size, if we can get expansion of our ranches onto Crown land for grazing pasture on Crown lands and whatnot that are in the ALR, that’s pretty important. We can build the herd size that way.

I certainly like the idea of…. If we can start finishing some cattle in B.C. without having to background them and ship them off to Alberta by getting some grain products down from the Peace and whatnot, it would be a good thing. But, of course, we need facilities to be able to kill and cut and wrap finished steers in B.C. Can you just speak briefly on what I mentioned about Crown lands and grazing?

K. Boon: Absolutely. One of the things we put into the recent ALR submission is Crown land that’s in ALR, we feel, needs to be prioritized where agriculture is a priority on that. If we are restricted, or if the ALR is to be successful, it needs to applied equally over private land and over Crown land. The priority on that land needs to be for agriculture. The majority or a lot of that ALR land that’s out there is, in a lot of cases, on the side of the mountain and not utilized or acceptable for anything else other than grazing.

[6:05 p.m.]

On another initiative, forage enhancement is one that we’ve been pushing hard. We have a timber protocol or a timber plan out there where they’re able to assess how much timber is there and be able to monitor it and do their cuts as such. We have no such protocol for grass.

We need to be able to implement policy that regulates or has a factor that oversees the amount of production of grass we have. That can go in how much we produce in different varieties and different areas but also in the canopy and stuff. So it needs to have an initiative there, as well, for that.

R. Leonard (Chair): Okay. Well, thank you very much. We appreciate your time coming out and sharing again.

K. Boon: Thank you for the opportunity.

R. Leonard (Chair): The next person on the list is Valley Wide Meats — Richard Yntema. What’s the heritage?

R. Yntema: Dutch.

R. Leonard (Chair): Welcome. We’ll listen carefully.

VALLEY WIDE MEATS

R. Yntema: My name is Richard Yntema. I’m the owner of Valley Wide Meats near Enderby, B.C. We are a class A licensed slaughter facility. Back in the day when the government moved forward with implementing a meat inspection program provincewide, we stepped up and upgraded our facility to meet the requirements, at a great expense, and obtained our class A licence in August of 2008.

We are a small, family-owned facility in our region that offers a valuable kill, cut and wrap service for all red meat that farmers produce. We employ five to seven workers in our operation. We have, every year, seen our business grow. We have of late been having a big challenge in filling three vacancies for our staff. We are looking for one meat wrapper, one experienced meat cutter and one slaughterman.

Hearing that the government wants to expand the D and E licences in various regions of the province, I’m strongly opposed to do this, for the following reasons. It will further weaken my already fragile business, as it will take business away from us. How is it a level playing field when they are not built to the same standards as class A or class B licensed plants? How can they have access to the same markets we enjoy when there’s no inspection on animals that are processed in these facilities?

That comes down to food safety, because these people market their animals either at farmers markets or farm-gate sales. How can self-reporting and self-inspection work when human nature is such that you see, hear and do what you want to do? Writing down the right answers in self-audited reports and records is just wrong. A farmer having a fox guarding a henhouse will simply not have any chickens after a time.

These facilities will also not need brand inspection and not have inspection on humane handling of animals, no inspection on the health of animals, no monitoring of diseases like BSE — otherwise, mad cow disease — scrapie or other related diseases.

We were promised a robust and enhanced meat inspection system for the province. It will be impossible, in my mind, to run two parallel standards for meat inspection and get the result that consumers expect and need. If the public loses confidence in what the industry is doing, we will all be losers — licensed plants and unlicensed plants and also the D and E licences.

The economic loss on that is far greater than what we would ever make on providing the service for producers. How can class A and B licensed plants compete with D and E licences when we have to follow all the regulatory requirements laid out in our required standard operating procedures? In my region, I will lose business.

[6:10 p.m.]

In closing, I would like to say we need to collectively work in educating and helping our producers in becoming better farmers, in humane handling of animals, feeding and finishing animals.

One comment I can make…. I’m not sure on the exact percentage. Sixty percent of my customers’ beef is not satisfactorily finished, and therefore, it cannot be graded. We need to educate the small producers so that they can market and sell their beef and not sell substandard beef to the public. That’s probably an education process where we can, through workshops, teach them how to raise beef.

Traditionally, my business is so swamped with work from about July to March. That’s because, basically, hobby farmers want to get their animals to market or to get processed. I simply don’t have the manpower to help everybody in my region in short time.

My challenge is, okay, what do I say Monday morning, ex­pecting a Friday afternoon booking? It’s like: “Sorry, I can’t help you.” “Well, what about next week?” “Can’t help you there either.” “What about next month?” “No.” Sometimes they’re like: “What are you talking about? I’ve got this animal ready.” It’s just like: “Yeah, you and 50,000 other people.”

The challenge is to get everybody helped on that aspect. But they’ve got to realize, too, that we are a class A facility, yes, but we’re not big at all. Our kill floor is 18 feet by 18 feet. We have three people maximum on that kill floor. I mean, the perception that we’re only big processors is completely false.

For me, the biggest challenge right now is to get workers working in this business. That’s because, again, lots of people are family people. How can I offer them possibly eight, maybe nine, months of work, and then the rest they’re on EI? Or wait till it picks up, and if your benefits run out, tough. That’s a real challenge.

We are willing to work with the issues. We want to support producers. Hearing Tristan’s story…. To me, he needs to apply for an A licence, and then, basically, that whole region will be serviced, with possibly growing into a bigger plant that can take the capacity that’s being produced in that area.

Again, meat inspection is paramount. You cannot have a person self-inspecting, because that’s just human nature. We need a third party arm’s-length away so that when we do have an animal with questionable condition, either from a humane point of view or there’s a disease…. “Okay, well, let’s just close our eyes, trim off what is not acceptable. The rest is all good. Let’s put it into the food chain.”

My biggest worry is that if substandard product enters the food chain and something does go completely sideways, we’re all going to be painted with the same brush, and we will all be losers on that aspect.

That’s it.

R. Leonard (Chair): Okay. Well, thank you very much. Very well said.

R. Singh: Thank you so much for your presentation. I have two questions. First, you said you have heard that the government is expanding the E licences. Where has that come from?

R. Yntema: Well, the thing is that when I started the whole process back in 2006, there were regulatory conditions that…. I was promised a five-hour radius around my plant that no one else would be able to set up a class A or B licence. That completely changed.

My neighbour was fast-tracked, and they’ve only got a seasonal poultry operation. They lasted one year, and now they’ve sold their equipment because they found out that it’s simply not a viable business model that they can deal with.

Hearing that they want to open up the province for D and E licences because people claim that they can’t get their animals to my facility or I cannot handle it…. It’s not true at all. I mean, you can’t expect everybody to come rushing in, and then I have to hire 50,000 people to run for two months.

[6:15 p.m.]

The biggest challenge, too, is that the reason why they can’t get their animals to my place is that a lot of them — we’re talking small hobby firms — don’t have a corral system. That speaks volumes as to: how do they humanely handle animals on their little operation when they get sick or when there’s a piece of barbed wire wrapped around their leg? They can’t handle them. They’d rather shoot them in the field, bring them to a D and E licence that has no meat inspectors and carry on.

R. Singh: My second question is the challenges that you were mentioning. We have heard from many other people in the last few days about the challenges. You are a class A facility. What do you think can be done, and what can the government do, to break those barriers that you are facing?

R. Yntema: I think a lot has to do with education to the producers, understanding that probably 50 percent of my customers are repeat customers. A lot of them will book a year in advance, just to get that key date or that key week. There’s a little bit of fudge factor in that.

It’s totally education. We’ve had people that, when Valley Auction in Armstrong was still open for business, after Thursday’s sale would show up in my yard with their livestock trailer with an animal in it. “Can we drop it off?” “Okay, and your name is? Do you have a booking?” “Well, no.” “Oh okay. Here’s the problem. No booking, we can’t help you.”

We’ve tried to educate our producers, too, to say: “Hey, look. The key busy season is this and this. If you can start to produce an animal in the shoulder seasons, to extend our operation time frame, it becomes better for everybody.” Then we can handle a lot more business. I can keep my workers having steady work.

It’s a real challenge, because a lot of the hobby farmers are only trying to get limited farm-loss status as a hobby farmer. They have nine-to-five jobs in the cities or in the towns and don’t derive most of their income from their farming operations. I understand that. But I mean, for us to cater to them won’t make my business model viable.

N. Simons: I really appreciate your focus on the need for education.

There are some contradictions, not within your statements but from what we’ve heard over the couple of days. One is that the small producers care nothing more than to make sure that the people they sell to are getting a good product, and the small farmer is more concerned about that because of their personal relationship. On the other hand is the need to look out, because they might be getting away with sloppy practices. There’s sort of an interesting kind of challenge.

Then you’re busy ten months of the year, and people can’t get in. What happens? Is that why there are Ds and Es out there, or if there weren’t the Ds and Es, would you be able to…? How would they be accommodated?

R. Yntema: Yeah, that is a very good and difficult question. The thing is that it’s all connected.

Five years ago I didn’t have a labour shortage. Then two of my main meat cutters back in the day…. Okay, I can only pay so much money, because I’m a small plant. I can’t even offer benefits. So the oil patch, oil boom — boom! — they’re gone. They’re driving a rock truck for 45 bucks an hour, benefits up the yingyang, overtime. I mean, I can’t even pay overtime because the thing is…. Okay, how can I explain to you, if you bring a beef into me: “Sorry, Nicholas. Your beef was done on overtime. Therefore, instead of 85 cents a pound cut-and-wrapped, it’s now $1.40”?

You know what I’m saying? It’s a multifaceted solution. The thing is, educating people about producing good-quality beef, you don’t fall into it one, two, three. You need to be trained or brought up in the business.

