by JIM ALGIE
The amount of quota offered for sale on the Egg Farmers of Ontario’s first-ever electronic, quota transfer sale in March matches volume under the group’s previous, less formal, transfer method, general manager Harry Pelissero said in an interview, Friday.
Egg Farmers had received approved offers to sell 21,407 units of layer quota and 78,058 units of pullet quota by the exchange’s Jan. 23 deadline, an announcement, Thursday, said. Buyers have until Feb. 27 to submit bids for transactions, which close March. 12.
“This is the first milestone as EFO launches a new and improved quota market mechanism for its farmers,” chair Scott Graham said in the statement. The system allows Ontario egg farmers to participate equally in a regularly scheduled market, the statement says.
Previously, farmers bought and sold quota among one another directly. The old system was a bit like land transactions although Pelissero says he dislikes the comparison because real estate markets have multiple listing services that didn’t exist in the egg quota marketplace.
Developed by Université Laval agricultural economist Maurice Doyon and a University of Victoria colleague, Daniel Rondeau, Ontario’s new, egg quota transfer system followed more than three years of research and consultations with growers. It answers concerns among some of the egg board’s 440 members that they lacked adequate information about quota availability.
“If you knew somebody selling quota; that’s how it happened,” Pelissero said in an interview about previous transactions. The electronic system allows quarterly transfers in a “more open and transparent” process that will also publish, completed transfer prices, Pelissero said.
For egg producers, a unit of quota represents a license to market the annual output of one bird, roughly 25 dozen eggs for laying hens. The volume of quota on offer for the March sale “is roughly equal to the old system,” Pelissero said.
The Egg Farmers manager would not comment on recent price trends or expectations about bidding.
The quota exchange schedule for 2014 lists four sales – March 17, June 11, Sept. 10 and Dec. 10 – with earlier deadlines for offers and bids. Following each quota transfer, Egg Farmers will publish details. That includes the established “equilibrium price” which is set by a formula designed by an independent third party agent to reconcile available offers and bids.
“EFO consulted extensively with egg and pullet farmers to design the details,” Graham said. The new system has been designed to provide “a regularly-scheduled market where all buyers and sellers are guaranteed access and can participate on fair and equal terms,” Graham said. BF
Comments
DFO should also hire these consultants to enhance quota movement and efficiency for dairy farmers in Ontario
Do not the feedmills control much of the quota ?
I have been told by different layer farmers that feed mills come around trying to sell quota with the catch that they will sell you some aslong as you agree to buy your feed from them and them only !!
That might have been the case for one or two feed mills in the past but now it won't be a factor.
How old is the new system . This was just 5 or 6 months ago .
Also what about feed mills jacking the price of feed for less than a day when feed price is set for the month . Is that fair a reasonable ? Crooked as hell if you ask me .
EFO has had quota transfer moratorium since June 2013 in prep for new system March 2014.
Anyone familiar with competitive grain markets can make their own decision on how successful a feed mill could be in the pricing conspiracy story.
One or two feed companies ya right
The big is getting bigger and I think its really too late for any one single person to do anything about it, the people with the big bucks has more than a lot of countries do. The world is bad now wait till only a couple or one company or country runs everyone the world will become one big dump.
Just a few decades ago (pre-Internet days) you would be classed as a tin-foil hat nut job...today the evidence is painfully in our faces. It's no longer a conspiracy theory, it's a conspiracy fact. There are too many benefiting from the rigged system(s), it can not reform itself (political animals & banketers give up their power willingly, hahaha...as likely a the Mafia willingly leaving NYC). The next true milestone will be systemic collapse (end of the fiat money scam), then a natural move to local free markets...capitalism's painful and yet required creative destruction. This current system is an organism that has no future.
Of course, all of the above are still free to grow their own feed... but that means more work. If you aren't prepared to take on the responsibility of growing your own (which,of course, many small flock owners aren't as well) then you pretty much take what you can get.
Lets face it, without Supply Management there wouldn't be near the number of feed mills we have.
They cater to the people that pay their bills, its that simple!
No SM = more animal units = more feed demand = more feed mills!
That is why the Beef and Pork Industries are such great examples of Agr-life in this country without being under Supply Management,do you really want to go into the facts and logic of that? Feed Mills like everyone else in Agriculture services grave stability, there will always be way too many influences affecting Beef and Pork, whether its the dry weather of 2012,the dollar value,Cool,BSE or trade barriers,it will always be something that holds off that stability,its why some feed mills have solely specialized in SM only.
