Agriculture committee  If you had five or ten good years and you built up a wonderful margin on your farm, and then you had a bad year, you would qualify for CAIS. But as Kenton says, when you have four or five bad years in a row and your margin has gone down to nothing, it doesn't help you. There's a

Agriculture committee  The Americans say that this marker carries CWD, and if you eradicate it from your herd, you're not going to get it. We approached CFIA about six years ago, and they said there hasn't been any research on this in Canada. When they did all the killings and eradicated the herds, t

Agriculture committee  I think the cattle industry was scared, right off the bat. When CWD struck one of our elk farms, they eradicated the farm, and the fellow went in and put cattle on his pasture. Right away, the cattle industry said, “Get them off there. We don't want any disease to transfer into t

Agriculture committee  It's mainly the antlers.

Agriculture committee  We've tried to set up a European meat market, but we've run into too many CFIA and government regulations in Canada. We'd like to get an EU inspector to come over here, because their regulations are not as tough as ours are, but they won't agree to that.

Agriculture committee  They want the CFIA in there first, and then the EU. Our markets have been hampered by that too.

Agriculture committee  You can export them, but we're held hostage by the price. Everybody knows that we can't go into Korea. China has come over here, and they're offering us $15 a pound for it. They export it to Hong Kong, and it then probably goes by boat to China or Korea. They get $100 a pound for

Agriculture committee  Right now we have Chinese buyers who come right to the farm. I have a Chinese buyer who comes out to our farm. Different producers will bring their antlers to our place. We weigh them, grade them, and store them in freezer units until we get enough to ship the product out. We h

Agriculture committee  I guess when we talk about recognition with our industry, it's basically that before we ended up having the CWD, we didn't need any help from CFIA or anybody. Our industry was growing, and growing fast, and it was promoted by the federal government as a way to diversify. Now that

Agriculture committee  Our elk industry is being linked with the cattle industry. When there was a payout with compensation for BSE, the cattle industry got a payout and the elk were linked in with them. The program started in August. It started at 45¢ a pound for the cervid industry to a maximum of $1

Agriculture committee  That's as far as they will go.

Agriculture committee  Eight thousand animals.

Agriculture committee  There was compensation paid to the farmers at that time, but out of those 8,000 animals there were about 120 animals that were infected with CWD. We approached them to slaughter the animals, test the animals, and sell the meat or start a meat market for us so that we could have a

Agriculture committee  The antler market was one of the main driving forces of the elk industry. With the onslaught of CWD that hit our market—just like the BSE that hit the cattle industry, or bird flu—we eradicated 8,000 animals in Saskatchewan. To this date we haven't made any further progress. Basi