We’ve had people that have come in and dropped off a beef, and then they say: “Hey, Richard, that beef is triple-A, right?” “Well, what makes you say that?” “Well, look at it. It’s triple-A.”

Well, we can only grade it when it’s cut in half, and we take measurements from the muscles and the measurements from the fat and grade it triple-A, double-A, single-A or no grade, right? Just to look at the animal from the outside — that’s not how you grade an animal.

[6:20 p.m.]

It’s that education process, again, of workers. Right now the gears are stuck in my business. I cannot grow the business because I can’t source out skilled labour. Back in the day, too, various processors were able to go through the temporary foreign worker program and apply to get workers from Mexico, the Philippines, Europe. Those programs are all finished, and it’s so hard to get workers from outside this country to fill these positions.

I went through the program two years ago. I spent $7,000 of my money, and I was turned down, because it was deemed that there were Canadians that have the skill set that was needed for my positions. I just had to find them.

I have ongoing postings in the B.C. jobs offices for it, and the phone is not ringing. It’s, like, I want to hire three people. I’d like to pay them more, but then I have to charge more too.

All those facets. It’s not just a simple answer, saying: “Okay, if the government does this, all our problems are solved.” Not at all.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you. We have time for one quick question here. I appreciate the answer, though.

I. Paton: This is probably our sixth get-together in 2½ days. I think our task is getting more and more difficult. We see situations such as yours, which is great. I think we’re all very happy to see inspections. Then you see Tristan, who spoke to us earlier, and he paints a picture of somebody that’s really passionate about what they do, and they’re providing a really good product. But he’s in an area that’s a long ways away from an abattoir and a long ways away from a provincial inspector.

As much as we’d like to recreate the livestock industry in B.C. and get more people involved, we saw examples in the last couple of days of, I’ve got to admit, horror stories. Guys with D and E licences say: “Well, I don’t really have a facility. I kill the steer in the field. I load it up in the front-end loader, and I start skinning it out.” And you go: “Wow.” How do you compare that D or E licence with Tristan, who is doing a great job?

It’s going to be a difficult task to figure out where to go with this.

R. Leonard (Chair): So just a comment.

Well, then, thank you very much, Richard. We really appreciate the opportunity to hear your comments.

Next we have Julia Smith.

J. Smith: I wanted to be a whole lot better organized for this, but here’s what you get.

R. Leonard (Chair): We’re happy to hear from you.

JULIA SMITH

J. Smith: Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. My name is Julia Smith, and I raise heritage hogs on pasture and woodlands just southwest of Merritt.

My partner and I found our way to farming without the benefit of generations of family experience that most farmers have. We’ve only known the meat industry post-2008, so it was with a whole lot of enthusiasm and passion, not a whole lot of practical good sense, that we found ourselves riding the wave of the buy-local movement through the better part of this decade.

We raised a couple of pigs at our produce farm in south Burnaby in 2012 and quickly grew that side of our business until meat overtook vegetable production. We raised chickens, ducks, geese, a few sheep, rabbits and pigs. It wasn’t long before we realized that our local butcher shops couldn’t handle the volume of meat we processed. At that time, we were having our animals killed in the Fraser Valley and weren’t having any trouble booking kill dates. So we bought a butcher shop and started cutting our own meat and meat for other local farmers.

We lost our poultry processing pretty quickly after that. We’d been having a lot of trouble booking dates for our ducks for a while, and then we lost our chicken processing altogether. We applied for a class E licence for rabbit processing but were turned down due to municipal opposition.

Conflict between our farming activities and our municipality escalated to the point where we were served a cease-and-desist order instructing us to shut down our farm stand, due entirely to the municipality’s lack of understanding around the rules of the ALR. We were even told that meat isn’t an agricultural product.

As a struggling small farm, we were in no position to fight city hall. I know that we’re not alone in this type of experience. Across the province, municipal and regional bylaws continue to be a thorn in the side of small-scale producers. It isn’t reasonable to expect farmers to educate bureaucrats. I’d love to see the Ministry of Agriculture taking a more active role in advocating for and supporting farmers in these types of conflicts.

[6:25 p.m.]

In spite of our challenges, our customer base continued to grow, and in 2015, we purchased bare land in the ALR, in the Nicola Valley, so we could expand our pork production. We had a solid business plan and growing market demand. We borrowed a lot of money, scaled up our breeding program and started building infrastructure as quickly as we could.

A serious accident on the farm put me out of commission long enough that we had to close the butcher shop, and we quickly realized that we were facing the butchering bottleneck again. Our local abattoir cannot consistently handle the number of animals we need to kill in order to make a profit, and the next closest option’s 2½ hours away on a good day. That might not be so bad in the spring or fall, but hauling livestock on the Coquihalla in the winter is downright dangerous. The heat of summer can be almost as bad.

The other problem with our other option is that they don’t do cut-and-wrap, and about half of my market is direct to consumer, so being able to get my meat cut is essential.

We can’t get a class D because we’re not in one of the ten designated regions that allow class D. We can’t get a class E because we have a local abattoir. Even if we could, the limits are too low to allow us to process enough animals to earn a living or to justify the expense of setting up the infrastructure required. We’d also be restricted to sales within our regional district, and almost 100 percent of our customers are outside of our regional district.

I believe that these regional restrictions may be linked to the fact that the licences are under the jurisdiction of the regional health authorities. It seems to me that it would make a lot more sense if these licences were under the oversight of the ministry’s meat inspection branch, in which case, perhaps, the regional distribution restrictions could be lifted.

We’ve been forced to scale back our operations and, like most small-scale producers I know, now rely on off-farm income to subsidize our farming activities. This is so frustrating to me, because there is tremendous potential for a thriving small-scale meat industry. We have consumers who want to buy our products and farmers who want to produce it, but everything breaks down when it comes to processing. I’ve had to turn down opportunities to produce for larger wholesale customers because I can’t produce a consistent product on a scale that they require.

Now, with the real estate market being what it is in this province, it is virtually impossible for a new farmer to buy prime farmland, so we’re seeing more and more producers being forced into more remote areas in situations that further compound the processing problem. Our property is off the grid, down a rough mountain back road that ranges from unpleasant to travel on a good day to death-defying in winter.

It would make a lot of sense for us to slaughter on site, particularly in the winter. We’d love to have a cut-and-wrap facility on site too, but being off-grid presents a number of challenges when it comes to meeting the current regulations. As the cost of property continues to climb, the technology to set up off-grid is becoming more accessible, so this makes it a real option for farmers like us. But it’s a catch-22, because affordable land tends to be far away from amenities like abattoirs and butcher shops, making on-farm processing impractical and/or very expensive.

I don’t know what the answer is, but it’s something worth considering as farmers get pushed into more and more remote locations. Some of these remote locations happen to be ideal for raising livestock.

How can we safely and affordably process meat in an off-grid location? In our case, we’re actually only 15 to 20 minutes away from a local butcher shop. The butcher there also runs an on-farm slaughter business on the side, but the animals he kills can, of course, only be used for personal consumption. It seems as if there’s a great opportunity for butcher shops and/or abattoirs to offer a mobile service — so someone like Richard, for example.

Under the current regulations, mobile slaughter is a fairy tale. The mobile abattoirs end up getting parked, because the docking station requirements are so onerous. Surely there must be a way for a local abattoir or butcher shop to travel to a farm like mine and safely kill an animal and transport it to their shop to be cut and wrapped and shipped out. This might be a better alternative to some of the small-scale producers having a class E licence as well.

For example, somebody that only kills a small number of animals occasionally might be very happy to have an experienced, licensed professional come out to do the job. It would probably also be better for animal welfare and could even result in safer meat handling.

Personally, I see no future for small-scale producers like myself, unless there are some fundamental systemic changes, and those changes need to come quickly. My friend Jill’s family has owned and operated a successful pasture-raised poultry operation, with quota, in the Fraser Valley for 12 years. They raise about 1,200 chickens a month for eight months of the year. Shortly after placing their first batch of chickens for the season this year, their abattoir, which has been processing for them for 12 years, informed them that they will no longer process their birds.

[6:30 p.m.]

My friend Tracy just tried to book a kill date for her turkeys this fall, to be told by her processor that they’re no longer doing custom. There is quite literally nowhere in the Fraser Valley reliably doing custom poultry any longer.

Currently you can be either a backyard hobbyist or you can run an industrial-scale operation. There isn’t any room for anything in-between. I’ve already scaled back my operation to less than half of what I need to produce to be profitable, so this can’t continue.

I think we can all agree that, ultimately, we all want to produce a safe, high-quality product. The question is: can we accomplish this in a way that supports all scales of production? If not, I’m going to turn my place into a glorified petting zoo, raise a few hogs, get my farm tax status and run an Airbnb, which I can do with a lot less stress and a lot less risk. It really makes a lot more sense than what I’m doing, but it isn’t right. We need farmland producing food, not selfies.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much, Julia.

Questions?

N. Simons: Thank you very much. I have heard a lot about the mobile abattoirs, partly because I live in Powell River, where there’s not much going on — well, there’s a lot going on; strike that from the record, please — in terms of meat production. The issue around mobile abattoirs, I’ve heard, is around scheduling as well and about the inability to make it financially viable. I had not heard about the onerous docking requirements. Can you expand on that a little bit?

J. Smith: There’s probably somebody here with more expertise on the subject than myself. You basically need to have all but a roof and walls over your processing area in order for a mobile abattoir to come in and process on your property. The requirements are…. You might as well just set up your own abattoir. It’s just not practical. That’s why they all end up getting parked, because it’s much easier to just bring the animals to the mobile than to bring the mobile to the animals.

