The CCA has been a member of the roundtable since it was created a decade ago to promote practices that are socially responsible, environmentally sound and economically viable. It now has more than 500 companies and producer organizations as members. Sister organizations have been set up in numerous countries, including Canada.

The Lowe family’s roots in the ranching sector date back to the late 1800s and they have a feedlot in Nanton and a cow-calf operation in Eriksdale, Man.

Lowe has been a strong voice for the sustainable beef movement, the CCA said in a release.

“He is an outspoken advocate for sharing information about raising cattle, feedlots and best management practices, and promotes the understanding of the stewardship and conservation that is inherent in sustainable beef production,” the organization said.

Ian McConnel of Tyson Foods was elected as the global roundtable’s president. He is the director of sustainability for Tyson’s international business unit.

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For most producers, 2016 was a grind with a distinct shortage of highlight reel moments. But the world always moves forward and there were many significant changes that took place over the last 12 months.

Here are five of note.

The best years are still ahead for pulse growers

‘Past results are no guarantee of future performance.’

That standard warning from the stock market certainly applied to pulses this year as prices dropped sharply and excessive rain downgraded many Alberta pea and lentil crops to feed category.

Poor harvests in India sent pulse prices sky high in 2015 and Alberta farmers sure noticed. According to StatsCan, they seeded 232,700 hectares of lentils — double the acreage of 2015 and five times what they planted the year before that. Peas were sown on a whopping 2.27 million hectares, 73 per cent more than in 2015.

• Read more: Pulses’ popularity points to bright future

But neither Mother Nature nor the markets co-operated — prices fell and so did the rain. There’s likely a fair number of farmers who have vowed to never grow those crops again, or at least on poor-draining fields better suited to cereals or canola. And the spread of root rot means many other fields won’t see a pulse crop for quite a while.

But while it proved to be a crummy year for growing pulses, it was a heck of a one for spreading the word about their health and environmental benefits.

Sylvan Lake farmer Allison Ammeter — Alberta’s, and perhaps, the country’s most enthusiastic booster of the crop — was excited going into the year. The United Nations designated 2016 as the International Year of Pulses (IYOP) and Ammeter predicted that shining the international spotlight on dried legumes would pay dividends for years and decades to come.

“As IYOP draws attention to big global issues like nutrition, food security, and environmental sustainability, this crop — which is a Canadian success story — is only going to get more attention, get more agronomic research, and more breeding research,” she said a year ago.

One year later, Ammeter said that IYOP “wildly exceeded all expectations.”

About 55,000 people took the Pulse Pledge — a vow to eat pulses at least once a week for 10 weeks — and social media interactions and mentions using the #lovepulses hashtag reached an astonishing 3.1 billion interactions.

“That’s unbelievable. Our goal was 750 million and we far exceeded that,” said Ammeter.

It’s a strong indicator that people are figuring out what pulses are, how to use them, and why they’re good for you.

“We have a sense that consumption has increased, but we’re waiting for the next consumer research information to come to really have hard-and-fast numbers,” said Ammeter.

But she expects growing consumer awareness will mean greater demand and more pulse acres in the province.

“Consumer demand will definitely cause more to be planted. We’ve seen that with chickpeas and hummus. Where North America used to be net exporters, now we can hardly supply the North American hummus market, which is a great problem to have.”

That’s going to happen with other pulses, too, she predicted, although a good chunk of that could be using pulse fractions in things like ravioli, chips, and even dog food.

“That is going to result in not only more demand, but also better research and better agronomics.”

Strife and anger give way to consultation

When it came to workplace health and safety, it seemed most everyone took a breath and stepped back in 2016.

The angry demonstrations and rushed passage of Bill 6 at the end of 2015 set the stage for even more bitter confrontations. But the unprecedented furor prompted the province’s farm organizations to do something equally unprecedented — form a coalition that could speak with a unified voice for virtually every producer in this big and diverse province. And so 2-1/2 dozen farm groups, representing nearly 97 per cent of producers, created the Alberta Agriculture Farm and Ranch Safety Coalition.

