No matter where you are in your career, there’s always value in learning something new.

When the Maritime Beef Council created the Atlantic Beef School, the goal was to provide the region’s cow-calf and feedlot producers with opportunities for applicable professional development, and in a few short years the program has done just that.

“We have had new entrants, established producers, extension staff and industry salespeople all give positive feedback from sessions that they attended, so the scope of who would benefit is quite wide,” says Amy Higgins with the Maritime Beef Council.

The program started in 2017 with a feedlot school module focused on health management, followed by another on dairy-beef production. In 2019, eight cow-calf modules were created to “cover all aspects of the beef production cycle,” Higgins explains, to be spread out over two to three years.

The cow-calf modules are on pasture management systems, herd health management, feeding and nutrition management, cattle handling systems, reproductive systems management, herd procurement and replenishment, marketing strategies/value chain and farm business management.

“The development of the Maritime Beef Sector Development and Growth Strategy identified these modules as high-impact areas to profitability,” she says. “The feedlot school is designed to be a bit more fluid with no set curriculum but offering certain topics with an ability to respond to that sector’s need.”

The courses are open to everyone, even participants outside the Maritimes. Originally, the Atlantic Beef School was an in-person program, but currently the modules are being offered online.

“Since moving entirely to virtual delivery, the future of the Beef School may involve some sort of hybrid delivery, as there are people who would prefer an in-person learning experience, and there are others who prefer the flexibility of taking the training from their own office,” says Higgins.

The Atlantic Beef School is just one of the options available to Canadian beef producers who want to improve their practical skills. Here, we’ve highlighted a selection of resources and programs for anyone seeking to expand their knowledge of production practices.

Beef Cattle Research Council

In addition to its research priorities, the Beef Cattle Research Council (BCRC) has developed a wide range of resources for beef producers as part of its extension activities. Throughout the year, producers can take part in BCRC’s monthly webinars and receive e-newsletters with recent blog posts.

BCRC has developed a producer-focused website, BeefResearch.ca, to share news related to beef cattle research in Canada and resources on production practices. Producers can access videos and fact sheets. The decision-making tools section features a host of tools and calculators created by BCRC to help producers make decisions related to a variety of aspects of beef production. This includes winter feed cost comparison, evaluating feed test results, vaccination cost/benefits and the impact of body condition on cow productivity and profitability, among many other decision-making tools available.

Thompson Rivers University Applied Sustainable Ranching diploma

The Williams Lake, B.C. campus of Thompson Rivers University offers an applied sustainable ranching diploma, which can be taken in-class or online, making it a flexible option for those who are already ranching. This hands-on, interdisciplinary program is focused on developing practical beef production skills through real-life experience, either on your operation or on a home-stay ranch for your practicum.The program also focuses on giving students the knowledge and skills to build and manage a profitable beef operation through courses on business, land management, natural resources and marketing.

Continuing education at agriculture schools

Several post-secondary institutions across Canada offer continuing education courses in agriculture. Olds College at Olds, Alta., has a beef production certificate for non-students, as well as hands-on courses in artificial insemination, agribusiness finance and field-to-plate direct marketing. The college also offers a program on veterinary medicine geared towards teenagers.

Continuing education at Vermilion, Alta.’s Lakeland College includes workshops on calving, artificial insemination and using the feed management app CowBytes.

Many Canadian universities and colleges open their regular in-person and online courses to non-students. For example, Dalhousie University’s faculty of agriculture in Truro, Nova Scotia, has online courses open to those not enrolled at the university. The past semester saw courses offered in principles of animal welfare and husbandry, animal feed and nutrient management, forages and cover crops, soil fertility, and introduction to animal health science.

Provincial extension programs

If your province has an agriculture extension program, you can contact extension specialists with production-related questions or browse online resource directories. For example, Saskatchewan Agriculture’s Sask Ag Now website features a livestock and feed section with articles on a range of related topics and posts on upcoming events and programs. You can also sign up for a monthly e-newsletter with Sask Ag Now’s top stories.

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While producers in Western Canada have access to the Western Livestock Price Insurance Program and Quebec and Ontario also have risk management programs, producers in the Maritimes lack any program to offset market risk. 