N. Simons: Thanks. I’ll think about that.

R. Leonard (Chair): Any other questions?

I have a question. You mentioned the notion of professionals coming to do the kills on site as opposed to an un­trained farmer doing it themselves. We’ve also heard about third-party inspection. Do you see a way of bridging that independence with somebody who’s professionally certified, kind of like how engineers have to sign off? Is that what you’re saying? I’m trying to get a grasp on what you mean.

J. Smith: For the record, most of us have no objection to inspections. It’s not the small-scale producers that don’t want to be inspected. Send me an inspector. Inspect me all day long. It’s the system that can’t or won’t provide it for whatever reason. What I’m thinking with the mobile suggestion is that perhaps this person, you know…. Maybe they do have a certified abattoir. Maybe they have received extra training, some level of professional accreditation that means that maybe they can act as both the executioner and the inspector, for lack of a better word.

Again, we have no objection if the inspector wants to come out. It’s not us. It’s a logistics problem, from what I understand.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Julia, your comments in regards to difficulty in finding an abattoir for poultry in the Lower Mainland — who would be addressing that? Is it: “Oh, I can’t get my birds to the abattoir, and I panic, and I do what I can”? But is there an organization or some place where you actually report that and somebody does something about it, or is it just that it happens?

J. Smith: It just happens. I mean, the first presentation…. I understand the Chicken Marketing Board has never heard from anybody who said that they couldn’t get their….

R. Leonard (Chair): They should have stayed.

J. Smith: I’ve got a lot of people that need to call them. There is a hearing on the 15th and the 19th. It’s actually my friend’s hearing through the Chicken Marketing Board about their issue. She has quota, so she’s kind of an exceptional case. Most of us small-scale producers don’t have quota.

[6:35 p.m.]

In her case, the marketing board needs to help her market her product. It’s very hard to market a live chicken. It’s hard enough to market a dead chicken, because people don’t know how to cook them. Again, I’m not an expert on the chicken side of things. I would really recommend that you do follow up around this hearing and find out what the outcome of that is.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much. I don’t see any more questions, but I really appreciate your coming out and providing us with your input.

J. Smith: Thank you for the time.

R. Leonard (Chair): Next on the list is the Nicola Stockbreeders Association — John Anderson. Is he in the room? No?

Okay, we’ll move on to Nova Woodbury. Welcome, by the way.

B.C. ASSOCIATION OF ABATTOIRS

N. Woodbury: Thank you. And thank you for allowing us the opportunity to express our concerns about the meat industry.

Just to formally introduce myself, I’m Nova Woodbury. I’m the executive director of the B.C. Association of Abattoirs. I’ve been actively involved in many of the projects the abattoir association has been doing to help grow the meat sector in B.C. I’ve had a chance to visit all of the class A and B operations in this province, and as far as I know, I’m the only one who has had that opportunity. I have also been out to some of the class D and Es. I’ve been to Tristan’s plant, for instance. I have also visited federal abattoirs, both here in B.C. and in Alberta. In the last two years, I’ve been to over 100 abattoirs, so I have a fairly good idea of what they’re doing.

You’ve heard from many speakers, livestock producers, about their challenges that they’re facing in the industry. You’ve heard from class A and B abattoirs, as well, on the challenges that they’re facing. You’ve heard from the small livestock producers and the challenges that they are facing.

You’ve also heard that labour is an issue on farms as well as at abattoirs. It’s also an issue at butcher shops. I don’t think you’ve had an opportunity to actually speak to a standing-alone, retail butcher shop. I understand that there were some that there going to be at the Abbotsford meeting, but that was cancelled, so I’m speaking on their behalf as well.

You’ve also become aware that illegal slaughter is rampant in this province, and it is all over the province.

I had a really hard time deciding what to speak on today. I have five different presentations. You will be getting all my opinions through written submissions, so you’re not going to miss anything. I can answer a lot of the questions that came up today, so I welcome the opportunity to respond today or in the future to any questions that you have.

What I thought I would speak about today is the Association of Abattoirs so that you have an understanding of what it is that we actually do and how we’ve been working at trying to build a B.C. meat-processing sector. To let you know, our membership is actually made up of livestock producers, small and medium-size. We have no large livestock producers here. We also have chefs and retailers as well as abattoirs themselves, so it’s a mixture of memberships.

We have, as an association, developed a 100 percent B.C. beef program in conjunction with the B.C. Breeder and Feeder Association and the B.C. Association of Cattle Feeders. We have also developed a premium B.C. lamb program in conjunction with the B.C. Sheep Federation. We are currently working on a premium B.C. poultry grade trademark as well, and we’re doing that with producers and processors of poultry in the province.

We have developed a B.C. Beef Net program for an on-line buying system to hook livestock producers up with chefs and retailers so that chefs and retailers are buying a premium product. We’ve also done several projects, thanks to funding from the beef Cattle Industry Development Council and their funding program, to work with producer groups and go out and meet with them in person.

[6:40 p.m.]

We have developed a meat quality information system, which is a carcass-scoring system for beef and lamb that can be used by producers to understand what kind of a job they’re doing on finishing their beef. All of those programs are geared directly to livestock producers.

What are we doing for the abattoirs? We have a food safety program that we have rolled out across the province to all class A and B plants. We are trying to raise the bar for everybody.

We have delivered an animal welfare training program in conjunction with B.C. Food Processors and the Ministry of Agriculture. Over 85 percent of the class A and B abattoirs participated in the program. It’s a tremendous success.

We encourage and help new abattoirs to become inspected. We have worked with class E operations that have decided to move up to being a class B. We’ve worked with illegal slaughter operations that have now become inspected operations. None of them have said that they regret moving towards inspection. It’s quite remarkable.

We liaise with all sorts of different government groups within the province to help this sector: the Ministry of Environment, the Ministry of Health, the health authorities and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency as well as the Ministry of Agriculture.

We bring awareness of funding programs to our members and to all the abattoirs in B.C., members or not, about what they can do, money that they can access. Post-farm food safety is an example. One of the abattoirs used that funding to put in a new cooler, so they were able to expand what they can produce and also produce a safer meat product for consumers.

We will be developing food safety and animal welfare — two separate ones — on-line training systems so that abattoir operators can take them. We are hoping that this becomes part of a yearly recertification for them.

We are just completing a technology adoption program to try to introduce technology into the abattoirs so that they can increase their productivity when faced with a lack of labour and especially a lack of any skilled labour.

Relating to the labour issues, we have done a labour market partnership engagement report between all the abattoirs in B.C. and butcher shops to try to look at addressing some of the labour issues. We are participating in a federal labour sector engagement report as well. We have travelled all across Canada and met with Agriculture Canada, Cargill, JBS, Maple Leaf. All of the provinces are at the table and trying to solve the labour issues across the board.

We have also been participating federally with trying to develop skill assessment levels and standards for the industry. We, ourselves, have developed a training program because Olds College is the only one left in North America. We developed a training program to bring new entrants into the industry.

We’ve done this with funding through the Ministry of Advanced Ed. It has been absolutely phenomenal, great for the industry. We’ve had a much better uptake with the local people than we had expected. We have been granted other funding that has to be used up by September 30. It is a great program that we want to expand on and have more viable and more guaranteed funding over the long term.

Our model that we developed is homeless. We delivered it twice in Kamloops, once in Courtenay, and our next one is going to be outside of Williams Lake. One of the reasons we’ve done this is that we want to take the training to where the people are, not have the people come to the training.

With this industry, it is hands-on. This classroom has been developed as 50 percent theory, 50 percent practical. Every week it’s a mixture of the two: learn in the classroom, apply at the plant. The students that have taken it have all enjoyed it and have new respect for animal welfare and food safety. We hammer those two points home very strongly.

As a result of all this work that we have been doing with livestock producers, abattoirs and butcher shops, we have an over, sort of, vision of what we want to see happen in the B.C. meats industry. I have been speaking with the Ministry of Agriculture for a year and a half on the need to do a provincewide capacity study: livestock production, abattoir capacity, cutting capacity and the marketing side of it. I actually brought a copy of my proposal that I finally got to officially submit on March 16. I think it was just about the same time that all of this consultation started.

[6:45 p.m.]

We did have a conference call last night. We are moving forward with the project. I think that the findings of this panel are going to fit very nicely with what we’re going to look at.

This is provincewide, species-wide — all the majority of species. It is going to look at how much we can produce, where we produce it, and what the challenges are with producing it, including feed costs. This is also going to involve all the producer groups, all the Farmers Institutes out there, all the regional districts. We need to take a look at the bigger picture and really understand what’s happening out there.

R. Leonard (Chair): Well, on that note, thank you very much. I really appreciate that. That was, on our final night, a good time to sort of wrap it up all in one package.

Any questions?

I. Paton: Thank you, Nova. You know, the last few days we’ve mostly dealt with inspection services provincially, with the A and B licences, and then regional health districts doing the audit inspection of D and Es. But then, I think it was just this morning at one of our get-togethers, they started talking about Canada Food Inspection Agency inspectors. I’m a little bit foggy on that one. Where does that come in with provincially licensed abattoirs that aren’t federal?

N. Woodbury: The CFIA oversees animal transport. So technically, if poultry arrives in a poultry crate, while it is still in the poultry crate, it is still in transport, even if it’s off-loaded from a truck. They cover the animal being transported to the abattoir as well, if it’s a poultry animal.

They are also responsible for all of the reportable diseases, which includes BSE — so the handling of all the specified risk material, which are the parts of the beef animal that have been shown to house the prions that are the precursors or indicators of BSE. They are responsible for overseeing its removal, recording and proper disposal.

The CFIA isn’t doing the inspections of the meat; they are actually overseeing a component of it.

I. Paton: I’m trying to follow this. Are they actually at the abattoirs when livestock arrives, or are they at stockyards or auction yards when the animals are loaded?