• Read more: Alberta ag minister promises to work with farm groups

The new group, known as AgCoalition, wasn’t exactly thrilled with the terms of the consultation process and even less so about the province’s determination that the right to unionize would be mixed in with things such as occupational health and safety rules. But its top priority was being part of the process, and also educating non-farmers on the six committees (known as tables) that would make recommendations on specific rules and regulations that would give teeth to the Enhanced Protection for Farm and Ranch Workers Act.

“In some areas, we did see some movement and we did get to resolutions,” Gord Winkel, AgCoalition’s interim executive director, said in November.

“In other areas, it was clearly not acceptable to the industry to move forward with certain things.

“Fortunately, the process allowed for that, and we were able to show that there was a lack of consensus and basically make the agriculture sector’s intent known.”

In the win column was an agreement that farms couldn’t function if they had to live with the rules governing hours of work and overtime that apply to other sectors. Those rules limit the workday to 12 hours with 30-minute breaks every five hours, and impose overtime after 44 hours in a week. Instead, the committee agreed, farm workers should get a minimum of four days off for every 28 days worked and families should be exempted entirely.

AgCoalition members are also being proactive when it comes to providing safety education and reminding their members that, in Winkel’s words, “If you don’t do it your way, it will get done to you.”

Still things may flare up again in the coming year.

There were heated discussions at the table on labour relations, with everyone eventually agreeing to disagree on unionization. It’s easy to imagine a push to unionize a farm, ranch, or feedlot becoming a flashpoint in the coming year. And the number of farm employee injury claims to the Workers Compensation Board were also up significantly, which raises the prospect of higher WCB premiums at a time when both grain and livestock sectors are trying to cope with lower prices.

But it’s worth remembering what, at the time, may have seemed on overly optimistic appeal from farm groups a year ago.

“While we have not been provided the opportunity to influence the process to this point, we ask for your patience and support as the work begins to design the legislation that directly affects your operation on a day-to-day basis,” Alberta Barley Commission said in a release a year ago.

“Although we understand the frustration felt by producers, we are optimistic that the upcoming consultations can be meaningful.”

The lesson from 2016? Expect the unexpected

Well, at least we didn’t have a drought — and we’ll be starting off with great soil moisture conditions.

That would sum up the optimist’s view of a year that many would rather forget. But 2016 offered a classic reminder of both Mother Nature’s ability to make a U-turn and the need to bear that in mind when making a cropping plan.

• Read more: Horrible fall harvest goes on and on

Drought was indeed on everyone’s mind as the winter that barely was came to an end and producers wondered whether the old saying, ‘seed into dust and bins will bust,’ would prove to be true in 2016. Forecasts of the warmest spring on record also prompted warnings that an invasion of grasshoppers and other pests was on its way.

But crops germinated and insect Armageddon was averted (although a plague of gophers hit some parts of the province). At one point, things looked so good, there was talk that the harvest would rival 2013’s all-time record, which raised concerns that Prairie farmers were in for a repeat of that year’s grain transportation gridlock.

And then the heavens began to open up. In June, it was ‘million-dollar rains.’ In July, ‘OK, we’re good now.’ From August onwards, it was just, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

Of course, not all precipitation falls as rain. If you avoided a serious encounter with the Great White Combine, consider yourself lucky. Although the province didn’t set a record for hail claims last year, Agriculture Financial Services Corporation has paid out $355 million in hail claims. And no sooner had the summer hail season ended when winter made an early visit to many parts of the province with some September snow.

In the end, many producers saw their best harvest weather in November and set personal records for their longest-ever harvest season. But many, many others still have crops in the field. And it’s not just that that grain will be worth little or nothing, it also means some farmers will have to start spring in the combine before they can start seeding.

• Read more: Help for some producers with unharvested acres

On top of all that was the fall in global grain prices.

