FEATURE
RISK MANAGEMENT CANADIAN FOOD BUSINESS VO L U M E 3 6, I S S U E 1 • 2 0 2 1
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There’s a lot at stake for livestock producers By Jana Manolakos
IN
2008, Guelph student Catherine McCorquodale – who today practices agriculture law – gave a hard-hitting speech at the Royal Agriculture Winter Fair in Toronto. It painted a brutal picture of the cost to the Canadian cattle and beef industry hit by mad cow disease. “What do you do when in one day, you lose over $100,000 and your 15-year plan is thrown out the window?” she asked the audience, describing the impact on her family’s dairy farm in Embro, Ontario. From diseases like mad cow to tariffs and climate change – to the impacts of the current pandemic – Canadian livestock farmers are fighting a seemingly never-ending battle to fend off risks to their operations, in an industry that had annual shipments worth $22.3B in 2019. On the day of McCorquodale’s speech, five years had passed since a lone black Angus cow in Alberta had tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as mad cow disease. This triggered an unprecedented crisis in the Canadian beef and cattle industry, which still today is engaged in a legal battle with the government. While her family struggled with the reality that their cattle business was facing ruin, further difficult news followed. Canada was almost immediately banned from exporting its cattle to over
