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Founded in 1909, UFA Co-operative Limited is an Alberta-based agricultural co-operative with more than 120,000 member-owners. UFA’s network comprises more than 114 bulk fuel and Cardlock Petroleum locations, 34 Farm & Ranch Supply stores and a support office in Calgary, AB. Independent Petroleum Agents and over 1,000 UFA employees provide products, services and agricultural solutions to farmers, ranchers, members and commercial customers in Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan.
It takes a certain kind of ambition to do what farmers do. Between the hours and the hard labor, to the public scrutiny and bureaucratic maze running, it's not an easy task. While the agricultural industry feeds millions, quietly tilling and producing behind the scenes, many forget that our food comes from the hands of real people with real stories.
Join us as we share stories from those with boots on the ground and unearth unique perspectives on agriculture's biggest conversations. It's time to grab your shovel and get to work. I'm Dodge Schaeffer and this is Digging In with UFA.
Let's keep talking about beef. In part one, we looked at public perception and the influence of social media on the industry, as well as what advocacy looks like for cattle ranchers. We talked about trust and what it means to maintain the bridges that connect customers in the grocery store to ranchers out on the pasture. Joined once again by Dixon DeLorme and Adrienne Ivey as they continue their discussion. Today, we dig deeper with Truth About Beef, part two.
When it comes to nutrition and the role beef plays in our everyday diets, it's hard to ignore present day scarcity and price point. For many, beef is a nutrient dense food at a relatively accessible and stable cost. However, when we look at the staggering shift in prices of the Canadian beef industry, it's becoming more and more cost prohibitive. With prices nearing an all time high, what's driving this current and unprecedented surge?
boy, here we go. So I'll speak first to the hoof price of beef right now. It's very important that our farm gate price on the hoof for beef continues the trajectory that it's on because it seems to have been the one commodity that really hasn't followed the inflation price of anything else. And I think that's what a lot of people lose track of. You know, back in the day when my dad used to sell pure red bulls for what we can actually get for some steer weights right now. And he's like, wow, it's really good. I said, yeah, but dad, like.
Back in those days, you used to be able to buy a brand new front wheel assist chore tractor for, you know, 95 to $100,000. And now $350,000 doesn't get you close to what you need. So everybody really needs to keep track of the cost of everything else that we face as producers, that we need our commodity price to track that a little bit as well. But that being said, we definitely need to pay attention to the gap that exists between hoof price on the farm, feedlot price, and then actually finished product price that's on the shelf.
And I hate to be that guy that sounds a little bit conspiracy theoryist kind of thing, but there are a lot of larger corporations that touch the product between the time that it leaves the farm to the time that it gets the consumer on the shelves, be it packers or be it grocers. And I think we need to find some way to get some transparency in there to see, to see exactly why we have such a large gap in that price that exists, right? Because I don't think with the herd size and the amount of population that we have in Canada, that our consumers should have a challenge to access the product that we provide.
be it financially or be it availability, one or the other.
Yeah, I completely agree with everything that Dixon just said. think that everybody thinks that beef is very, very high priced right now. So it must be very profitable for beef producers. But the reality is that even at the historic high prices that we're seeing right now, most years, it's still more economical for me to grow crops rather than beef on some of that land, which is really unfortunate that we have to
determined how to farm just based on prices that don't actually have anything to do with what prices are in the grocery store and how available the products that we're growing are available to consumers. think that beyond the issues that Dixon spoke on, I think also that for those of us that love it, beef production is one of the most rewarding livelihoods that we could ever imagine. But for the vast majority of people,
It is just a lot of work and there are a lot of years that you not only don't actually make a living, but you actually lose money growing beef. There's far too many of those years. And so therefore there are fewer and fewer of us every year willing to do it. And the Canadian beef herd continues to shrink for that reason. And I cannot see that trajectory going in another direction anytime soon.
unfortunately.
I'd say specifically with commodity prices, it's not gonna make things different. It's not gonna make it cheaper in the store because like unfortunately everything really does fall with supply demand, right? And based on what Adrienne said, she's bang on. like you can see there's a lot of older generation that's in the cattle industry for a long time that have fought through some really tough years. Like say we're even lose money on them and they're taking this as an opportunity to get out, you know, lots of guys that get, guys will do cow-calf operations into their late seventies sometimes.