Again the optimist can point to the low Canadian dollar as a shield, and it’s a good point — many American grain farmers are having very serious discussions in their lender’s office these days. But if oil prices continue to rebound, there will be less shielding in 2017. And huge grain and oilseed supplies around the world mean there’s little prospect of prices rising significantly any time soon.

If both looking back and looking forward seems a little depressing, remember, this is the time of year when there’s a lot of money-making advice on offer. As always, conferences and workshops will offer top-notch presentations on topics such as marketing and grain drying, as well as predictions that prove prescient (fusarium’s westward march and the threat of aphanomyces in peas were two from a year ago).

But perhaps the greatest lesson from 2016 is ‘expect the unexpected.’ And who knows? Maybe the 2013 harvest record will be broken this year and the biggest dilemma will be where to find enough storage for it all.

A golden opportunity, but will it be seized?

Wouldn’t it be nice if people were always complimenting you on your work?

That actually happened a lot to beef producers in this province in 2016.

“You are making the most advancements when it comes to sustainable beef today,” Cameron Bruett, JBS’s top sustainability official, proclaimed at the Canadian Beef Industry Conference in Calgary this summer.

• Read more: Canada hosts Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef

Another major vote of confidence came from the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef — one of the leading forces in the whole sustainable ag movement — when it invited top industry officials from around the world to Banff. Once again, the Canadian beef sector was showered with praise.

But for all that’s been accomplished, the past year showed more needs to be done. Two stories from 2016 — one that made national headlines and another barely noticed — put this into sharp relief.

Earls Restaurants thought it was giving customers what they wanted when it decided to switch to ‘Certified Humane Beef.’ The problem, of course, was that involved getting that meat from the U.S. and that didn’t sit well with patriotic Canadian steak lovers.

But another proponent of certified beef with considerable more marketing expertise came to Alberta to say that producers can make money by giving people what they want. John Stika, president of Certified Angus Beef, told a Livestock Gentec conference that the brand’s success — more than a billion pounds of beef sold annually — stemmed from listening to what consumers want and delivering it.

Could Canada do the same by positioning its beef as a premium product with the highest environmental, animal welfare, and safety standards in the world?

The pieces are there. The past year saw the successful completion of McDonald’s “verified sustainable beef” pilot, the hand-over to the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, and the launch of the VBP (Verified Beef Production) Plus program. There’s also a robust traceability network; the BIXS carcass data and information-sharing system; and an extensive body of scientific work that shows beef production on grasslands produces environmental benefits.

Putting those pieces together and creating demand for a Certified Canadian Premium Beef brand will take a lot more time and effort. However, with cattle prices once again in the doldrums, the coming year may see more people in the sector wanting to leverage the advantage that Bruett says Canadian beef has.

A tough year for AFSC, a last one for ALMA

It’s been a heck of a ride,” said chair Dave Chalack when the Alberta Livestock and Meat Agency held its final Future Fair conference in October.

There was widespread disappointment (and considerable irony) that an agency created to help diversify the provincial economy should fall victim to government cost cutting prompted by the latest oil industry downturn.

The province had announced in its spring budget it would dissolve ALMA and have civil servants take over its duties — a move it said would save $8 million annually.

• Read more: ALMA reaches the end of the road

But Chalack, a veterinarian and president of Rocky Mountain Holsteins, argued the agency’s funding ($25 million in its last year) was money well spent. His tally was that $230 million in government funding (dispensed since 2008) had leveraged nearly triple that amount from industry for 1,400 projects that created about 15,000 jobs.

ALMA had its critics when it was created, who didn’t see the need for another government agency. But its performance won over some of them, including Alberta Beef Producers.

“It made some very good investments in projects and initiatives that will serve the industry well in the future,” said Rich Smith, ABP executive director. “It has made a difference.”

“It’s been good for agriculture and for the livestock side of the business,” added Ray Price, president of Sunterra Meats. “It was becoming a place where everybody felt they could go to get some information and possibly some support for unique Alberta products.”

The story for another government agency — Agriculture Financial Services Corp. — was a lack of information. Apparently nobody knew that large sums were being misspent until a whistleblower alerted the government.