N. Woodbury: They’re at all of them, depending on the region and depending on what their cycle is. There are some that are very active.

When I go to different areas of the province…. One area in particular, I see the CFIA inspector every single time I’m there. She is at the abattoir checking documentation of the transporters. And they’re all small. It could be five pigs in the back of a truck. She is there checking to make sure that they have their pig trace information and herd markers, because that is their responsibility before those animals are off-loaded. The CFIA does play a role.

Then, once that animal walks off the truck, the Ministry of Ag takes over, except for the SRMs. The Ministry of Ag inspectors make sure, though, on behalf of the CFIA, that those specified risk materials are properly handled and disposed of. They do make sure that that happens — up to the drip cooler after the carcass is hanging there.

If the abattoir goes beyond that, as a class A facility, that’s when it hands over to the Ministry of Health. That disconnect, we’ve heard…. I think you’ve heard multiple times that it really all should be under the same ministry. It was happening, and then it got delayed. I’m quite sure it’s still on the books to move forward, to have the A side of these facilities also under the Ministry of Agriculture. To bring the Ds and Es also under the Ministry of Agriculture improves traceability and consistency, and everybody’s on the same page.

Environmental health officers are very busy. They’re overtaxed. They have to go to retail stores. They have to go to restaurants. One of my suggestions is also going to be to bring in retail butcher shops under the Ministry of Agriculture — full traceability.

R. Leonard (Chair): We have one question from Donna.

D. Barnett: Thank you very much for your presentation. I’m very interested in this education program that you are delivering. Is this through any university or college, or is this a program that was put together by the association?

[6:50 p.m.]

N. Woodbury: It was a program that we put together at the association. One of the reasons we did it ourselves is because we wanted to be able to deliver it in different regions of the province, and we wanted to have the flexibility.

This is a completely industry-driven curriculum. When we developed it, we went out to the abattoirs: “What is it that you want the students to learn?”

It’s a ten-week program. They are by no means experts when they come out of it, but what they’ve been given is a solid background in animal welfare and humane handling. They’ve been given a solid background in food safety, correct slaughter procedures, correct worker safety procedures.

We give them an overview of the rules and the legislation and the reporting, whether it be through ownership identification or reporting to the Chicken Marketing Board. We give them an overview so that they have the bigger picture, the thought being that if you’re given the bigger picture, you’re going to be better at your jobs.

D. Barnett: If I can follow up to that, is there any certification for that once they complete the program?

N. Woodbury: Right now there is no butcher certification. We have developed our training program because we’ve been involved in the national skill level competencies. We are making sure that our program follows those skill competencies so that when a certification body comes along, if one comes along, it could be just an industry certification, and they will be able to challenge the exams to meet it.

D. Barnett: Just one more follow-up. It’s funded by the Ministry of Advanced Education.

N. Woodbury: Yes, it is.

D. Barnett: Thank you very much.

R. Leonard (Chair): I appreciate you coming out and sharing all of your wisdoms with us.

The next person that we have on the list is Uncle Mark’s Custom Meat Cutting — Mr. Mark Roth. Welcome, Mr. Roth.

First question. Who’s Uncle Mark, before we get started?

UNCLE MARK’S CUSTOM MEAT CUTTING

M. Roth: That’s me. My brother has four kids. If they’re listening: “Hi, kids.”

I’m Mark Roth. I have Uncle Mark’s Custom Meat shop in McBride. I went to Olds College. I took their meat-processing program there. Then my instructor put me up with a job in Manitoba, working for a Swiss guy. He went through the master butchery program in Switzerland. I learned from him for a little while and then came back to McBride.

I was going to operate, actually, the McBride abattoir, Robson Valley Custom Meats, as was mentioned in one of your early ones. I put the first animal through on a test kill on that one and did all the initial paperwork in 2012. There have been several operators since then. At the time, it just wasn’t the right fit for my life and my age and my income. It just wasn’t going to work with the start-up, but it was really good experience with paperwork and how it works.

I also really want to send a thank-you to Lana Popham. She visited McBride through the McBride Farmers Institute, and she spent the day. She toured farms, toured the abattoir. Her enthusiasm and her encouragement were excellent. It really encouraged us to think about the systems and get off our butts and try and do something about it. Thank you, Lana Popham, for that. I wanted to put that out there.

A little bit about why I’m here. I have just a one-man shop. My shop is just a one-man thing. What I do is custom slaughter for personal use. I do slaughter and cut-and-wrap for two class E licensees, but other than that, it’s all for personal use only, and that keeps me busy just as a one-man shop.

Our family recently, in 2016, bought a shop in town, and we converted it into a meat shop and a general processing kitchen. We’re hoping to get into local vegetables and things like that, be a centralized processing location for premade meals and things like that — that we can, hopefully, add value to our local produce and meats.

It’s all Northern Health–approved, and everything like that. The drip cooler will handle about 15 beef. Since I’m a one-man shop, I can do about four beef a week as my capacity. My parents and myself and my family are trying to increase our livestock and vegetable production with Roth farms. So far we’ve not done anything with it yet, but we’re just considering our options.

[6:55 p.m.]

What we’re really passionate about…. Here’s the thing that, really, is the reason I’m here. We’re really passionate about the final 24 hours of our animals’ lives. Our animals are all raised…. We don’t do any handling of them — they live in a field — other than a scratch behind the ear. They never go through a chute or anything like that. It’s a small farm, right? We don’t have a big operation.

We’ve got these animals. They’re kind of like…. We’ve got Lyla, the old cow. She’s a miserable thing, but she gives good cows, and she’s just been around forever. She’s really tamed down, and she’s one of our happy animals. The idea of putting her on a truck, bringing her to an abattoir to be handled by strangers and put through chutes when she’s never experienced that is a little heartbreaking. It’s not something that we want to do.

They’re to the best standards you can, but when an animal’s never done it…. These larger cattle producers — they have to handle their cattle because they’ve got so many. But with these smaller producers, the animals are not used to that process at all.

We would like to fix that so that we didn’t have to do that with our animals. Other people are in a similar situation. Not to mention the cost of loading chutes, trailers, trucks, ear taggers, squeezes — things that you just can’t do if you’re raising three or four beef, or even 15 beef. You can’t justify the cost of all this handling equipment.

Our hope, our proposal, our whatever it is. We want to have a mobile slaughter establishment, focusing mostly on animal welfare but with equal food safety standards to the class A and B system. Basically, it’s a class A or B minus the knock box.

Our idea of how this would work is…. Sorry, I’m going to get lost a little in my notes.

R. Leonard (Chair): Oh, and I was just getting so excited.

M. Roth: Yeah, there we go.

Here’s the traditional idea of a kill floor. I don’t know what everyone’s familiarity is. I know you’ve heard about it all the time. I’ve been following on your blue notes, and you hear all sorts of stuff.

A kill floor is a thing on the abattoir. But I want to think about it as two different things. We want to separate the kill floor and the skinning room as a concept. So the kill floor…. Everything up till that point is all about animal welfare — up till that point, up till the point it’s stunned. That’s the point where the animal welfare side of things has been looked after.

At that point, food safety isn’t really an issue. They’re covered in hair. It’s the nature of animals, right? So there are no food safety factors up to that point of stunning. What we’re saying is that the point of food safety starts as soon as you open the hide, which is when you skin it. What we want to do is stun it in the field and bring it over to…. You stun it where it stands. You go to the farm. You stun it. You bring it in. At that point, you put it into your controlled trailer, say, that’s set up with equal food safety standards to a class A or B system.

At that point, you’ve done the humanity side. I mean, once it’s stunned, it’s done. Your animal welfare side of the quotient is totally looked after. Then you take it to your controlled facility for the skinning, and we have the same standards. We’ve got our potable water. We’ve got our sanitary knives. Our food safety standards are all met for the skinning, and it’s all set up in a mobile trailer. Then there’s obviously a cooler, a reefer truck.

It would be an investment, but it’s just for the option. What we want to do is just offer the option for that. It’s really quite simple. Class A or B minus knock box is our hope.

R. Leonard (Chair): Excuse me. Can you explain what a knock box is?

M. Roth: Oh, sorry. A knock box is a head squeeze that you put the animals in. When you put them through a class A or B abattoir, they go up a chute. They get their head…. There are various forms of squeezes that lock around their heads so that they can’t move their head. At that point, you stun them with a captive bolt gun or something to that effect. This is what we’re trying to eliminate, right?

Basically, moving on to the discussion paper. That’s the summary of our concept: a controlled environment, only once it’s already been stunned. At that point, food safety only applies once you open the animal up.

[7:00 p.m.]

Our discussion paper here. Livestock production. I think that there are a lot of people with three to 12 animals to slaughter a year who can’t afford the infrastructure to take it to an abattoir. This would allow them…. They don’t need it anymore. You don’t need to load it onto a trailer or run it through a chute to ear tag it, because you only need ear tags once it leaves the farm. You can actually do a postmortem ear tagging, if you wished, for traceability. The full traceability in everything. But there’s no transport with the live animals, so it really simplifies matters in that way.

Processing of B.C. animals raised in B.C. was another point on the discussion paper. It’s just obvious there.

Increasing slaughter capacity, especially in rural and remote communities. If you have these large, remote communities, if a mobile operator could take advantage of several of these remote communities…. You know: “I’m going to be there in May. I’m going to be there in June.” They can actually bring these people so that the capacity is enough to support a licensed abattoir.

Access to B.C. meat for consumers, retailers, restaurants and institutional buyers. It’s the same standards as class A and B again. It’s fully up for the market, and it increases…. Once again, these people with two or three animals could actually get it to a restaurant, if they wanted to feed it all….

