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Farmer sell steaks from his truck - His response to mad cow disease |
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When the mad cow scare struck Canada in 2003, beef producers were devastated, but it led one man to transform his operation in a manner he would never have imagined — and meat-eaters in Richmond and Shefford are the better off for it.
“That’s when I started marketing my own beef,” says Daniel Morel, who once a week parks his truck and trailer on the corner of Craig and College streets in Richmond and sells meat. “For a couple of years I went to the Melbourne Market to sell, but it only runs about 15 weeks. I’ve been coming here to Richmond for the last year and a half. I also go to Shefford on a weekly basis. The furthest I go is to Hull, where I have some two dozen clients I go to see once every three months.”
Morel appreciates the Town of Richmond because not all municipalities welcome him. On a monthly basis, he stops by the town hall to renew his vendor’s permit.
“Richmond’s close,” says the Roxton Falls beef producer, “about 20 minutes from my farm, and I have a faithful clientele. I don’t know all my customers by name — I don’t have a good memory for names — but I recognize the faces when they come in and most of my clients are regulars.”
Daniel Morel’s story echoes the social changes of the last half of the 20th century. He was born on the family farm in Roxton Falls some 55 years ago. When he was two, his parents gave up on farming and moved to east end Montreal where they found work and raised their six children. Upon retirement,
Morel’s father returned to Roxton where he purchased a small farm. The whole family ended up returning to the Roxton area. In 1989 Daniel Morel bought his own farm, 350 acres of heavily wooded land, and started cutting firewood on a commercial basis.
“That first year I also got my first cow,” recalls Morel. “My father always bought a calf in the spring which he would fatten and then butcher in the fall. That year, he bought two calves and ended up giving me one. It was a Jersey heifer. Instead of butchering it, I kept it, had it bred and found myself with two animals.”
Morel’s herd grew slowly, which was a good thing. “My first farm,” he points out, “was essentially a big wood lot. I had no pasture land, no hay fields and no barn. I did have an old school bus which I had converted into a shelter I could use when I was cutting wood in the winter. The bus became an improvised barn, but within a couple of years it went from being impractical to being impossible.”
“I sold that first farm,” Morel continues, “and bought another one, where I am today. It’s smaller, only 90 acres, but it’s all pasture and hay fields. I also rent three other farms for their hay fields — my animals go through 1,500 round bales a year. In 1999 I purchased two Angus bulls and my herd, now up to 180 head, is predominantly Angus.”
Morel strives to keep his operation as simple, and as natural, as possible. “My animals are outside, year round,” he says. “I haven’t invested in barns or outbuildings and my only machinery is an old tractor with a back hoe. I have my hay custom cut. But I’m close to my animals. I’m there when they are born. Last week we had our very first set of twins born, and I’m there to look after them. If I see a lame cow in the field, I will walk out to her and she will follow me back, with no rope or halter, so she can be treated. My animals are grass-fed and my vet bills run to about $500 annually, of which less than $200 is medication.”
Morel keeps some 70 breeding animals. Calves stay with their mothers and begin pasturing just a few days after birth. Of the non-breeding animals, some will be butchered at 10 months and be sold as veal, while others will be kept till the age of 16 or 17 months and will then become baby beef. “I will not sell old animals,” says Morel adamantly. “My very first cow had to be euthanized a few years ago. I dug a hole with the back hoe, dropped her in, covered her with lime and filled in the hole. I would have felt bad doing anything else.”
Morel’s animals are butchered at a nearby abattoir. “It’s licensed and regularly inspected,” stresses Morel. “The meat hangs for two weeks and then is vacuum packed and frozen.”
“As far as I know,” says the Roxton beef producer, “I’m the only farmer who raises his animals and then drives around and sells them as roasts and steaks.”
“The mad cow scare,” he continues, “was really bad for almost everybody. For producers, like me, it meant selling animals at a big loss. For consumers, it meant buying meat at the grocery store at higher prices. Prices in the stores still haven’t gone down, and the producer who brings his animals to auction makes such a thin profit, he might as well be on welfare.”
Rather than give up, Morel took the bull by the horns. (Not one of his Angus bulls — Morel selected the breed, in part, because Angus cattle do not grow horns.) He stopped bringing animals to auction and started selling beef from home. He also opened his farm to agro-tourism. After two summers of selling his meat at the Melbourne Market, he invested in a truck, a trailer and a few freezers. “How many people want to drive out to Roxton Falls to get a steak for supper? It made sense for me to bring my beef to the customer,” he says with a laugh.
Bad as the mad cow scare was, Morel credits it with more than just expanding his business. “It made me sit up and look at things,” he says. “It made me conscious of how poorly our government agencies look after us, as a society. It also made me aware that, in the long run, unless we make a commitment to local agriculture, our future is bleak.”
In Morel’s small trailer, besides five freezers (securely bolted to the floor), there is a small countertop on which, under a laminate of plastic, are newspaper clippings and letters from government agencies. Under the counter, Morel has a well-thumbed copy of William Raymond’s book, Toxic. As Morel starts talking about the state of agriculture, he frequently turns to the clippings or the book to stress his points.
“Only 25 per cent of the beef sold in Quebec is local,” he starts. “We import from New Zealand, from Uruguay, from the US. And when that meat gets here, it’s inspected and stamped and sold in the stores as if it were Canadian beef. And it’s not just beef. Doyon honey is sold as a Canadian product, but 70 per cent of the honey in the jar comes from outside Canada. Meanwhile, Canadian farmers — regardless of what they are producing — are almost all struggling. In Quebec, farms are being lost at the rate of almost one a day. A young person who wants to be a dairy farmer is going to have to spend half a million dollars just to buy a milk quota. He’s half a million in the hole and hasn’t yet spent a penny on land, on animals, on machinery. Who can afford that?
“And it’s not as if the consumer knows what he’s buying when he goes to the store. Did that animal come from an industrial-size lot where there was overcrowding and lots of opportunity for disease? In the year 2000, in the US, animal producers pumped 1.3 million tons of antibiotics into their livestock. Where do you think all that medicine ends up?”
“We live artificially,” Morel continues. “In January we go to the store to buy strawberries. They look wonderful, but isn’t there something unnatural about a berry that can sit in your fridge for weeks without spoiling? And does it really taste like a strawberry? We are going to have to learn to live in greater harmony with the land and with the seasons. We have electricity. We can put a freezer in our home and go out and pick our strawberries in June and our apples in October and make pies and preserves and put them in the freezer and enjoy local produce year round.”
For his part, Daniel Morel continues to raise beef animals in the most natural way possible. He buys from and promotes local growers. The freezers in his trailer are filled not only with his own beef, but also with pork and chicken from local farms.
For more information about Morel’s operation you can go to his website, www.boeufangus.com. His white pick-up with a life-size, plastic Angus bull in the back, and locally grown meat in the trailer, can be found in Richmond at the corner of Craig and College on Thursdays and at the Val-Maher Depanneur at 1000 Denison Road in Shefford on Saturdays.
By Nick Fonda
March 26, 2008
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Montreal Canadiens