“Producers in the Maritimes manage their risk by diversification,” Amy Higgins writes via email. Higgins is the industry co-ordinator for the Maritime Beef Council. She adds that diversification typically includes off-farm employment or other ag enterprises. 

“Without a functioning price risk management mechanism, there may be rationing decisions on inputs that may be a short-term solution that causes longer-term issues. Springtime forage land fertility and maintenance is a prime example of one of the first things that may get ‘skrimped’ on if the fall outlook isn’t very clear,” she says. 

A market floor for the calf crop should leave producers better able to invest in things such as bull genetics, seed or lime before selling calves, Higgins adds. 

Nathan Phinney, past chair of the Maritime Beef Council and former chair of the New Brunswick Cattle Producers, writes that price insurance is a bankable program both young and established producers can take to their lenders. It allows producers to plan and there is high demand for it among producers when it’s explained, Phinney adds. 

“This is the most important tool for any growth of the beef industry in Atlantic Canada,” Phinney says.

Market risk management is key to the success of the Maritime Beef Growth Strategy, Higgins explains, and has been “rolling around the drawing table for many years.” 

Expanding price insurance into the Maritimes is a “very high priority” for the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association (CCA), says Brady Stadnicki, policy and program manager for the association. 

To lay the groundwork, the Beef Cattle Research Council funded a research project led by Canfax looking into whether calf and feeder volumes in Eastern Canada are sufficient to develop a pricing index. Stadnicki says they’ve found there are enough cattle to develop an index, subject to blackout periods, “which we see here in Western Canada as well.” 

The project has also determined that there are enough calves sold in Eastern Canada for the program to have a longer settlement period, Stadnick adds, similar to the recently expanded settlement period for the Western Livestock Price Insurance Program. 

Right now researchers are gathering historical data from auction marts in the East to develop indices for calves and feeders that could be used by a program administrator, Stadnicki adds. That project is expected to wrap later this year. 

Meanwhile, the Maritime Beef Council, regional associations in Atlantic Canada and the CCA are working to get federal and provincial governments on board to expand the program into their regions and “do the necessary legwork to make the program a reality,” says Stadnicki. 

Stadnicki says it’s been a lobby topic for years at both the provincial and federal levels, but he senses more support from provincial governments in the last year. 

Higgins also sees support among the provincial governments for the program. Bloyce Thompson, Prince Edward Island’s ag minister, has publicly spoken in support of price insurance, Higgins says. New Brunswick has supported a project by the New Brunswick Cattle Producers related to future funding of the program. Department staff from New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island are involved in a price insurance steering committee, Higgins adds. 

At the federal level, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Agriculture included the CCA’s recommendation to expand price insurance in its final report last fall. 

“And the federal government response to that report did acknowledge the recommendation and confirm that they’re working with Maritime provinces to determine the feasibility of a program, which is a positive step” towards expanding into the Maritimes, Stadnicki says. 

The COVID-19 pandemic and the uncertainty it’s introduced to markets has added urgency to the conversation around price insurance in the Maritimes. While that market volatility increased the program costs in Western Canada last year, it also emphasized the importance of a program that gives “some peace of mind in locking in a floor price for your calves” and reducing COVID-related risks, Stadnicki says. 

Given all the factors at play, Stadnicki is reluctant to put a timeline on when the program might be implemented. One possibility would be to include it when the Canadian Agricultural Partnership rolls out new programming in the spring of 2023. But he says CCA and its regional counterparts will also be pushing for it to be in place as soon as possible, with spring of 2022 as the best-case scenario. 

“There’s a need for it today,” says Stadnicki.

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“We have lots of access to grass and forages,” says Higgins. “And generally, land costs are much lower here than, say, Ontario.”

Higgins and her family run a small purebred Black Angus farm and she started up a community-supported agriculture (CSA) operation two years ago in Quispamsis, New Brunswick. She also works part-time as the industry co-ordinator for the Maritime Beef Council.

Atlantic Beef Products in Prince Edward Island is the only federally registered processor in the region and slaughters about 600 head a week. While it is committed to sourcing locally, the company does need to ship fat cattle from Ontario and Quebec from time to time to fill hook space.