I'm not here to say that I need some kind of a hero cookie for what we do, but we cab out 400 head of cows between the two of us. It's a lot of work and we're slowly continuing to live in a society where a lot of people are afraid of hard work. We even want to talk about, you know, temporary worker programs that happen here in Canada and there's starting to be some new legislation be kicked around that they're going to try and make that not happen here in Canada. But we have a society where we have kids that don't want to go out and pick cucumbers for a living and we have to bring people to do it because it needs to be done.
We're seeing a lot of these challenges in the cow-calf industry as well. Lots of guys will buy bread heifers and grass them and sell them. And cow-calf part of it is the tough, dirty, ugly work. And I'm glad a lot of these producers have the opportunity to get out when prices are good. But the more they get out, the less of us there are. I mean, we're going to continue to do this for a long time because I love doing it. Seeing a calf born never gets old. People ask me if it gets old. It never does. Even if it was a bad experience to get the cow into the maternity pen and get the chains on and get the calf out.
That part of bringing life into the world just never goes away. The awesomeness of it and watching them grow, it's fantastic. We will keep doing it, but we're going to keep losing producers. And unfortunately, social media has got a lot to do with it where it's a lot sexier for people to just get in a piece of equipment, hit the GPS button and throw to their Instagram story the sunset of the drill that's being run by GPS behind them versus yanking a calf out of the back of a cow.
while the mom's trying to kill you. Yes. Yeah, it's tough. mean, we can find labor here to work on the grain side of things. We can put butts in seats of tractors. But when it comes down to the nitty gritty cattle work, processing, calving, all of that, it is only the family, myself, my husband, and our kids that actually enjoy that side of it. The guys that work here and farm here with us.
Exactly.
Those are the days that they want to call in sick. No part of that is their fulfillment in farming. They like to run equipment. So as long as there is a lack of people wanting to do the physical work, we will never grow our herd. Canadian brief prices will not go down in grocery store.
As farmers and ranchers, we try our best to predict what the future holds because our livelihood depends on it. generational knowledge and the tools of new tech, we do what we can to ensure the best output year over year. Unfortunately, there are some events that we just can't account for. When it comes to policy, action, and the well-being of the general public, what role does the government play when responding to potential crises? And should they have a role to play at all?
using a mix.
I could talk for hours and hours, tell you nobody was listening to this podcast anymore about business risk management tools and that we are very well protected on the grain farm side of our farm and there is very little protection on the beef side. We are finally enjoying prices where they're at right now on the beef side, but we also know that any twist in the marketplace that could go away tomorrow and we could be
back to losing money on every single animal that we have. And it's a scary thing to put so much money, time and effort into investing on that side of something when there's no bottom end.
I think one of the big things that maybe hits at home for people that don't understand the amount of work that goes into the beef side of an operation is it's you're essentially playing the stock market is essentially what you're doing, but you're actually using a live commodity to do it. Right. Take away all the romance and the fun and the great stuff that exists. You know, your relationship with your herd and everything or farming in general. mean, you're playing the stock market essentially is what you're doing. And it's easy for people on Wall Street to just be able to do a few clicks and make an investment. And all of a sudden, three days, 30 days, 300 days later, I mean,
doubled their money or they've made 20 % on their investment. We do that every year. We do that every year with a commodity that we grow. You put a lot of money into doing these things, be it grain or be it cattle. And there are a lot of contributing factors that can make or break that. And if you actually do successfully get your commodity harvested, then we start dealing with a lot of different things like we have happening right now with case in point, tariffs on canola, peas, pork that we're seeing from China. Just saw another tariff on peas, I believe from India it was.
And even with the president of the United States here just recently even having a couple of public conversations about what he's maybe planning on doing with beef, it affects our market so profoundly. I mean, we saw almost a $400 per head slide in prices just from a conversation that a public figure had. So to Adrian's point, it's risk and risk management is one of the biggest things. That being said, I got to talk out of two sides of my mouth here right now because I believe that most of the time when government gets involved in business.
It usually turns into a large burden and government are bodies that don't move quickly, that don't adapt to change, and that you seldom get results from. And I think, especially speaking of government bodies like the CFIA, they refuse to adapt to change. And in order for anything to survive in the technological world that we live in right now, adaptability and change has to be something that you can do quickly, on point, and to make an informed decision on it. And I think that that's where we really lack.
in government bodies, and that's just my personal opinion, is that we do not change and pivot fast enough. One of the best quotes I've ever heard to explain this was from Sean Haney, and he was on Real Talk out of Edmonton with Ryan Giesperson, and he said that the Canadian food industry is constipated, and he's right. We've got a lot of product to move, and we just can't seem to move it faster than
The CFIA is the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and in November 2025, came to center for a larger controversy. In an attempt to stop the spread of avian influenza, the CFIA proceeded with the calling of an ostrich flock at the Universal Ostrich Farm. Is government intervention in cases like these necessary when it comes to public safety? Does it cross the line?