There’s a lady in Valemount who raised a beef on brewery hops. She worked at the brewery. She used the spent hops, raised a beef — beautiful beef. I’m sure there’s some restaurant who just would die to get it. But she’s got one beef, right? She’s not going to invest in the infrastructure to get that to market. Maybe she wants to raise six next year. I don’t know.

Access to specialized types of slaughter to meet cultural and market-based demands. Now, this is what we really like, because we really believe, once again, the last 24 hours of an animal’s life are very important. The farm-slaughtered animals are in demand. People believe in the humanity of doing an animal where it stands. It’s sitting there munching grain and gone. It’s as good as it gets.

I call them political vegetarians. They oppose the way that animals have to be slaughtered, right or wrong. You can’t beat the handling of just shooting it where it stands.

R. Leonard (Chair): Just to let you know, another 30 seconds. I gave you a little bit more, because I interjected.

M. Roth: Okay, thank you.

Then the standards for food safety are exactly the same.

I think that’s more or less everything on my notes. The only thing would be…. A question for the inspection branch of the government would be how inspection works. Obviously, ideally, it’s a person — an inspector, in person — who would be on farm with you. I’d really be open to things like GoPro cameras, additional training for professionals and then they could…. Like the third-party things.

I heard recently that Alberta has something like that. I just heard about it today. I don’t know what it is, but it would be worth looking into that. Additional training for your slaughter personnel but obviously checked by a third party, because it wouldn’t be right otherwise.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation. Let’s see if we’ve got any questions.

M. Morris: I like your thinking — mobile abattoir class A. Would the inspector be riding with you in the truck?

The other part is cooling capacity. All of that has to be taken into consideration. It would be quite limited there.

You’ve taken all of that into consideration. So the entire class A abattoir would be in this reefer trailer that you pull, with the exception of the kill floor.

M. Roth: That’s correct. Actually, it would be class B, because that’s slaughter only. But the same effect.

As far as cooling capacity goes, refrigeration guys can tell you what your Btu will do as far as pounds per 24 hours of cooling and things like that.

I forget your first question.

M. Morris: The inspector.

M. Roth: Oh yes, the inspector. I would more than welcome them to be along with me. Like I say, that would be a question for someone with more expertise in inspection. If it could be done via a GoPro camera or some sort of…. So they didn’t have to be there, especially for these remote locations, would be ideal. Say additional training, and then they could sign off on it, like engineers, as we heard earlier, or something to that effect. That’s outside of my area of expertise, so I don’t really know.

Anything, right? Whatever it took.

N. Simons: Can I ask what kind of reception you’ve had from others who you’ve discussed this with?

M. Roth: Oh, they love it, obviously. But I only talk to people I like, right?

N. Simons: That’s how we set up our witness list today too.

M. Roth: When I talk to these…. Because this is my clientele. That’s why I know these people. I’m busy all year cutting for people who have two, three beef in their yard, and they’re just dying to sell it to their neighbour, but they can’t legally do it, right?

Whether they do or don’t on their own time, I don’t know. That’s not up to me. I have to advise them not to, and I have to get them to sign that they won’t — just because it’s too tempting, right? Obviously, they would just love to have a legal way to get it to either their neighbour or to a restaurant, if they have a specialty market.

R. Leonard (Chair): Well, thank you very much, Mark — Uncle Mark.

At this point, I think I’m going to call a break. We’ll recess for five minutes. Then it’ll turn into 7½, just because it always does.

The committee recessed from 7:05 p.m. to 7:14 p.m.

[R. Leonard in the chair.]

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you, everybody, for your patience. We will now call Helen Cabot from Cabot Home­stead Natural Meats and Pioneer Market and Meats.

[7:15 p.m.]

CABOT HOMESTEAD NATURAL MEATS,
PIONEER MARKET AND MEATS

H. Cabot: Good evening. Thank you for the opportunity to present. I apologize. I’m probably not going to be as eloquent as Tristan and Julia and some of the other speakers we’ve heard from.

R. Leonard (Chair): I’m happy to hear a new voice, a woman’s voice, in the system.

H. Cabot: My husband and I moved to B.C. about five years ago with a plan, a dream, to start a small off-grid farm. Over the years, we’ve realized that there is a significant number of challenges to doing that.

We live about 2½ hours north of Kamloops, which puts us within range of one class A facility. We were raising chickens. We raised pigs, we had goats, and we had sheep. We’re now down to just pigs, because we also have a butcher shop.

We’ve used a variety of different avenues for slaughter. We have our class E licence. I opted to not renew when my pigs and chicken licence ran out because we were in the process of opening a butcher shop.

The irony of the class E licence is that I can kill that animal on my farm, with all the humane care and attention needed, and I can take it to a cut-and-wrap facility. So I could bring it into my shop; I can cut and wrap it. I cannot offer it for sale within my shop, because my shop is a retail location. I could take it to a farmers market across the street from my shop, but I can’t sell it in my shop.

I also can’t make a living with a class E licence. In March, my husband had a discussion with our local class A facility, who we try and work very closely with, especially with the shop. We booked pretty much every date they had available for pig slaughter through to the end of year. That still leaves me gaps of four months that I cannot get animals processed.

I do have some other options if I want to drive four-plus hours. There’s Rocana down in Salmon Arm. They’ll do them. I question some of the facilities that they have for housing overnight, but they will do them. But then I’m driving four hours with animals in a trailer — hot weather, cold weather, bad roads — to turn around and pick them up — pick up hanging carcasses, haul those. Now I need refrigeration. I need a reefer unit. My costs go up exponentially.

I don’t know what the answers are, but the limits needs to be in place so that small farms stand a chance. I’ve had birds processed at a couple of different facilities. I’m not going to name names, but I can tell you that every bird I’ve done on the farm has come out cleaner. My packaging has been better. Ones that we got back, we tossed. I said: “No, there’s something wrong. There’s a broken leg. There’s this; there’s that.” They went to my dogs.

I’ve heard people comment that farms need oversight, and maybe we do. I’m not going to say we do or don’t. But that a class A facility cares more or does a better job, I really do struggle with. For me, when I’m scraping a pig, it’s not done until every hair is off that pig. When I’m doing a chicken, until every ounce of whatever from the cavity is gone, it’s not done. If there’s anything I question….

No, I’m not an inspector. I don’t have an education in it. But if there’s anything I question, that animal never, ever, gets sold to a customer. I would rather err on the side of caution. As Tristan said, that’s my farm. One bad product out my door, that’s the entire business.

The standards for the ten regional districts that get the class D facilities…. The Squamish-Lillooet I’m going to pick on, because I kind of know where the lines are.

[7:20 p.m.]

The district line is about 75 kilometres, give or take a little bit, from a class A facility. I’m just about 200, but I’m not in one of the regional districts. I can’t even apply.

There’s no level playing field when it comes to processing within the province. Tristan commented that he hadn’t had a follow-up inspection. I haven’t either, but I got written down for denying a follow-up inspection because my road was impassable. I live seven kilometres up a forest service road. They wanted to come out in December with a two-wheel-drive vehicle. I got marked on my file as denying them an inspection.

N. Simons: Did they try?

H. Cabot: I told them they were welcome to. This was one of my arguments on why I needed a class E licence in the first place, because there are times I can’t tow a trailer down my road. At this point, we are running about 200 pigs. I’ve got about 25 sows. We are farrow to finish. That’s the lowest I need to make a living.

My class E licence allowed me to process about 33 pigs. A class D licence currently, if I were to get it, would allow me to process about 75. I produce about 200, finished, per year.

It’s a struggle. I don’t know where the answers are. I don’t envy you guys your job in trying to sort it all out. I think that if there was funding available to get more, at minimum, class B facilities operational in remote areas…. Maybe the answer is a class B mobile abattoir. But again, I’m not sure they’d want to tow their trailer up my road in the winter.

Like I said, I don’t envy you your job, but I do appreciate the opportunity to speak.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much for sharing your experience. You kind of filled in the lines a little bit for how things work for you and your farm.

I do have one question. We’ve talked about the seasonality of the slaughter world. You just talked about some of the challenges with winter slaughter. I’m just wondering how it is that you’re able to have winter slaughter. Maybe that was poultry; I don’t know.

H. Cabot: Poultry is a huge challenge. Thank you for actually mentioning that. It was on my list, and I missed it. Currently within that two-hour radius they love to use for the feasibility study at this point, I can only get chicken slaughter done three months a year. If I want to go outside that range, yes, I can get it done outside that up until about…. Early November, I believe, is when the last one kind of shuts down in the Interior. Most of them, as far as I know, don’t start up again until April or May.

We have quite often finished birds late November or early December. With our class E licence, we were able to do that. We could easily start earlier, but we can’t because of processing. The challenge in our area is that we have one class A facility. We’re almost at the halfway point, I guess, between them and McBride. There’s nowhere close. There’s no good option.

Fall is an extreme challenge, as a lot of people have said. I’ve been told for pigs, you’re not getting them in, in the fall. Pretty much from the middle of August until December or January, I’m not getting anything in unless I haul three or four hours, and my customers don’t necessarily want to pay that additional cost.

I. Paton: Just quickly. You said you’re roughly two hours north of Kamloops here. Whereabouts are you, exactly?

H. Cabot: We are 50 kilometres on the highway past Clearwater and then another seven kilometres up a forest service road. Towing a trailer, that takes me half an hour or better to get my animals down because it’s a non-maintained forest service road.

[7:25 p.m.]

I. Paton: So your nearest class A, if you wanted to haul to get killed, would be McBride or…?

H. Cabot: Rainer’s. Darfield.

I. Paton: Darfield? Okay. That’s obviously an issue for you. I don’t know how big your trailer is or how many you could haul at a time.