The province’s chief internal auditor investigated and found that over a five-year period nearly $900,000 had been spent on travel, accommodations, mileage, meals, hospitality, conference fees, and other similar costs. This included limousine travel and luxury box tickets at Edmonton Oilers games and more than $340,000 on travel to meet with reinsurance companies even though the agency contracts brokers to deal with reinsurers.

The auditor’s report prompted the province to dismiss the entire board in June and suspend three top officials at the agency, including its president who was earning $670,000 annually. A trio of interim replacements is currently overseeing the agency as the slow process of appointing a new board grinds on.

The post It likely wasn’t your greatest year, but 2016 was definitely eventful appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

The inaugural version of the conference, held in Denver six years ago, gave birth to the “sustainable beef” movement through the creation of the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef. That, in turn, led to the founding of a Canadian roundtable and, ultimately, McDonald’s decision to pick Canada for its sustainable beef pilot.

Hosting this year’s conference is “a big deal” and recognition of Canada’s leading role in the sustainable beef effort, said Dennis Laycraft, executive vice-president of the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association and current president of the global roundtable.

“With how we’re moving forward with our Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, it sounds like it was a perfect fit,” said Laycraft. “We’ll be doing some fantastic work with that group.”

The global roundtable has just adopted a new five-year strategic plan, he noted.

“With that, there’s a lot of focus on how we are assisting and encouraging the country and regional roundtables that are developing,” he said. “We’re fortunate that Canada has one of the most active roundtables in the world.”

The conference, co-hosted by the Canadian roundtable, is being held at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel from Oct. 4-7. It will welcome 250 to 300 participants from Australia, Europe, South America, Mexico, Canada and the U.S. Participants will include beef producers, processors, retailers, environmental organizations, and other stakeholders in the global beef sector.

Sessions will highlight different parts of the strategic plan, as well as success stories and successful strategies from roundtables around the world.

Since the meeting is global in nature, some sessions will deal with issues that may not be applicable in Canada, such as deforestation in Central and South America.

“With sustainability, it’s not really one size fits all,” said Laycraft. “Each part of the world has different circumstances and different factors that you’ll be looking at.”

The goal isn’t to promote one type of beef production, he said.

“It’s about how you are doing all these things taking care of the environment; allowing the farmers and ranchers to make a living doing it; and at the same time, meeting the social expectations that are growing around the world. This will hopefully be a terrific forum to have that dialogue.”

The conference was actively promoted at the recent inaugural Canadian Beef Industry Conference and will conclude with a meeting of the Canadian roundtable.

“Our beef industry conference was over 600 registrants, and we don’t have a facility large enough for that,” said Laycraft. “This is more targeted to people who are very engaged in sustainability initiatives around the world and how we are working to move to the next step. We’re really looking at more information sharing through our data platform, so we’re more effectively communicating what the real benefits of the cattle industry are.”

Other conferences were held in Brazil and the Netherlands. For more information, see grsbeef.org.

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“We’re confident that we are sourcing verified sustainable beef because we have completed 82 full verifications,” said Jeffrey Fitzpatrick-Stilwell, senior manager of sustainability with McDonald’s Canada.

“Because of the large portion of Alberta participation in the pilot and the fact that the two plants that we source raw material from are both in Alberta, it would be difficult for there not to be verified sustainable beef in our supply chain.

“But we are still a few months away from making the claim.”

The fast-food giant can’t say how many head of cattle made it into its supply chain and won’t do that analysis until its verifications are completed. So far, 66 Alberta operations have been verified, along with five in Saskatchewan; three in Manitoba, B.C.; and two in Ontario. Another 100 are slated to be completed by the end of March.

“I will be pleased if we end up with 100 to 150 full complete verifications — that looks doable at this point,” Fitzpatrick-Stilwell said in an interview in late January.

