You fit into that.
Evidence of meeting #42 for Agriculture and Agri-Food in the 41st Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was animal.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #42 for Agriculture and Agri-Food in the 41st Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was animal.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Chief Executive Officer, Beretta Organic Farms
Yes. Generally, we deliver to the end user.
Conservative
Pierre Lemieux Conservative Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON
The retailers purchasing the product are willing to pay a premium price for the product you're offering them, and the consumer, I'm guessing, is also willing to pay a premium price to the retailer for the product you're offering.
Chief Executive Officer, Beretta Organic Farms
In a perfect world, yes. That's always the challenge.
Conservative
Chief Executive Officer, Beretta Organic Farms
Of course not. You set up a pricing model and then inevitably you're pushed into a situation where you're trying to drive your costs down to ensure that, which is a challenge especially when we're dealing with a market like this and one that's so related to the U.S. and the fluctuations.
Our costs tend to be the same. There's very little variability there, but what we're being compared against is quite a roller coaster.
Conservative
Conservative
Conservative
Ben Lobb Conservative Huron—Bruce, ON
One question, Mr. Beretta, is on your operation. Obviously in a traditional farm operation where you have a feedlot or a cow-calf or whatever, you're going to treat your animals for foot rot, mange, and pink eye, and all the things that are part of being a farmer.
How do you treat illnesses and ailments such as those?
Chief Executive Officer, Beretta Organic Farms
The first thing we do is to try to prevent them, which is probably a cliché answer, but we do everything we can to avoid them.
For example, right now at our home farm we have 300 stocker cattle, and we practise what's called intensive grazing. The animals are moved every two or three days, depending on the size of the fields. That helps us avoid having to use any kind of dewormers; the parasite pressure is diminished by constantly moving the cattle into new pastures. That's an example of a step we would take to try to ensure we don't have to.
Inevitably there will be animals that get sick, one way or the other. If we have to treat them, they're segregated from the program, they have to be tagged differently and kept separate. What we generally do is, if we think they're getting sick or we're going to have to treat them, we ship them off to a stockyard and sell them on the commodity market.
Conservative
Ben Lobb Conservative Huron—Bruce, ON
That makes sense, I guess, doesn't it?
When you finish cattle in your feedlot, do you finish them with organic corn or organic grains? Perhaps you can tell us how that works.
Chief Executive Officer, Beretta Organic Farms
For certified organic beef production, all the feed has to be certified organic. We will use whatever is available at a given time, whether it's corn, or barley, or oats. It will always be certified organic.
We're working on a separate line, which is our grass-fed line. That's certified organic as well, but those animals will never have received grain at all during their lives. It's something we're getting more and more requests for from consumers, who are becoming more educated and aware that as ruminants, those animals really are not made to eat grain. We're trying to develop something that's seasonal. The animals would be harvested right from pasture—that is completely grass finished.
Conservative
Ben Lobb Conservative Huron—Bruce, ON
How heavy can you take a steer up to finishing it organically?
Chief Executive Officer, Beretta Organic Farms
With grass they're much smaller. We tend to use more of what are considered the British breeds—the Hereford, Angus, Shorthorn breeds—which finish well on grass and are a smaller carcass size.
The ones that go through a feedlot and are fed organic grains will be about 1,300 pounds when they die, and they'll dress out anywhere from 700 pounds to 800 pounds.
Conservative
Chief Executive Officer, Beretta Organic Farms
It takes a little longer. Then the challenges we run into, of course, are with the SRM now. We have to be very careful we don't exceed 30 months. I'd say, on average, we're looking at about two years.
Conservative
Ben Lobb Conservative Huron—Bruce, ON
If a farmer today has 50 cows in a cow-calf operation and thought this is something he'd like to get into, can he take his 50 cows and over the three years certify his stock as organic? Is that how that works when you're certifying?
Chief Executive Officer, Beretta Organic Farms
Yes. The cows would never be considered organic. You can't make organic an animal that's already been treated with an antibiotic, hormone, or something just by letting it sit for three years.
Generally the cow herd would not be considered organic, unless you could prove that during its whole life it had never received any kind of a treatment, but the offspring could be. The animals born could go through that period and then be slaughtered as organic, depending, of course, on the feed and the land they're being raised on. It's quite a challenge.
Conservative
Ben Lobb Conservative Huron—Bruce, ON
I have one last question.
Mr. Clarke, bone meal certainly would be considered an organic fertilizer for cropland. Could you tell this committee, is that something allowed currently under Agriculture and Agri-food Canada?
Government Affairs, Canadian Renderers Association
Do you mean as an organic input?
Government Affairs, Canadian Renderers Association
Not that I'm aware of, primarily because under the organic regulations, if you're producing organic bone meal, you would have to have third-party certification, as Mike has mentioned. The organic regulations on the food require third-party certification.
The rendering industry obviously has HACCP, and it's under CFIA inspection, and so on, but as far as using bone meal as organic, I'm not aware of that.
Conservative
Ben Lobb Conservative Huron—Bruce, ON
Looking at it objectively, even if you could get to the point where bone meal would be acceptable to use as a fertilizer, does it matter really if it came from an organic beast or a traditional beast?
