High costs closing down the chicken coop
Small-scale farmers say they’re being crippled by rising fees and reduced access to slaughter services
Squamish farmer Tracy Robertson is getting out of the chicken business.
Chickens from her Stony Mountain Farm were being processed a few hundred at a time at a local meat packing facility — until late last year, when her processor raised the minimum order to 2,000 birds.
“I’m only licensed for 2,000 chickens a year and there is no way we can get to 2,000 in one order,” she said. “The most I’ve ever done is 700 in one year.”
She found a new processor in Yarrow, but the drive, unloading and reloading over two consecutive days, burns so much time and fuel that raising free-range chickens amounts to volunteer work.
“There’s so little capacity in the slaughter and packing industry that you have to book months in advance to get, say, turkeys for Thanksgiving,” she said. “I’ve been bumped before and then you can’t fill your customers’ orders.”
The situation is even worse for new pig farmers as slaughter and meat-cutting services at provincially inspected (Class A and B) abattoirs are not available for months at a time.
Meanwhile, the number of on-farm (Class D and E) slaughterhouses has declined by one third since 2013.
Helen Cabot got a Class E licence to slaughter animals on her farm because she was unable to book time at a meat packing plant between mid-August and the end of the year.
“I was told that, between summer and the New Year, I wasn’t going to get any animals in unless someone quits, retires or dies,” she said.
Under the terms of her licence, she can slaughter her own animals only in limited numbers, and the products derived from those animals can only be sold on the farm or at markets in her local regional district — effectively locking her out of the Lower Mainland’s lucrative farmer’s markets.
“When I have pigs slaughtered commercially, my customers have to pick up their orders at the abattoir,” Cabot said.
“I can’t bring the meat back to the farm, so I can’t make sausage and do that value-added stuff where I can make a few more dollars on that animal.”
The jumble of federal, provincial and health authority rules and regulations add a huge overhead of both time and money to raising so-called higher-welfare livestock on a small scale, farmers say.
“Being a small producer, it’s a nightmare,” Cabot said.
Sudden increases in packing and kill fees have left some small-scale producers holding the bag.
“We sell those animals months or a year in advance, so when the price (of slaughter and cutting) goes up, we’re left to eat that cost,” she said.
When Robertson’s customers buy her heritage pork, they pay the abattoir’s kill fee and butchering costs from their own pocket, so she’s protected from profit-eating price changes.
Gabriola Island farmer Theresa Curtiss was hit by a six-month feed bill after the processing date on her last batch of pigs was pushed from summer to just days before Christmas.
She’s quitting the chicken business, too, mainly due to the cost of hauling birds to the nearest packing plant in Port Alberni.
“There was a (government) rule change that made it so we couldn’t pick up the birds on the same day, so suddenly it was two trips and two ferries,” she said.
A number of small producers were caught by surprise earlier this year when Chilliwack-based Johnston’s meat packers nearly doubled their kill fee from $40 a pig to $75.
“Prices for custom cutting have been stable for several years,” said Bonnie Windsor, assistant plant manager at Johnston’s.
“When we changed our kill fee Feb. 1, that was the first increase in four years.”
Windsor believes there’s enough capacity in the packing industry to serve the province’s farmers, who simply need to book well in advance.
“I know of a few places that are shut down right now with no business,” she said. “There are really only a few months of the year — October and November — when we’re booked solid.”