The number of cattle in herds around the province is slowly increasing, but the overall health of the industry will rise and fall based on how many younger farmers take up ranching in the next few years.
That's the assessment of Ken Ziegler, a forage and beef specialist with Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development. He was commenting on statistics recently compiled by his department that indicate the herd has declined by 23.3 per cent since 2005, just two years after the BSE crisis, to 2,187,000 animals.
The number of ranchers had also declined by 25.6 per cent to 18,944 farms.
“(Numbers could increase) only on the confidence of the industry. Cow numbers and heifer retention is a statement of confidence. Economics can be very good but if the confidence isn't there, (ranchers are) not going to do it. If the markets are somewhat mediocre but the confidence is good, they'll do it anyway. At this point we're slowly starting to get confident again,” Ziegler said.
Mountain View and Red Deer counties were no different, seeing a drop of 25,011 and 29,777 cows raised on 355 and 379 fewer ranches in the 10-year period between 2001 and 2011.
During that time, only four counties — Bighorn No. 8, Birch Hills, Cypress County and Lakeland County – saw increases in herd sizes. In each of those counties, even though the herd size increased, the number of ranchers decreased over the decade.
Lakeland County was the only jurisdiction throughout the province that saw an increase in both herd size and the number of farmers between 2001 and 2011. In 2001, there were 250 producers with 18,035 head of cattle.
A decade later that had increased to 26,619 cattle being raised by 368 ranchers.
The number of younger farmers getting into the industry depends partly on the availability of oilfield jobs Ziegler said.
“There has to be a combination of confidence and will,” he said, adding that higher prices for bred cows is the measure of confidence.
Another marker of confidence is how much bred cows are selling for compared to last year's calves. If the bred cows are selling for much higher than last year's calves, the industry is strong.
Currently cows and last year's calves are both selling for between $1,200 and $1,400, so the industry isn't quite as confident as it could be.
“People are being cautious, even though the calf prices are pretty strong,” Ziegler said.
Back in the early 2000s, before BSE became a reality, the industry was booming along and nobody foresaw the crash that would happen.
“Back in the early 2000s, the cattle industry was on a roll. We were exporting, we were just booming along, the social licence to produce beef and to eat it was really good, and so the industry responded. At that time the general agricultural industry saw that beef production was a very stable industry and something that was worthy of investment,” he said, adding that nobody guessed it would take so many years for the industry to rebound.
“What happened was it wasn't a human health issue, it wasn't an animal health issue, it became a political issue. And so here we are so many years later and in the meantime people are getting older (and leaving the business),” he said.
"People are being cautious, even though the calf prices are pretty strong."Ken Ziegler, forage and beef specialist AARD
