Small is beautiful they say. I once read a book, Small Is Beautiful* by E.F. Schumacher, which discusses the economics of just that. Here in rural Alberta, after farming for over 40 years, we are still small, even smaller than we were a few years back, and yes, we think beautiful. But we are more and more running into livestock regulations favouring large and larger, making it increasingly difficult to survive as a small livestock producer. The latest ruling from above has crippled our ability to manage the health of our sheep flock. Imagine our surprise when we went to the vet’s office prior to lambing and discovered that we could not purchase any broad spectrum antibiotic to have on hand should the need arise. Once again, Ottawa’s bureaucratic fat cats have handed down a regulation which on its surface appears to be for the good of the people, but lacks any concept of the negative effect on those who are expected to accept and adhere to their decree. This new federal regulation** has been set in place because overuse of antibiotics, mainly in the human population, has had the result of creating “super bugs” (mutated bacteria resistant to currently available antibiotics). Health Canada’s regulators, sitting behind their comfortable desks with their secure salaries stuffed in their wallets, have decided that livestock producers are contributing to the creation of these super bugs by using too many antibiotics. (I doubt if any of these people have ever set foot on a farm.) Their solution? Don’t let the farmers buy antibiotics over the counter. They must be prescribed by a veterinarian. Only a qualified vet can make a decision as to when an antibiotic is needed. Hmmm.
Obviously, Ottawa is unaware that livestock producers do not all live within a few miles of a veterinarian. Nor do producers go wild and inject antibiotics just in case an animal may become sick. Vaccines are used for this. Profit margins are small. Antibiotics are expensive, even more expensive for small producers because they are unavailable in small quantities. This necessitates the purchase of over-large bottles that are barely touched in a season and expire with about 90% of their contents unused. But wait, that’s no longer true! We can no longer buy antibiotics at all! Now vets dispense syringes with only the amount of drug required to treat the one animal they see! And they must see that animal, or at the very least they must come to your farm annually, inspect your flock and discuss management practices, then make a judgement as to whether or not you have the intelligence to recognize when an animal is sick and needs an antibiotic injection. It should be noted that veterinarians are not happy with these regulations either, though they may profit by them.
So my bottle lamb with the weepy eyes and running nose, the lamb with navel ill, the ewe that managed to tangle twine in her foot, cutting circulation and causing infection - any animal in need, well, Ottawa says too bad, Mr. and Mrs. Farmer, you’re too dumb to know when an antibiotic is required. You must get the vet out to check on them.
In our situation this essentially means shoot your animal or hope he manages to recover on his own. Why do I say that? Isn’t that a bit extreme? I don’t think so. We live 40 miles from the nearest vet office. The vet charges $4.95/mile, both ways, just to come out. That’s $396 before he even looks at the flock, for which I’m quite sure there would be a good sized price tag with an additional cost for any drugs prescribed. So say $550-$600 annually for this legislated process to take place. For our small flock that produces about 25-30 lambs, that’s about 1/6 of gross income!
And net income? Sometimes I wonder if we are just kidding ourselves as to there being any profit after input costs. Ewes eat hay in winter, grain before lambing and during lactation, many producers also creep feed the lambs with grain to give them a boost. Fixed costs - buildings, fences - need maintenance. We spent $4000 on fencing just this year to repair our corral and sorting system. Besides all of this I can quite honestly say every sheep we ever loaded onto a truck and took to the vet died, with a hefty price tag attached.
Large producers can afford to get a vet out once a year. They will get the antibiotics they need. Their profit margin, based on volume, may take a small, insignificant drop. Feeds lots, intensive pig barns, chicken barns, where animals are crowded together in unnatural circumstances, are, I suspect, where antibiotics are used on a large scale. Small operators, where animals are kept under natural conditions, are less likely to need antibiotics. We use them sparingly. This year we are using an expired bottle of Bio-Mycin when an antibiotic is needed. Next year...Well, I guess we and our sheep are out of luck.
It’s a way of life. We produce our own meat, we produce our own vegetables and much of our own fruit. If we did not do this we could never manage. I’d like to close with a quote from the preface by John McClaughry, added in 1989 to Small Is Beautiful. He quoted from a British magazine called Resurgence, where Schumacher was an associate editor. The magazine called into question “the existing power structures of the world, not because they are Capitalist or Communist or Fascist or whatever, but simply because they are too big. ...We envision a Fourth World, where government and economics are under genuine human control because the size of such units are small, sensible, and human scale, where there is a maximum of decentralized decision making, and where the pace of change is regulated not by the appetites of an overmighty minority for profit and power, but by the day to day needs of small-scale human communities and the psychic capacities of their members to adapt.
*Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, E.F. Schumacher, London: Blond and Briggs,1979
**Responsible use of Medically Important Antimicrobials in Animals - Canada.ca
https://www.canada.ca › animals › actions