“There’s a limited amount of feeding capacity here,” she says. “We could fill the niche if we got a bit more efficient.”

Most of the feedlots are also on Prince Edward Island, with pockets in northern New Brunswick. While the island seems an unlikely choice as the centre of the region’s beef sector, in earlier times the draw was a good feed supply: rotating grain crops for potatoes and the waste from processing spuds.

Last spring, the Maritime Beef Council published its Maritime Beef Sector Development and Expansion Strategy, with an ambitious target of increasing the regional herd by 20,000 head in the next 10 years.

The strategy notes that the herd has been dwindling since 2007, from 63,700 cows and 8,100 replacement heifers to 42,300 cows and 6,200 replacement heifers in January 2016. At the same time, Atlantic Beef Products is expanding and is anticipating a need for 10,000 additional feeders per year. There are also opportunities to supply the Ontario Corn-Fed Beef program, which is ramping up demand.

A central piece of the strategy is the eight-module Maritime Beef School, which will provide professional development opportunities for producers in a range of topics including pasture management, feeding and nutrition, breeding strategies, business management and marketing.

There are also research, extension and marketing components to the strategy, which focuses on four areas: seedstock development, cow-calf production, background feeding and finish feeding. Higgins says that most of the work will be in “tweaking” some of things that have worked for many years.

She points to her own farm, and says that she could double or triple her herd of 23 cows without needing additional land by managing the pastures a little bit better, running some water lines and a few other strategies.

“We need to manage things instead of just harvesting what grows,” she says.

Higgins says that the last couple of years have not been great for forages and that 2019 started off with a significant shortage. In 2018, there were 40 days without rain between July and September.

This year was better — not a bumper crop, and fall rains hindered corn silage chopping — but there seem to be decent stocks going into the winter.

“The first cut was not the best, but people have had better luck with the second cut,” she says. Most of the grains were looking good as well.

Lack of price insurance a drawback

British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba all have the Western Livestock Price Insurance Program. Ontario has a Risk Management Program and Quebec has Programme d’assurance stabilisation des revenus agricoles (ASRA).

But Higgins says that Maritime producers don’t have access to price insurance, aside from the national AgriStability program. This presents another barrier to growth.

“Having no price insurance makes it very difficult for new producers to get loans from the bank because you have no baselines or guarantees to get them,” she says.

It also makes business and risk management planning tricky because there’s no backstop if things go awry.

“We’re working diligently with the Canadian Cattlemen (Association) to find a local solution — we don’t know what that looks like yet, but it’s been identified as a definite barrier.”

Higgins points to the fact that she has to grow vegetables in a CSA in order to diversify her operation enough to be able to go from a full-time job to a part-time job.

“And I still don’t know if that’s going to work,” she says.

Dairy to beef

There’s a growing segment of dairy producers who are taking advantage of new beef opportunities by breeding cows that won’t be used as replacements to beef bulls and producing bull calves.

“I know one producer who’s getting triple-A grading on 98 per cent of his cattle,” Higgins says, adding that, done properly, the dairy beef tastes just as good as traditionally raised beef.

Higgins came back to New Brunswick in 2017 after working for Cargill for 11 years in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

As a purebred Angus producer, she takes pride in the quality of the cattle in the Maritimes, and is hopeful for the future of the industry.

“There are a few things we can do to be more competitive,” she says. “It will take a little bit of change and little bit of risk management, but we can do it.” c

Lois Harris is an experienced Ontario freelance writer and editor working in the agriculture and food industry.

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The group visited two collaborative projects funded under the Beef Cattle Research Council. AAFC scientists Dr. Kathleen Glover and Dr. Yousef Papadopoulos explained their research project on the winter survival of sod and frost seeded forage legumes.  The first two field seasons are showing that there are measurable differences in alfalfa and birdsfoot trefoil performance depending on the cultivar chosen and the scientists are excited to have a closer look at the data over the winter. They are also seeing very promising results using low-cost frost seeding. AAFC biologist John Duynisveld also discussed preliminary results from a grazing management project, also funded by Beef Cattle Research Council. Cattle are grazing pastures at varying intensities, and the research team is monitoring both cattle and pasture performance. Stay tuned for more results as this project continues.

