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Dr. Vincent Amanour-Boadu shared the following tips on how to position yourself for success in the global marketplace with participants at the Making Tough Decisions in Tough Times conference: Increase and sustain industry share of plate and market. Consumers are not loyal and will buy from wherever they think their needs are being met. Find a way [...]   Meeting the needs of a finicky consumer is hard – but essential for success in the evolving global marketplace. And it’s something farmers need to start committing to, according to a popular agricultural economist from Kansas State University. “We need to understand consumer needs and how ungrateful they are,” said Dr. Vincent Amanour-Boadu as he addressed livestock farmers at the recent Making tough decisions in tough times conference in London ON. “And we’ve talked about this long enough – now we need to start committing to success.” If producers don’t survive, the rest of the industry won’t either. That’s the blunt message Canadian Pork Council president Clare Schlegel is hoping the government will hear loud and clear. The Canadian livestock industry has been battling an economic crisis since last summer, when Canada’s high-flying currency helped sink cattle and hog prices and drive up feed costs. Farming is a tough business. I’ve been around agriculture all my life and it seems as though one sector or another is always hurting. Right now, grains and oilseeds (crops grown for their oil such as soybeans, canola, sunflowers etc) farmers are enjoying record high demand for their crops – and the high prices to go along with that. By comparison, livestock farmers are struggling to make ends meet as the high crop prices have driven up the cost of feed. There are other problems plaguing the livestock sector too, but the rapidly sky-rocketing feed prices are certainly a contributing cause. Now you can know for sure. There’s a new, fool-proof way of determining whether the steak you’re eating came from a cloned animal using DNA barcoding technology. This statement was made by an Irish scientist at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Boston this week. According to Professor Patrick Cunningham, DNA tracking which is already used in some countries to certify meat as organic or hormone free, could easily be used to identify meat that came from cloned animals. Products from cloned animals were recently approved as safe for human consumption by the United States and the European Union. There were howls of protest from consumers groups about whether or not enough testing had been done to rule out long term, negative side effects of eating cloned animal meat. Tough decisions about their businesses and their futures are facing many livestock farmers these days. But there may be some help on the horizon – a one day conference in London this week is designed to help them with those decisions. The Ontario Pork Industry Council is hosting a day-long information meeting for beef, pork and [...] A Canadian-made cattle vaccine against a deadly form of e.coli has been given a conditional licence for sale by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Developed in Canada and already conditionally approved for sale in this country, this vaccine is the first that can be used on-farm to reduce the shedding of e.coli 0157:H7 bacteria by cattle. It is this strain of e.coli that is responsible for thousands of food and water-related illnesses and deaths across Canada and the United States every year. It is also this strain of e.coli that caused the Walkerton tragedy, where seven people died and hundreds became sick after the town’s water supply became contaminated. |   | |||||
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