In January 2014, McDonald’s pledged it would start using sustainable beef and chose Canada as the site of its pilot project. It then worked with the Canadian beef sector to create 40 “indicators” — which cover areas such as animal care, environmental stewardship, and food safety practices — to rate an operation. To qualify as verified sustainable beef, every step of the supply chain an animal passes through must be verified, from the cow-calf operator, to the backgrounder, to the feedlot, to the slaughter plant.

McDonald’s Canada is still encouraging more producers to participate and is sending representatives to workshops (including one in Hussar on Feb. 5) and farm, forage and beef conferences across the country. Producers who have been verified are attending meetings to talk about their experience with the process, and why they participated.

Fitzpatrick-Stilwell said he can’t give information about how individual farms participating in the pilot have scored, but noted that the pilot does emphasize the need for good record-keeping. Producers tend to score higher if they have been maintaining good records.

“That’s one of the big lessons we will give back to the industry,” he said. “As there is more verification and assessment happening, there are a lot of these things that you can do really well on if you keep records on what you’re doing.

“It’s understandable why a lot of people don’t keep records (if) it’s a small operation and it’s all in your head. But this is one of the reasons to write it down. That’s where we get veracity and credibility.”

Overall, McDonald’s is extremely pleased with the pilot and the response from the Canadian beef sector, he said, adding the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef will take over the verification process once McDonald’s pilot project has ended.

“The positive engagement we’ve had through the pilot will grow and expand with the work of the roundtable,” said Fitzpatrick-Stilwell. “We were not creating a McDonald’s standard. We were doing a project to help inform ourselves internally about what the verification of sustainable beef looks like, and what the challenges and opportunities are.”

There will also be an event in late spring to thank everybody who participated in the pilot and share what the company has learned.

“We promised the Canadian roundtable a full report that would give it an overview of all the things we looked at; what we included; and successes and failures along the way,” he said.

“It’s going to be a big year for beef in Canada, with the success of the McDonald’s pilot, and McDonald’s — assuming everything is successful — being able to claim Canada as the first geography where we were able to source, verified sustainable beef.”

The first national Canadian beef industry conference in August will be followed by the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef’s meeting in Banff in October.

“2016 will be a great year for Canadian beef domestically, but also on the international stage,” said Fitzpatrick-Stilwell.

McDonald’s is still looking for more producers to participate in the pilot project. To learn more or to participate, go to vsbpilot.ca.

The post McDonald’s confident it is now serving ‘verified sustainable’ beef appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

The global roundtable was established in 2012 with a wide range of stakeholders, including McDonald’s, JBS, Cargill, Walmart, Merck Animal Health, the Nature Conservancy, and the World Wildlife Fund. Its goal is to foster a global beef supply chain that is environmentally sound, socially responsible and economically viable.

The post Dennis Laycraft new president of Roundtable for Sustainable Beef appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

“You guys are rocking when it comes to sustainability,” said Cameron Bruett. “You’re doing a fantastic job.”

Bruett is also chief sustainability officer with the U.S. division of JBS, the world’s largest meat company. The Brazilian giant partnered with the likes of McDonald’s, Walmart, Cargill, and environmental organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund to create the global roundtable.

The definition of sustainable changes with the person you ask, but it’s nevertheless a great opportunity for Alberta and Canada, Bruett told attendees at Future Fare, the annual conference of the Alberta Livestock and Meat Agency.

“Sustainability is a great issue for our industry because no one has the story to tell that we do,” he told several hundred attendees in a packed conference room at the Marriott River Cree Resort.

“There is no NGO (non-governmental organization), consumer activist, or mommy blogger who can say that they’ve done more for the environment than many of the people in this room.

“So you need to be proud about it and need to embrace that, and understand that when we talk about sustainability, it does not afford people the opportunity to isolate you on any one issue.”

The idea for a global roundtable was conceived nearly four years ago, but the notion of ‘sustainable beef’ captured headlines late last year when McDonald’s announced it would start sourcing beef verified as environmentally and socially responsible beginning in 2016. As reported in Alberta Farmer in May, the fast-food titan has since chosen Canada to pilot its sustainable beef project.