H. Cabot: We typically will process between five and ten. That’s also for the butcher shop. We’re a small butcher shop. That’s about where our capacity for cut-and-wrap is. We were forced into opening the butcher shop because our cut-and-wrap facility quit taking meat last fall, so there was nowhere to get processing. I can sometimes sneak some extra dates. Ben is great in that. I can get some extra dates for two or three, for kill-only. If I use Rocana, there are no cut-and-wrap options. So we were somewhat forced into opening our own shop.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much. Thanks for answering our questions.

Next up we have Columbia Valley Meat and Sausage. That’s Grant Kelly on the telephone.

G. Kelly: Good evening, everyone.

R. Leonard (Chair): Good evening.

COLUMBIA VALLEY MEAT AND SAUSAGE

G. Kelly: I’ll just give you a brief history of my life. I was born in west Quebec about 56 years ago. I grew up on a small farm. In the mid-1980s, I took a meat-cutting course at Algonquin College in Ottawa, full-time. I worked at that for a few years. Then I pursued a career in the restaurant and bar industry during the ’80s, ’90s and into the 2000s in a variety of positions — serving tables, bartending. Through all those years, I became accustomed, as changes happened…. Things like FoodSafe came along, and Serving It Right, as far as the liquor industry goes.

After I moved to the Columbia Valley in the early 2000s, I opened a health food store in 2004. Through that time there, I started to sell some local meat products, Zehnder Beef. There was no local abattoir here at that time. If anyone is familiar with where Invermere is, the closest place was Cranbrook.

Around 2010, 2012, I started to hear that they were talking about building an abattoir and that the Windermere District Farmers Institute had been for a number of years. That came to fruition a few years ago. I came on board after they were unable to find an operator, partly due to my passion for the food industry and to be involved and stay involved with something like this that’s growing. There was a need for it in the valley.

I sat down with the people from the Windermere District Farmers Institute, and I asked them, at that time, some fairly point-blank questions as to why they really…. I knew they sold a lot of beef into Alberta, and they had some concerns about, obviously, where their animals end up — feedlots, whatnot — just into the mass market.

They had ambitions to sell them here locally. It really wasn’t just…. You know, if it were just about money, they could probably have continued on with their practice of selling them away. But they wanted to make a conscious effort to sell them locally at farmers markets, around the valley here — and then, obviously, be able to get into restaurants and whatnot. Then there were a number of things that came into play here. The slow-food movement has a good chapter here in the valley.

One of the things I want to stress, too, is that throughout my time, I’ve seen these things change over the years, becoming focused with some structure, as far as food safety. I even go back to my days of serving alcohol, how that changed. It’s a different industry, but it’s kind of part and parcel of how we’re continually protecting us, the consumer.

I had a recent chat with my ten-year-old as we were driving around — that some of you that have children, maybe, have had — as to why we have to wear seatbelts. Well, it’s to protect us. I said: “Daddy grew up in an age when we didn’t always have to wear seatbelts.” Some of you, maybe, recall those days. I can’t see how old everyone is.

[7:30 p.m.]

R. Leonard (Chair): Maybe that’s a good thing.

G. Kelly: We might not know. Those things changed as we became…. I saw a lot of the changes, as I said, in the food and the liquor industry. When our abattoir opened…. This is a class A abattoir that they built here, with some government funding, so to speak, and some private funding. We’ve been open for just over a year now, about a year and a half, and we’re rolling along pretty nicely.

I do understand that in our area there are some issues with some people that are not, maybe, as close. It makes it more difficult for them to get here if they’re small operators, because they are an hour and a half or an hour and 45 minutes away — two hours away, some of them. So they have a hard time to make it viable for them. I understand that people have reasons to push for class Es, but as we go forward, I want everyone to remember the reason: that we have a conscious effort to make sure that we’re keeping everything safe, and clean, healthy food.

Going back to the issue with the class Es, some of them find it a little prohibitive, maybe, to get here — people in the Golden area. But as I suggested to the one lady that called me and that wanted to bring two pigs at a time, because that’s all they can do: “You know, maybe you can team up with some other people to get your animals down here.” I think that there are some solutions — in this area, anyway — out there for people to achieve.

That’s about all I have to say.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much. We heard from Hedi Trescher this morning in Cranbrook. So we’ll start to connect some dots there. Thanks to Jackie for pointing that out.

Jackie, you have a question.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Grant, we heard this morning in — where were we? — Cranbrook, from Hedi. It’s a very interesting model that you are working with in regards to — I assume they’re a non-profit that built the facility — the commitment of the valley to have the abattoir in their valley to serve their producers. It will be interesting. I understand, from her, that you’re at about 25 percent capacity right now.

G. Kelly: That’s correct.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): She indicated: start small and grow. Are there challenges specific to the model that you’re working under?

G. Kelly: Probably the biggest challenge just may be labour — you’ve probably heard that before: to get people. To find the people who are experienced in cutting, in this day and age, kind of got lost in there — right? — as we went to boxed meat and things like that. I’ve had people come to work part-time that worked in areas where they just received boxed meat. As far as breaking down carcasses, it’s a whole different story. That’s what I learned back in the ’80s, and I knew that that’s what I could bring. That’s probably my biggest challenge.

The potential here is huge for what we can do down the road, and I’ll keep working on things to achieve that, to train people, to show people, to get people involved, to get young people starting up. There’s a lot of land here — a lot of it not used, maybe, for agriculture. I’ve already seen the changes in it, with people coming in and asking: “Okay, I want to get some pigs, Grant. How do I do it?”

“Oh,” I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know, but let’s get some pigs.” I’ve seen that, and I’m quite proud of that: that in the last year we’ve started to move that way — to get more people into small-scale agriculture. For the people from the Farmers Institute, that is one of their goals too: to get people back into farming.

[7:35 p.m.]

Sorry, back to your question as far as challenges, mostly the big one that’s been a learning curve for me: dealing with things like SRM and health regulations, different inspectors. But we work through it. We talk it out. We communicate.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much. I don’t see any more questions. If I’ve missed anyone’s hand…. No. Okay. Well, thank you very much, Grant, for calling in. You have a good evening.

Next on our list is Conrad Schiebel. Hi, welcome.

B.C. BISON ASSOCIATION

C. Schiebel: My name is Conrad Schiebel, and I’m representing the B.C. Bison Association as well as my own operation, Turtle Valley Bison Ranch, out by Chase. I’m not sure if you’ve heard from any bison producers on your round-the-world trip.

R. Leonard (Chair): We saw a bison carcass.

C. Schiebel: Oh, you did? Okay. Well, I’ll give you a little rundown on how things are going in the bison industry here in B.C. Currently the bison prices are consistently high and supporting the industry very well, but we’re in a state of stagnation here in B.C. We’re not really growing like the other provinces are. I’m trying to figure that out as the president of the Bison Association.

Currently we have 55 producers, of which 28 are members of the B.C. Bison Association, so I’m essentially speaking for those 28 members. We have 6,500 animals here in the province. And we’re very closely tied to the Alberta bison association and the whole abattoir system for bison. Most of our animals get cleared through the Alberta markets.

Some of the challenges we have in British Columbia. We are the only province in Canada that considers bison to be game. There are no states in the United States that consider bison to be game. They consider it to be livestock. So when it comes to international trade, there are some considerations to be made. When we’re trading with jurisdictions that consider bison to be threatened or in danger, you know, that might raise some red flags. If they’re considered to be farm-raised livestock, that kind of takes that red flag down, so we have to really prove where our animals come from in order to have our animals cleared properly.

That’s one of the big challenges for us. We’re currently working with Agriculture staff to try to get them to review some of the regulations when it comes to bison ranching. It’s fairly onerous to be a bison rancher with all the regulations, and we kind of wonder if, perhaps, that’s why there aren’t many new bison ranches starting in British Columbia — that they look at the bureaucracy that’s involved and the reporting considerations that have to take place.

There’s a lot of redundancy in the legislation, especially with the federal Animal Health Act, as far as traceability. We’re hoping some of those duplications of regulations can be changed to follow what’s going on nationally in the industry.

As far as my own experience with Turtle Valley Bison Ranch, we formed sort of a sideline business, Turtle Valley Meats, where we were sending a lot of meats to the Lower Mainland and then across the border into the States. So we were required to have a federal plant, which we did, but we had some real inconsistency with the abattoir that we were using as far as the cutting, and they were shut down fairly regularly because of regulation problems, for whatever reason. As a result of that, we lost some significant contracts and had to eventually look to Alberta to get our kills. We had to go to Lacombe. As much as we hated to do it, we had to go across the mountains to Alberta, where the infrastructure was in place.

I can see some real needs in B.C. to help the bison industry grow. There’s a lot of potential for it.

[7:40 p.m.]

There’s a lot of demand for bison in British Columbia. It’s sort of that other red meat that people, once they’ve tasted it, really enjoy it. It’s a niche market. We have great success going to farmers markets with it, but we just couldn’t get the cutting down to a level where we could consistently provide product here in the province.

Anyway, I think in order to move our industry forward, we need to consider bison as a growth industry, try to support it wherever we can. Even building the abattoirs. Sounds like there’s one going to be built in Prince George.

There are some considerations for bison, because you need to have heavier-duty panels for the animals. That was one of the reasons why we initially had problems with the local ones. They didn’t have the facilities to actually properly contain the animals. There’s an old joke in the bison industry that you can pretty much make a bison go wherever they want to go. But we like to contain them whenever possible, with lots of steel.

Then, also, you have to have the rails higher up. You have to have taller rails because the animal carcasses are longer than with the beef cattle. So you have to make those considerations when you’re designing abattoirs — to have tracks that are higher off the ground.

I really like the idea of portable abattoirs, because occasionally we have animals that are problem animals. We know that if we’re going to load them in a trailer, that trailer is going to become a wreck. By doing a field kill, that is some­thing that is more desirable for us, and we’ve found that the quality of the carcass is a lot better if we can do a field kill versus loading them on a trailer, where they have the potential to injure themselves.