Your forecast of life without SM can only be looked at as completely flawed.We would be low-man on the world trading pole,trying to undercut the likes of the US and EU for trade scraps.Our Dairy industry,albeit having the technology to compete with any other country does not have the climate that exporting giants like the US, EU and New Zealand has.
...and l don't even want to get into the export subsidies of some of those Countries, would we match theirs ??
Everybody is going that way sm only or European ,when a farm comes up for sale through real estate ,in neighbourhood they only call on the sm guys or Europeans that has all the money then they just bully themselves and pay cash Maybe realtors should ask other well established farmers if they would like them give them a chance don't just go the easy route
Let get real, there are only a few select mills in Ontario that cater to SM farms, the vast majority of the mills cater to the rest of the livestock sectors, in Grey Country where i come from there are several small feed mills, Holstein mill, Ayton mobile mill, Bayshore feeds and Huron Bay coop in Owen Sound, Blue Water Feeds Desboro, Lembke at Chesley and Walterfalls mill, so 7 mills plus several feed dealers. None of those mills would be in business if they only counted on SM farms because none of those mills make any layer or broiler feed for any SM barns, and we only have a hand full of dairy farms in our county in comparison to the rest of agriculture.
Its Small diverse farms that keep rural Ontario going, not large mega dairy and broiler farms.
If you support diverse family farms I would encourage you to check out the Practical Farmers of Ontario web site and join our chats on facebook.
Sean McGivern
President PFO
The people who pay their bills are the consumers
The egg farmers are partially right, but, as usual, the false half of the half truths proffered by supply management always provide the more-interesting story.
When it comes to any sort of understanding of "fair and equal terms", consumers and non-supply managed farmers are,of course, always excluded from any consideration.
In addition, the increase in so-called "transparency" makes it just that much easier to tell how much extra egg farmers expect to gouge from consumers and be able to financially bully other farmers, because of supply management.
Ah, yes, another effort at re-arranging the deck chairs on the supply management Titanic - someday, hopefully soon, these people will discover the concept of icebergs.
Stephen Thompson, Clinton ON
Consider cheap illegal labour, cheaper production costs and a $1 trillion US farm subsidy. Supply management is the best response possible for Canadians who are vicitmized. Continued handouts like we've seen in the pork industry only lead to bankruptcies and failures while some people who don't even use the products see their money spent on subsidies.
Since supply management victimizes over 30 million Canadian consumers, as well as the 90% of farmers who are not in supply management, the author of the above posting has a vivid imagination, as well as apparently little understanding, as to who is victimizing who.
In addition, the above author continues to ignore the basic differences in the macro-economic effects of tax-payer funded subsidies, and consumption taxes.
The undeniable fact of the matter is that there is no comparison between taxpayer funded subsidies, where the rich pay their fair share, as do corporations, and consumption taxes such as supply management, which is disproportionately funded by poor consumers.
Therefore, if farmers are to be funded by any sort of artificial means, it is far-better from a macro-economic, and public policy viewpoint, to do it through taxpayer funded subsidies than through consumption taxes.
It`s been a travesty to see supply managed farmers shrill that they receive no government subsidies, even though if they did, the entire country would be far-better off, and supply managed farmers would even be better off, because they wouldn`t have to perpetually finance the ogre of quota, and dairy farmers wouldn`t be constantly facing the reality of continually lower consumption because the dairy industry has priced itself out of any sense of reality.
Stephen Thompson, Clinton ON
I recently spent some time in the US. I was surprised to find the price of eggs and milk to be far from cheaper than here in Ontario grocery stores. So, if a free market should provide consumers with a cheaper product, why isn't it? The profits go into the small handful of companies that own the egg and chicken industry in the US. Quota still serves its purpose to family farms and consumers alike. Have we seen chicken, egg, or milk price spikes and troughs in the last 3 decades? People can budget for those item and know what they should have to spend on the year. I think it is a good system. You can sit on the sidelines and complain about inequality among farmers...the only American price I envied was gas...I suppose you could call that a free market (based on the oil price?).