The attendees also got to see a project on companion crops to improve the establishment and long-term persistence of alfalfa.  This project is in collaboration with AAFC scientists in Quebec, and is funded through the Dairy Research Cluster.

Bill Thomas of BT Agronomy led an interactive discussion on the quality and yield of forages. Thomas had participants guess the weights of round bales. This led to a discussion on the importance of knowing how much your hay bales weigh and the value of feed testing. Sonny Murray of Perennia and Jason Wells of the New Brunswick Department of Agriculture joined in to answer many questions from the audience covering pH, soil fertility and cutting times.

Cedric MacLeod of MacLeod Agronomics and John Duynisveld also led discussions around two demonstration projects on cover or “service” crops and their benefits to soil health, the environment and as sources of livestock feed. Ellen Crane with the Beef Cattle Research Council went over some newly released tools that are on the www.beefresearch.ca website including a very producer-friendly forage analysis calculator used to decipher a lab analysis.

The Maritime Beef Council also updated attendees on the projects that are in development for the upcoming year. The Atlantic Beef School launches at Nappan, N.S., in early November. The pasture feeding module is slated for November 1, while the feeding and nutrition management module runs November 2. Registration is open from September 24 to October 26. One module costs $100, while both come in at $175. For more information, visit www.maritimebeef.ca.

Many thanks to the sponsors of the day, AAFC Nappan farm services crew, technical staff and students who helped make the day very successful. We are already planning for next year!

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“With this in mind, the Maritime Beef Council recently developed a growth and expansion strategy for their industry,” said Brad McCallum, manager of the red meat commodity associations in Nova Scotia. “To meet this potential increase in demand for their cattle, the beef producers realized their grass production resource was underutilized. As a result, they wanted to promote and enhance the use of pastures as an integral part of their expansion strategy.

Over the years, Dr. Yousef Papadopoulos, a forage breeder at Agriculture and Agri Food at Kentville, Nova Scotia, has developed pasture management systems for increased forage production in Atlantic Canada.

“The traditional weakness of alfalfa and other legumes in our area is usually poor persistence, often a result of periods of prolonged wetness or flooding. We are seeing a decline in legumes in our pastures and this results in reduced animal gains,” said Papadopoulos. “This is due to our flooding conditions and lack of winter hardiness in legumes. John Duynisveld at the Nappan Agriculture Canada Experimental Farm and I are co-leading a recently proposed project with the national Beef Cluster to identify the factors associated with the re-establishment of legumes in existing forage stands. Our goal is to sustain an adequate long-term legume content of 30 per cent legume on a dry matter yield in forage mixtures under grazing management. We want to identify cultivars with increased seedling vigour, and develop some new seed treatments to promote enhanced root growth of the new legume seedlings.”

“Our research has shown that some cultivars within a species are more suited for use under grazing management than others. We looked at timothy, Kentucky bluegrass, tall fescue, orchardgrass, meadow fescue and meadow brome mixed with birdsfoot trefoil, alfalfa and white clover. We found that within most species there are some cultivars that can produce pasture with significantly greater yield and quality. We will then use these cultivars to create new forage varieties that are better adapted to our growing conditions. We also want to develop fertility and forage stand management systems to improve legume establishment in pastures.”

The commercialization of a new alfalfa cultivar developed by Dr. Papadopoulos that offers farmers a tougher alfalfa variety for extreme conditions is currently underway and seed of this cultivar should be available to producers by 2020.

Frost seeding and sod seeding of legumes into existing forage stands can increase the legume content of the sward without the economic and environmental costs associated with cultivation and re-establishment of the entire stand. However, these methods can produce variable results, and without predictable success their implementation on farms is difficult.

Dr. Kathleen Glover, the new forage agronomist at Nappan, is studying the environmental conditions during seedling germination for frost and sod seeded legumes. “I will be looking at how soil moisture, temperature and light intensity at ground level affect seedling growth in an established forage stand in the spring and summer. I will also be evaluating the use of some new growth promotants applied to the seed, to help the seedling to establish,” said Glover.