They’re not like cattle. They’re still wild animals. For the bison industry to be able to do on-site kills is a huge advantage for us. They have a tendency to lose weight in transit, as well, and they get damaged, so the quality of the carcass goes down. So having a portable abattoir system would certainly appeal to us.

We’ve had situations where we’ve had to get a little bit creative about how we clear our animals. If we have problem animals, we can sell the animal and have the person that gets sold that animal kill it and then take it to a local butcher for personal consumption, which is sort of doing an end run around the whole system, right? We don’t really want to get into a situation like that on a large scale.

That’s about all I really have for you. If you have any questions….

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you. You’ve given us a very unique presentation. First bison farmer we’ve had — or rancher, I should say.

D. Barnett: Thank you very much. Very interesting. There is a bison ranch in the Cariboo, and they slaughter about 200 a year. They have a class B licence, and they do quite well.

My question is: for inspection, do you fall under the same regulations as the beef industry?

C. Schiebel: We do, yes. It’s almost identical.

D. Barnett: So you have both the federal inspector and the local health authorities?

C. Schiebel: We do, yes.

D. Barnett: How often do you see the local health authority?

C. Schiebel: At the inspection facilities? Actually, we don’t have our own facility, so we were relying on other abattoirs to do our kills.

N. Simons: I’m just curious — thank you, by the way — about where the bison industry is located primarily and if it’s spread around the province. We did see it on Vancouver Island, obviously. I didn’t see any live ones, but I saw one that was….

C. Schiebel: Yes, there’s a smattering of ranches all around the province, but the majority of the animals are up in the Peace country, where there’s more land, larger tracts of land. You do need a lot of land to actually be a successful bison rancher. You need to be able to move the animals around.

[7:45 p.m.]

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Conrad. I’ve been working with the Ministry of Agriculture, looking at changing bison to be qualified as livestock. It’s an interesting process. I think I was first approached five years ago, and I go back many times, and we’re still not there.

If they’re classed not as livestock but as game, what does that do for the sale of the meat? I come from a family of hunters. I don’t know what the rules are around a moose, if somebody wanted to sell moose meat commercially.

C. Schiebel: Actually, it’s illegal to do that.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Okay. So why is it legal for you to sell bison?

C. Schiebel: Well, because the game farm regulations allow us to farm bison. How do you differentiate between farm-raised bison and some bison that was shot out of the Pink Mountain herd? That’s a bit of a dilemma, right?

If we really want to keep the whole bison thing under wraps, we need to have wild bison considered to be game, the ones that we hunt, and farm-raised bison to be considered livestock. So have a dual-designation.

I. Paton: You talked about reporting considerations, which were a bit of a hassle. Can you just expand on what sort of reporting or paperwork is causing you more grief than if it was just raising Angus or Hereford cross or whatever.

The second question. You said you were exporting out of B.C. into Washington state or whatever, which is great. You said they were going to a federal slaughterhouse from Chase. Where were they going? Down to the coast?

C. Schiebel: They were going down to the coast and then going to meat distributors that had clients across the border, as well as in the Lower Mainland.

We just wanted to have that option to be able to supply them with a product that they could export if they needed to.

I. Paton: Did you say Lacombe was your other option?

C. Schiebel: It was.

I. Paton: So that’s the only option you’ve got right now?

C. Schiebel: Pretty much, right now — for a federal plant.

There was another question that was….

I. Paton: Just about the reporting.

C. Schiebel: Oh, the reporting. To become a game rancher, you have to actually go through a pretty lengthy process of proving that you can contain your animals. There’s an application process. There’s a fee attached to it plus an annual registration fee that you have to pay, which other livestock producers don’t have to pay.

We have to do an inventory of our animals and report that annually as well, which is very difficult to do, if you’ve ever tried to count bison calves in a pasture, moving around. Typically, it happens when we’re handling in the wintertime.

As far as I know, there’s no other industry that makes you send an inventory and a detailed plan of your business every year. It’s just sort of an annual thing, an annual process, that other livestock producers don’t have to do, plus having a fee attached to it.

I. Paton: Is that B.C. Agriculture paperwork or federal?

C. Schiebel: No, it’s B.C. Agriculture. None of the other provinces make you do that as well. It just seems to be one extra step that is a bit of a hassle for producers.

D. Barnett: Do the bison get tagged the same as the beef?

C. Schiebel: They do. They get RFID tags. It’s actually aligned with the livestock industry, the beef industry. Now we actually have our own bison RFID tags, and they’re tracked through the traceability system when they’re sold.

D. Routley: In the other provinces and in the states where they don’t have the designation for raised bison, is there a dual-designation between wild and farm raised?

C. Schiebel: Yes, there is. There’s a wild designation for anything like the national parks herds. Or the wild herds in Alberta have a wild designation. Then they have the farm-raised animals that are livestock.

R. Leonard (Chair): Any other questions? No.

Well, thank you very much. We really appreciate you coming out tonight.

C. Schiebel: You’re welcome. Thank you.

[7:50 p.m.]

R. Leonard (Chair): Now we have Kam Lake-View Meats Ltd. — Ron Keely.

R. Keely: Last one, last day, I guess. Are you all excited?

R. Leonard (Chair): No, we’ve got a few more folks that we’ve added to the late list.

We’re happy to hear everybody’s comments. So thank you and welcome.

KAM LAKE-VIEW MEATS

R. Keely: Thank you for allowing me to present as well.

My name is Ron Keely. I’ve owned and operated Kam Lake-View Meats for the past 26 years. Kam Lake-View Meats is a government-inspected red meat plant located not too far from here, Cherry Creek. We specialize in slaughter, custom cutting and full processing. We do the sausage, bacons, hams, the whole works. We even have a little storefront attached to our abattoir.

We employ about 12 to 17 people, depending on the time of year. Again, it is a little bit seasonal, but we seem to be getting over that hump at Kam Lake. We stay busy pretty much year-round now — until we reach the really busy season. You know, keeping employees hasn’t really been the problem that I know the other abattoirs have. We’ve got some long-term employees that stayed with us, and I think it’s probably because we’re close to Kamloops and we’ve got a bigger pool. I also just successfully brought in a German meister, a sausage maker. He’s part of our staff now as well.

Like I said, we stay pretty much busy year-round, with lots of work for everybody. We also are Animal Welfare Approved. As well, we do some organics, so we are certified for organics. Our customers come from all over. They come a long ways — Pemberton, up in the Cariboo, Williams Lake.

The things that keep us busy…. We’ve learned to get a relationship with these customers that want to do year-round products, and we cater to them the most. For instance, Douglas Lake Ranch. They like to have their own meat for their restaurants and their cow camps and their fish camps and their golf course. We have several customers like that that we’ve worked with over the years, built up a relationship, and a successful one. That’s what’s keeping us busy year-round.

Our biggest challenge is our capacity. When that time of year comes, the fall, these people, the hobby farmers that I’ve dealt with that were my bread and butter for years and years, you’ve got to say no to them now. Or you have to book months in advance, and you can’t really look after them. You only see them once a year. And you’ve changed your business from looking after those single customers to the bigger ones that have figured out how to bring in beef, hogs and lambs year-round and are keeping us busy. So capacity is one of our biggest ones, for sure.

You know, 11 years ago…. We operated as a slaughter plant for 16 years prior. For the first 16 years, we were uninspected. About 11 years ago, we were told: “You either bring it up to standards, or you shut her down.” That’s where we lost a lot of our butchers all through the province. I think a lot them said, “No. I’m not putting up with the regulations, the cost, the whole nine yards,” and they shut her down.

That’s exactly when we, the plants that stayed open, got overstuffed, especially in the season time of year. But you know, since that, having an inspector on hand in your plant is a must. It has to be there. I had to learn it the hard way. I wouldn’t operate a plant in any other way. The food safety, animal safety, traceability…. You have to have a third party in there to check it out, especially if you have 15 employees and you’re not there watching them all the time.

[7:55 p.m.]

It’s crucial to have safe food going out of the plant. Even being an owner, you need somebody to regulate. The capacity problem with us is huge, especially from people from far away. Our freezers get stuffed up. It’s not just the coolers now; it’s the freezers.

Our problem here right now…. I’m not too sure what to do about it. We’re busy. We pay a decent wage. We have a full staff. We even pay benefits. With all of our waste costs now, SRM costs, upgrade costs — just keeping the plant up to the power — by the end of the day, there is no money left for expansion.

You can only charge your customers so much. We’ve gone up. We’ve gone up. We’ve gone up. I’d like to see the butchers get more money too. You know, the butcher trade is still a low-wage job.

I don’t know where that’s going to go. We’re just sort of keeping on, going on, but in my plans, there is no money for any expansion to help out. I think any of our abattoirs that have expanded and gone on…. Expanding them more would be really helpful. The existing ones get more space. I think they would probably agree with me on that as well.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got to say.

R. Leonard (Chair): Okay. Well, I appreciate your presentation, and we have questions already.

N. Simons: First of all, thank you very much for your presentation. We’re all learning every time there’s a new witness, and that’s good.

The issue around spreading out the animals over the year, like where you were sometimes not busy, now you’re sort of busy throughout the year…. How do you teach the producers? What happened there?

R. Keely: They started selling some meat successfully. I’ll give you one, for instance.

I have one customer that has a ranch of his own, and he’s up to about 150 head a year, selling. But he doesn’t raise that many, so he asks other ranchers around him. As long as they do what he says — no medication and grass-fed — he’ll pay them a premium, and he’ll sell them. So these other ranchers are holding them back. Instead of the traditional “sell them in the fall,” they’re holding them back and feeding them some hay.