Before I drove to east Texas in mid-January of 2015, I checked the prices of dairy and poultry products in our local Wal-Mart superstore in Goderich ON - none of the products was on sale or otherwise labelled in a way that would appear to distort the normal retail price.
Then, all the way to Texas and back, I periodically checked the prices of similar items at Wal-Mart stores and, to no surprise, everything for which I checked the price at the dairy and poultry counters in Goderich, even when adjusted to Canadian dollars, was significantly cheaper in the US. I even did this over the course of several weeks so that I could filter out any sort of weekly sales effect on price.
Not only that, but I even saw a sign outside a grocery store near Houston (not a WalMart) advertising a gallon of organic milk for under $2.00 - in Canada we not only don't have cheap organic milk, DFO is doing its best to drive organic processors out of business.
Furthermore, Mr. van Donkersgoed's posting defies all logic in that he would have us believe that something which attracts 200% tariffs in one country could end up selling for effectively the same price as it does in an adjoining country whose products the 200% tariffs are designed to keep out of the first country - this is the economic and logic equivalent of Mr. van Donkersgoed claiming that pigs have wings.
In addition, Mr. van Donkersgoed's claim that egg and poultry processing and retailing profits in the US go "into a small handful of companies that own the egg and chicken industry in the US" is not only preposterous, it is also unverifiable and completely-unsupportable. As an example of the fiercely competitive nature of the US egg industry, one farm in Michigan supplies all of the eggs McDonalds uses east of the Mississippi. If this farm was making too much money, McDonalds could, and would, immediately switch to another supplier - contrast that to the inability McDonalds has, thanks to supply management, to get a better deal on eggs, in Canada.
Therefore, and unfortunately for Mr. van Donkersgoed's technicolour and nonsensical dream, the only excess profits anywhere in the North American food chain are made by the small handfull (15,000) of Canadian dairy and poultry quota owners.
The only things I can conclude from Mr. van Donkersgoed's posting are:
(1) Mr. van Donkersgoed doesn't live anywhere near the US border and doesn't know, and/or never talks to, anyone who does
(2) Mr. van Donkersgoed's comparisons were of a very-isolated nature
(3) Mr. van Donkersgoed wasn't comparing Walmart to Walmart
(4) Mr. van Donkersgoed was in Hawaii, Alaska or a part of Florida which caters to rich Canadian tourists who, thanks to supply management, are used to being hosed on milk prices anyway and who are prepared to pay Canadian prices for the convenience of walking to the store closest to their retirement community rather than drive to a Walmart to get a better deal.
(5) While Mr. van Donkersgoed is completely right that Canadian consumers can budget for supply managed products, it because they HAVE to budget in order to be able to afford the ridiculous prices charged by the quota-owners.
Finally, it is true that "quota still serves its purpose to family farms and consumers alike" but not in the way it was intended - what quota does is the following:
(A) it pits non-supply managed farmily farms against mega-sized supply managed farms.
(B) it deliberately overcharges the poorest group of consumers
(C) it drives non supply managed family farms out of business
(D) it causes groups like Ontario Pork to vote 68-13 at a recent annual general meeting to "urge government to place trade ahead of protectionism"
Stephen Thompson, Clinton ON
The more practical solution to take care of problems like the one above, and also the absurd value of quota is to simply reduce the COP's. The value of quota is representative of what someone is willing to pay for the government enforced ability to steal from consumers. Raube Beuerman
As a consumer I hope to see the only solution that makes any sense come about - abolish all marketing boards, yah tough to take if you are protected by them. They anti competitive, anti consumer and reek of the failed Soviet style central planning - let the consumer decide and the free market be free. There is no defense of these relics of the dirty 30's. Replace them with some type of Consumer Information organizations that rate products & producers, interdependently of government control and meddling.
I can't believe that some vaccine egg producers can try to produce dirt-free eggs without washing (and fail completely) then exist on 4 months of production (and fail to maintain production), but have to fork over millions for the rights to start up. The old established companies which got this quota very cheaply are practically fleecing the new entrants - that is the true consequence of legislated supply management. Seriously imagine that Tim Hortons charged independent coffee entrants a fee for quota - that is outrageously anti-competitive and vicious collusion
You're describing something like taxi permits?
Is Ontario waiting until UBER come on board to address this ?
Yup. Supply managed Dairy quotas bad. Cow shares good.
Supply managed taxi quotas good. Uber bad.
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