“After the new forage stand has been established, we find that legume longevity in the stand is impacted by abiotic stresses. In the future, we think that this problem will be more severe with climate change. We have recently submitted a research proposal to investigate the use of agricultural biologicals for enhancing the stress response of forage crops. These naturally sourced products help plants to adapt to stress. Research elsewhere has shown that these products can improve resistance of some crops to pathogens and are being considered for improving tolerance to environmental stresses such as drought or waterlogging. Very little work has been conducted in forage crops. We plan on evaluating these products to reduce the problems associated with lengthy exposure to abiotic stress in forage crops.”

For a number of years, John Duynisveld has been evaluating the economics of late-fall grazing tall fescue and red clover stockpiled pastures until Christmas then bale grazing through the winter with a spring calving beef cow herd.

“We find that the cattle grazed outside through the fall and winter under our Maritime conditions maintained good body condition and had similar weight changes to cattle housed and fed in a barn over the winter. Our cattle grazing outside through the winter reduced cow wintering costs by 54 per cent, or $0.92 per head per day,” said Duynisveld.

When manure is spread on forage fields in the high precipitation areas of Atlantic Canada it can lead to potential nutrient contamination of water systems from tile drainage effluent. Dr. David McKenzie, a field crop scientist and microbiologist Dr. Linda Jewell, AAFC in St. John’s, Nfld., have established a study to assess an improved tile drainage system using wood chips to reduce the amount of runoff nitrates coming from manured fields.

“Ideally producers want to reduce nutrient exports from their subsurface drainage systems and reduce overall fertilizer inputs and costs. However, with our high precipitation and intense weather events in Newfoundland coupled with over-fertilization and soil type, we find that nitrates and phosphate will leach into these systems,” said McKenzie. “Our team has developed one of the world’s best field structures to monitor the year-round nitrogen movement under a typical Atlantic forage production system.

“The soil water drains through beds of wood chips generating tremendous environmental benefits before leaving the farm,” explains Jewell. “The bacteria and fungi living in the wood chips enable a process known as denitrification. These organisms use the chips as a source for carbon, and transform the nitrates from the water into nitrogen gas, which exits into the atmosphere.” Jewell and her team are characterizing the types of microorganisms that are responsible for denitrification in the St. John’s bioreactor.

McKenzie is also working with environmental systems engineer Dr. Lordwin Jeyakumar who has found the nitrate removal rate of more than 50 per cent and the system can reduce nitrate run-off in a cool climate. Farmers in Newfoundland and Labrador often work with shallow, rocky soils that have poor nutrient retention and drainage. This research has the potential to provide a method of reducing the amount of nitrates in run-off water in forage and cropped fields.

The Morden Research and Development Centre in Manitoba has two bioreactors evaluating this process in Western Canada.

There has been a lot of interest in technology transfer of research to the forage and grazing industry in Atlantic Canada. Dr. Papadopoulos, John Duynisveld and Dr. Alan Fredeen have been teaching a fourth-year undergraduate course on pastures in sustainable livestock systems at Dalhousie University faculty of agriculture. This advanced course is designed to provide students with an overview of current sustainable pasture management practices in northern latitudes, with a focus on grassland ecology, the environmental impacts of livestock production and applied pasture management. Students participate in lab sessions on practical grazing management techniques, as well as, touring local farm operations.

In addition, Bill Houston, a senior range and forage specialist in Saskatchewan with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s science and technology branch and Tanya Dykens, a knowledge transfer officer in New Brunswick, developed a national project to share and promote forage research for use by Maritime and other Canadian farmers. They formed an industry advisory panel that was composed of members from different national and provincial specialists who work with forages to prioritize a list of the top five research projects that the industry wanted to see transferred.

In Atlantic Canada, they concentrated on extending the grazing season through bale grazing. There has been relatively slow uptake by Atlantic beef producers on using bale grazing to extend the grazing season as they believed their animals could not maintain body condition over the winter if grazed outdoors. “In the future, we will be working with the Maritime Beef Council’s beef and forage management schools to highlight the economics of extended grazing in Atlantic Canada,” said Houston.

— Duane McCartney is a retired forage beef systems research scientist at Lacombe, Alta.

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