There are several like this that are doing that. If you bring grass-fed beef down to…. It’s not grass-finished, by the way, either. It is not finished. It’s just grass-fed young beef. He sells it all. The market down at the coast is crazy about it.

I can’t grade it, either. It’s not gradable. But it is a young, grass-fed animal, and people eat it up like you wouldn’t believe.

R. Leonard (Chair): That’s interesting.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Hi, Ron. Interesting. You’re probably the fourth or fifth person that we’ve heard from that talked about when the regulations came in and a resistance to the change, and that having gone through the transition, they would never go back, because that third-party oversight is just so important to the quality that you are producing right now.

How do you bring more people on into the industry now that they’re not the ones that went through the transition? How do we attract more people when we look at capacity and people needing capacity across the province?

R. Keely: How do we get more people in the industry?

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Yeah.

R. Keely: I don’t know. That’s….

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): When you talk about the challenges of cost and no money for expansion too.

R. Keely: Yeah. I don’t have an answer for that one. I really don’t.

Devick’s Ranch, here, we’ve just helped them. I was part of helping design their new abattoir, and I had fun doing that. That was great to see another abattoir on board in the Kamloops area. It’s pretty exciting to watch, seeing what they’re doing, taking their own brand and selling it. I’m going to sell some of their stuff out of my store. I will.

R. Leonard (Chair): No more questions?

Well, thank you very much. I appreciate your perspective on this.

[8:00 p.m.]

Now we’re into the folks who just signed up to share some points of view with us for five minutes. We have, first on the list, Paul Devick.

Please come up to the table and the mike. Welcome.

DEVICK’S RANCH

P. Devick: Thank you for opening it up for people like me that are pretty busy. Our family has a fifth-generation ranch just north of Kamloops here. Fourth generation. Fifth not operating yet, but they’re on their way.

R. Leonard (Chair): You’re cultivating them.

P. Devick: Yeah. We have been processing and using local facilities for meat production for, I don’t know, 15 years or maybe even more than that. I haven’t got the date down pat yet. Definitely, capacity was a problem. We had people phoning us wanting more meat, wanting more meat. Not only slaughterhouse capacity, but animal capacity, too.

I mean, we’ve got the animals on the ranch, but as you heard from the president of the B.C. Cattlemen’s Association earlier, our ability to feed and fatten cattle is challenging because of facilities and because of the grain availability. We’ve worked through that. We’ve got a system. We’ve got our own grain processing. We get our grain from Alberta, our raw grain, but we do get it here. We feed our cattle right close to where we’re developing our slaughterhouse.

The slaughterhouse has been a huge investment. We’ve applied for and received our class A licence. We’ve been very fortunate. We’ve found an excellent manager to work with the facility who’s got good experience. Also, in developing the plant, we’ve had local people here — consultants and Ron and the other plants in the area — that have helped us, with great support, to build this facility.

I think you’ve heard, especially here in Kamloops, a lot of concerns from producers who really care. One thing that I think you should hear from…. I don’t know if you’ve talked to him or not, but there’s a compliance officer in British Columbia who works the whole province. He deals with all the people that aren’t complying. I think you people should really hear from that man, because some of the stories that you hear that are happening out there are horrendous. I’ll just leave that at that.

A concern for us is finding more as we grow. I think we’re set up right now, as we start. We’ve built a fairly substantial plant. We’re starting slow, with low capacity, and we want to grow with that. We’ve built the plant with mind of only doing our own cattle. As we went through the consultation with our consultant and stuff, we decided to do pork and sheep as well. We’ve already got bookings for as soon as we’re open for custom work.

I would also like to say that I really support creating a level playing field for all facilities, whether they’re class D or A. You people have got a huge job ahead of you of figuring that out, but I really think it’s important that we produce food that’s produced with animal welfare, traceability and safe, clean facilities right from wall to wall. I don’t care what class you’ve got. Whatever.

[8:05 p.m.]

It’s just so important, because we if get a disease outbreak, it’s going to affect us all. It’s going to shut us all down. I mean, we don’t have to look back very far to when we had BSE happen. It shut down the whole country.

Having said those things, I think that’s what we’re doing. We’re quite excited about it and hope it works out well.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much. I’m sure it will be a success.

P. Devick: Well, time will tell.

R. Leonard (Chair): Now we have an opportunity to see if any of our members have a question for you.

D. Barnett: Are you custom processing too?

P. Devick: Yes. We have a cow herd of 800, an 800 cow-calf operation on the ranch. In this area, it’s not huge, but it’s fairly substantial. Our goal was to build a facility big enough to basically have the ability to do our whole herd and retain that added value. We’re going to go forward and do smoked products and ready-to-eat things. That’s down the way, of course, but further processing for more value-added product.

I. Paton: I hope this isn’t a dumb question.

R. Leonard (Chair): There are no dumb questions.

P. Devick: There’s never a dumb question.

I. Paton: At the municipal level, we deal all the time in zoning. With agricultural land in your municipality or regional district, is there any sort of issue with an abattoir or slaughter facility on your agricultural farmland depending on the size? Could you go as big as you want?

P. Devick: We had consultation with the regional district as far as our facility goes. We had to commit to building a facility under 6,000 square feet. Well, we’re about ten feet under that. We had to also commit to over 50 percent of our own product to be able to do that. It’s considered a farm building to them, and that eliminated a lot of hoops for us. We were lucky there. I guess it worked out well for us that way.

I. Paton: Just one more. Did it have to go to public hearing with your local government?

P. Devick: No.

I. Paton: No. Okay.

R. Leonard (Chair): Okay. Any more questions? No.

Well, thank you very much for coming up. You were bang on at five minutes.

P. Devick: Okay. There you go.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you and good luck.

The next person on our list now is Cameron Harris. Welcome.

CAMERON HARRIS

C. Harris: Hello. Sorry, I just straggled in and thought I would talk. So thank you.

R. Leonard (Chair): It worked out well.

C. Harris: I started cutting meat when I was 17, and now I’ve been in and out of the industry for about 20 years. Especially when regulation came in, I found myself working in a big chain store to the point where I was just opening boxes.

I recently had an opportunity to work with the Devick farm there. They’ve hired me on to work in their plant, and it’s a great opportunity. I’m looking forward to a career there. As far as staffing goes, we’ll see. But I think we’re offering something to a new generation of people and a new generation of workers.

I heard quite a few people say that they started farming five years ago. I think that’s a reflection of this changing culture and this changing attitude. Some people have mentioned this urbanization. You can’t buy a house in Vancouver, so you move to Lillooet and you start a farm. I think that’s great.

[8:10 p.m.]

I’m a foodie. My girlfriend is a sommelier. She loves the wine. Our little dusty town of Kamloops has breweries and charcuterie boards. We’re getting uptown. There’s a market for this local beef.

Again, what I’d like to just mention now is that a big concern here has been labour. How are they going to find people?

Another big concern is food safety, as opposed to how does the little guy who started five years ago bring his or her animal to the market. I feel like now, in this atmosphere and with an opportunity like the Devick's, you can consolidate that culture. You have the traditional farm knowledge — five generations of animal welfare and finishing animals. I feel there’s an opportunity now for these people who want to become farmers to work with industry and learn.

Quite a few people said: “Well, if I put a bad product out, my farm’s done.” Yeah, but ten people got sick and died. That’s the main thing. So I think it’s really important to embrace this new culture, to encourage people to get in this industry, to make this industry a career again for people, but to not forget that you have a responsibility to your local customers.

With the Devicks here, we’ve been working on their food safety plan and compliance — and Ministry of Environment and Ministry of Agriculture and CFIA. It’s a lot of work. But it’s challenging, and if you’re a go-getter, you can negotiate this. You can work with the B.C. Association of Abattoirs, and you can find the support network. You can be challenged as a young person looking for a career. I think that’s meaningful, as opposed to just working in a factory or working in a store.

I think this kind of regulation protects people, but it also provides an opportunity — a real job, not seasonal anymore. “I got five beef. Can you come up to kill my beef?” And: “Yeah.” Then you’re done, and you’re on the road again. I’m thinking about a family, and this is a real opportunity. You won’t get that in a little rural farm with one beef.

That’s all I want to say. Thank you for listening to me.

Interjections.

R. Leonard (Chair): You can hear the gratitude. Everybody is very thankful that you came in and had some words.

Do we have any questions for Cameron?

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Not necessarily a question but a comment. We’ve talked in agriculture for quite some time as to how we attract young people to come in. I know that for probably 15 years, I’ve heard conversations about: “How do we make it a profession that is recognized for the importance of the work?” So to hear your comments is good.

C. Harris: Yeah, well, I’m excited about it. We just hired another guy. He was cooking for ten years, and he’s excited about it. People are asking me: “Did you see that on Food Network? Can you do that for me?” “Yeah, we can. You can eat that with the confidence that that animal was treated humanely and that it’s FoodSafe.”

Working with the inspectors is great fun. They have backgrounds in biology and veterinary. You say: “What are you looking for?” They’re opening up a little lymph node to see a pathology. You know, you won’t see that with a GoPro. You have to be there. I think that’s fun. I think that’s exciting. I think that offers something meaningful to people.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much for coming in. I thank you for presenting a feeling of hope and vision for the future.

Is there anyone else who would like to make some representations to this committee? We’ve got about ten folks sitting in the room who have not presented.

No? All right. Well, I thank you all for persevering through this whole evening and listening to everybody and your neighbours talk.

Everybody, do you want to say one last final thank-you?

Interjections.

R. Leonard (Chair): Yes, thank you very much to the Hansard folks who’ve been recording everything. And thank you to Jennifer and Stephanie for keeping it all together.

I now declare this meeting adjourned.

The committee adjourned at 8:15 p.m.