Are there any legal protections for farmers and ranchers when it comes to decisions made on behalf of public safety? My first reaction is I never in my life would have thought that I would hear the word ostrich so much over the course of six months. I'm shocked. But that being said, I think there's a whole bunch of things that play in a factor in there. And if we want to talk specifically about the CFIA, this is an example of exactly what I was just talking about. So this is a coal policy that was created in the mid 90s is essentially what they were following through with with the Supreme Court here. And that's what needs to change.
In no place in agriculture right now should we be running off policies that were drafted in the mid-90s. It is no longer the mid-90s. The mid-90s were over 30 years ago. We cannot continue to run on policy that was drafted then. We need to continue to engage in stakeholders and groups that exist within agriculture, and we need to keep these policies up to date. It's hard to get through the noise of absolutely everything that happened out there, but there was no good way that that was going to end no matter what.
and it ended probably in the worst way that it possibly could. And it's just an example of how we need less government intervention in a lot of these things. I've seen entire herds called here in Saskatchewan for tuberculosis. I get it and I get the stamping out policy, but there's just too much information at stake here. It was a chance for the CFIA and our government to show that they can pivot and they can make different decisions and they didn't. And I think it's a huge step back for food inspection, trust and safety in Canada.
I respectfully disagree.
I was hoping we would disagree.
I preface this by saying I am not a producer that is faced with the horrible idea of my entire herd being culled right now and who knows maybe that would change things. I don't know. It's one of those things that I think that until you're actually in that position you don't actually know how you would react. But I think when we talk about greater things like world trade and just how much an incident that might happen in BC or
like during BSE that happened in Alberta and how that can all of a sudden wipe out farmers across Canada because if we lose access to trade, we cannot continue farming the way that we farm in Saskatchewan. Trade makes all of our farms go round at the end of the day. And so I think that sometimes really, really difficult decisions need to be made in order to protect our trade markets.
That's a very good point.
That being said, I do think that this needs to be a very big wake up call for our food system and CFIA in particular about transparency, about being able to have conversations rather than just hiding behind bureaucracy. And I think that there's so much that could have been done so much better in this specific instance. But I don't know if I've spoke to a single
major poultry farmer that didn't say, are their ostriches more important than my entire livelihood? And it's just one of those really hard situations where I don't know if there's ever gonna be the right answer. It's just how can we navigate through these things to make it as less horrible as possible?
Very good point, Seth. Absolutely. Very well said.
I think that one thing is that we all need to hold ourselves accountable for our reaction to these things on public platforms, whether it's social media or whatever. think that in a lot of cases, issues like this are taken and turned twisted or shined up a certain way to make it about something that it's actually not. The amount of narrative that I saw come out of this that had to do with pandemics and vaccines and
and things that really have nothing to do with the issue at hand, but they twisted what was happening into trying to prove their point about something else entirely. And I think that that doesn't serve us as farmers well, and it doesn't serve the trust in our Canadian food system well either. I think that people forget that this is what CFI unfortunately is famous for right now at the moment.
But my experience with CFIA has been sitting in a packing plant and watching inspectors inspecting beef carcasses as they go past and ensuring that every single Canadian can feel that they are safe in eating the food that is grown and processed here in Canada. And that's really important for me that people feel that their backs are being had in that safety aspect.
And I wish that that's the part of CFI that people could also see.
now. Yeah, that's a very good point. Also, like, I mean, we're right close to Lilydale in Wynyard here, which is a larger chicken manufacturer there. And I actually know people that work for CFIA within there that are literally inspecting birds all the time. It's been something recently that happened down in the US here now, too, when they're when they're having the fight about RFID trackers on cattle and carcasses. And it's just like one of these things where everybody's like, hey, we don't want you tracking where our beef is. Alternatively, I think that's one of the best things that we have in Canada here is its its transparency and traceability.
