I'll start on that.
We worked pretty actively from 2005 on to increase capacity. Pre-BSE, which is the term in our industry from May 2003, we were processing up to around 70,000 head of cattle a week in Canada. We increased that capacity to over 100,000 head, if we were operating the full number of days with double shifting. And then, when the market opened to the United States for live cattle, of course they came back as competitive bidders in our market. We saw that capacity fall back to around 60,000 to 70,000 head a week.
It wasn't that we didn't have enough capacity to kill more cattle in Canada. A whole number of issues started to come into play. Some regulatory issues have created a higher cost structure in Canada. We presented before a number of committees on how we have applied the policies differently, like the feed ban and the impact of that. So there are some competitiveness issues that are greater than just simply do we have enough hooks in this country to process cattle.
Ontario is a really good example. If you take a look at the last two months, when U.S. plants, as a result of the change in the rules, started buying Ontario cattle again, we saw the price in Ontario improve by over $100 a head in relation to the rest of the country. In other words, they were being discounted just because of the concentration.
The fact that we've been integrated and those plants are all part of the daily bidding process creates more competition every day when a person is selling cattle. So it is healthy to have a certain amount of product and a certain number of people bidding on it every day.
We would prefer more of those cattle be processed in Canada. Part of it gets back to market access that Mr. Haney could talk about.
A range of those products capture more value outside Canada than it will inside of Canada, and one of those, I believe, is that you don't really have domestic markets any longer in our trade. You have larger or smaller markets. Every time we process an animal, probably different parts of that animal should find their way around the world. Long cut feet should be sold into Korea. You take a look at the value of livers in countries like Egypt and so forth, that all adds value. For us to compete against U.S. plants, we have to be able to optimize the value of every animal we process. And that is part of our overall strategy.
We believe there are some improvements in technology. We've just written to the Government of Canada, as we move ahead with some new technologies for quality assessment, that now, we think, is the ideal time to move forward with that, because it also links nicely to your question about traceability. We link the ability to go back to the original farm and add more information through the system. Not only do we show our customers we have a better system, we're able to use it better as an industry.
So a whole competitiveness relationship goes right from what does it cost to process products in Canada all the way through to what value can we obtain through the marketplace for them.