But the definition of sustainable is still being hammered out, said Bruett, who is based in Greeley, Colorado.

“When we talk about sustainability, environmental is a strong pillar that needs to be addressed, but it’s only one of three,” he said. “We have to consider the economic and the societal. We need to understand the impact of what the demands placed on these operations can do to a rural community.”

And while cattle-raising methods differ greatly around the world, any beef system can be sustainable if done properly, Bruett said.

“It is not about picking winners and losers,” he said. “It is not about saying, ‘My ranch is sustainable, but my neighbour’s is not.’

“It’s a continuum. You never achieve sustainability. You never wake up in the morning and say, ‘What I do is sustainable and I can call it a day, and I never have to worry about that anymore.’”

• More from the Alberta Farmer Express: Beef sustainability benchmark study to be ready by fall 

The challenge is that the average consumer thinks sustainable agriculture means a return to the small mixed farms of the distant past, he said.

“There is a separation between agriculture and the consumer. The modern-day consumer has not participated in the journey and the technological innovations that we have enjoyed and experienced in agriculture.”

For example, consumers frequently send signals they don’t like technology in agriculture — but modern farming practices are essential to feeding the planet, said Bruett.

To further complicate things, marketers tend to promote organic as sustainable.

“In its simplest terms, sustainability means producing more with less,” said Bruett. “There’s nothing wrong with organic — but organic produces less with more. So why is that equated with sustainability?”

While some think grass-fed beef is more environmentally friendly, the carbon footprint is actually reduced by having animals fed in intense operations, he said.

“They’re producing methane for a decreased amount of time, they’re more efficient and producing more pounds per animal, so it’s actually a sustainable system,” he said. “Not to say that grass fed cannot be sustainable, or that we don’t need grass fed to meet the challenges of tomorrow. But we have to be careful when we’re defining sustainable and equating it with niche systems.”

All of these issues, and others, are being worked on as the global roundtable heads towards a global conference to be held in November in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Core principles involve natural resources, people and community, animal health and welfare, food, efficiency and innovation. Because of Canada’s efforts (notably on traceability, the Verified Beef Program, and the effort to marry the two via the BIXS 2.0 initiative), Bruett said he chose Calgary as the site for working groups to meet on June 24-25.

Increasingly, sustainability is becoming a tool to differentiate your system and be more productive on that international global market scale,” he said. “We wanted to come up and acknowledge the great work of the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, and let this be the place where we redefine that definition. I think that sends a strong message.”

It will also be vital for beef producers, processors, and retailers to speak out and not leave themselves open to attacks from radicals and activist groups, he added.

“They don’t want conventional agriculture, the use of antibiotics or implants or hormones,” he said. “They don’t want anything technological that allows us to do more with less. They want to impose their will on the rest of the chain.”

Retailers and restaurant owners — fearful of losing market share or having their brand tarnished — are sensitive to these vocal radicals, he said. So the beef industry needs to be vocal, too.

“When you hear a radical claim or group, understand that this is not a representation of a huge swath of consumers around the globe. But we have a message too, and we have a message that resonates with the vast majority of the population. And we need to start articulating that message to drown out that noise we hear.”

He applauded companies such as McDonald’s and Walmart for promising to start sourcing sustainably, and create programs with environmental criteria.

“You can see the commercial marketplace is taking on sustainability, particularly in beef, to transmit positive messages to consumers, so that when they go and buy their Big Mac or their all-natural beef, they feel confident that they are consuming a product which respects societal impacts and the environmental footprint,” he said.

But Bruett emphasized the guidelines won’t impose change on the beef industry and will allow all beef-producing areas in the world to tailor the criteria to its individual system.

“We realized we could not come up with a global standard, or a global certification that would be applicable to every beef production system on the planet,” he said.

“We want to set these broad terms — these objectives and criteria and how you go about addressing them — in the manner that makes sense for Albertans, for Canadians (so they can) be determined by you. This is an empowerment exercise, not a global fiat.”

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