And I mean, essentially that was brought on and the size out of BSE, right? And I think we do a great job of tracking animals here. And I think it's great. I'm not just going to sit here and just dump on the CFIA, but do we have room for improvement? think it tails back to what we were talking about earlier. Agriculture, our food systems should always be improving. We should never just stop. And that's where I have the biggest issue with what went down is that this a 30 year old policy. Let's at least revisit it and say, okay, yes, we did the right thing. No, we didn't do the right thing. What are we going to do to learn from it? I think that's one of the most important things that exists.
We also have the PMRA, the Pest Management Regulatory Associations in Canada here. Another thing that moves very slow, that needs to be able to adjust faster because technology changes so fast nowadays, right? So these are big, slow moving regulatory agencies that are not keeping up with technology. And these are technologies that if we had access to as farmers and ranchers are going to make our bottom line better and food safer and more efficient and lower our carbon footprints and all of the good stuff. But if we're waiting,
on a big constipated unit to move something, we're all hurting from it,
I think that the hard part as farmers is that those are such big giants to try to create change in. We feel as farmers, what can I do for my tuna Saskatchewan to help move that along? But I think that comes from supporting the people who are taking the time maybe on producer organizations or within our provincial government or within positions of influence that can help create change.
As farmers, we need to be helping those people in what they're trying to do to create that change.
Absolutely. We live in a time of unprecedented speed, especially in agriculture. As integrated technologies like precision farming, IOT sensors and AI driven analytics evolve at a breakneck pace year over year, the industry is redefining what production means. From autonomous equipment to real time data insights, the expectation for efficiency and output is constantly shifting and we're adapting right along with it.
For the sake of industrial safety, should policy be changing at this same increased pace? When we look towards an idealized future, what innovations or sustainability practices could help the future of Canadian beef production as a whole?
I think that technology, along with being one of our biggest friends, is going to be one of our biggest foes as well. And I'd speak specifically on availability of technology. There's a lot of programs out there that exist. Maybe it's apps, maybe it's GPS systems, a lot of different things that require user fees and cloud subscription services and everything.
I think we need to have a close look at how invested we get into these things and rely on them because it wouldn't take much for us to lose a cloud service system or for something that we use and depend on to go away. So as much as I think technology is fantastic and we need to embrace it, there are certain things that we need to make sure we have ourselves safeguarded against. It would lose some of these technologies that our entire operations viability doesn't completely rely on them. So I guess I'd say.
Technology is one of the things that's gonna help us the most and could hurt us the most if we don't have ourselves set up that one day it might go away. I don't know if I got that across in the right way. think what's gonna help us the most can also hurt.
Yeah, and I think that when it comes to the technology piece, it's easy for people that don't live in rural Saskatchewan to forget how difficult technology can be here. The vast majority of land that is in our ranch, I can't even make a cell phone call. Like, if it weren't for Elon Musk, I would not be able to be on this podcast because I wouldn't have internet. There is like this amazing things that we can do. Our tractors and combines drive themselves. We are collecting all this data and to make these really
informed decisions, but yet I can't call 911 if there's an accident because I don't have cell service. So it's like we have so much technology at our fingertips, but yet also outside of urban areas, the building blocks of that technology aren't quite here yet. So I think that we've come so far and we yet still have so far to go. But I think beyond the technology piece, I think that as much as I love and hate it, think that policymaking is going to
be a huge driver for how farms continue in the future, which is really unfortunate because I don't think that should be what drives agriculture, but I do think it has the potential to do that. I think about a past leader of our beautiful country and he believed that beef was bad for the environment and there was a lot of policy being created to make our jobs harder rather than easier. 20 years ago, I would never have dreamed would have an impact on
how and what we grow on the farm. So hopefully we are able to continue to make decisions on our farms that are best suited for what we are doing and why we are doing it rather than what somebody 2,000 miles away thinks we should be doing.
That's such a good point and I found myself having a conversation with a local member of our legislative assembly here that actually decided he was going to step up and represent his riding here. And he had something really interesting to tell me. like, you know, we always tell ourselves that we're too busy on the farm, we're too busy on the farm. I don't have time to go be a part of this board or I don't have time to go be a part of this association. I don't have time to go to this AGM. If we continue to not find time as producers, and I'm one of the guiltiest guys saying this right now, if we don't continue or make time
to find time to go and be a part of these conversations. We have people that are two to three generations detached from the agricultural operation that they grew up on that are drafting policy that will ultimately completely affect the viability of our agricultural operations. It is always so important for us to make time to go make sure that the policies that are being made are actually beneficial to us and they are being made with sound information from people that have quality information.
In a perfect and enlightened world, what essential truths should people understand about beef production, cattle ranching, and the broader agricultural systems that sustain us? Our farm would not operate as well as it does without beef being incorporated in it. And it took a long time and it took a lot of technology on soil testing and a few other things, but for a prime example this year,
Beef is such a universal tool that exists at our disposal, especially here, because this year, was a strange year where we had a dry July, oats matured early, then some second growth started, we had the swath and we shelled some out. And normally this would be a huge problem on over 800 acres that we would have second growth, that we would need to use herbicides on to try and control some of the second growth so that we were ready to be able to seed it to a different crop in our rotation the next year.
One of those situations where I took every cow-calf pair that I had and I brought them out of marginal pasture and I put them on this land that was bent and they grazed on that for eight weeks. My pastures rested and I did not have to use any herbicides whatsoever on that land to try and get any of this under control. And the byproduct of that was nutrient-dense beef. They're such an important tool and they do such an amazing thing just by ruminating.
I don't think that people understand the important role that beef cattle actually play in the agricultural society. And if there's any way that I could explain to people that that was one of the perfect examples of why it's so important to have those animals around that are a byproduct of something that otherwise would have been destroyed or tilled under was nourishing food for the world. And that's just, you can't tell me that that's bad for the environment.
Yeah, I would agree. I wish that more people knew.
that feeding beef animals isn't taking food out of the human production system. Feeding beef animals means we are often taking land that's not suitable for growing human food or else we are taking food that was likely grown with human food in mind but it is not high enough quality or it is not safe enough for human consumption. So instead we utilize it and feed it to our cattle instead.
It is this amazing cycle of the food production that we're able to utilize all the parts. Even something as simple as the peas that we grow on our farm as well for plant-based protein. Well, when those peas are broke down, there's parts of those peas that are not usable for human consumption. That part of the same vegan protein gets fed to cattle and creates the nutritional superpower of beef that we know that
It is such a giant interweb of what we do on all of our farms here in Canada. And I wish people could just see a glimpse of the intricacies that go into it.
We're talking in Canada, 60,000 beef farms that exist in Canada. About $34 billion contributor to our GDP, 350,000 jobs. The beef industry in Canada is huge and it's very important to our food supply and our food chain. And its benefits far outweigh its negatives.
keep adding things until we completely run out of memory.
It's just kind of funny and if you didn't notice like I mean both of us you could probably tell like when we're talking about the beef industry like I can see it in a during I could feel I get emotional about it. I am emotionally attached to what we do for a living.
As we wrap up the second chapter on the realities of beef production, we can't ride off into the sunset without tackling one last juicy question. What's the one beef dish you simply couldn't live without? Okay, I don't have to think about it already now. 100 % rib steak.
I was doing tomahawks before tomahawks were cool. All right. I love a rib steak. It's the best marbling, the best flavor. Guilty confession here. I obviously get a local guy to cut and wrap my beef for me. And I'm one of the strangest guys. I do not get roasts made. I do not get anything made. Everything that can be cut into a steak gets cut into a steak. And I eat nine out of 10 of my meals are some form of a steak with some eggs. And that's about it. I love steak.
I had to think about it because it's between two. Rib eye steak is there is nothing better. Like I totally with you Dixon on that. But also I love that melty short rib that's been braised all day and is in a rich red wine sauce, like drizzled over some mashed potatoes. I don't know between that and a rib steak, it's a toss up. But I would also say as a mom of busy kids everywhere, ground beef is a freaking
superpower like you can do absolutely anything with that with ground beef and it's also super economical so it's really hard to choose which one is best.
It's basically the cheapest source of healthy protein that you can get. It's got everything in it and you can do a million things with it. Hamburger health or meatloaf, you name it. It's awesome. I appreciate you guys doing this and talking about this. It can't be talked about enough, so thank you for doing it.
Yeah, absolutely.
At the end of the day, we look to our resiliency within ourselves and our communities to make our collective futures as bright as possible. All it will take is conversations like these, some vulnerability and a little digging.
Thanks to the support of UFA Cooperative, we're able to share stories from those that live and breathe agriculture. Thanks to Dixon and Adrian once more for giving us a deeper insight into the lived experience of beef production and cattle ranching. For more information on today's episode, please visit ufa.com. With listeners like you, we'll continue to dig a little deeper here on Digging In with UFA. I'm Don Shafer. Thanks for listening.
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