By Josh Hall (Twitter: @Vancan19)

66th annual Westerner Dairy Showcase goes this week

Oct 19, 2020 | 3:20 PM

RED DEER, AB – The long running Westerner Dairy Showcase will go ahead this week with pandemic rules in place.

Dairy farmers and industry pros are excited to gather at Westerner Park Oct. 22-24 to network and reconnect after several unorthodox months.

More than 150 cattle will be on display, with the Central Alberta Holstein Club Sale, the youth show, jersey show and holstein show all on the itinerary.

Jillian Hastie, Westerner Dairy Committee board member, points out that the show will be first in western Canada to go ahead since fall 2019.

“It’s important we get back to it and start marketing our animals and industry again,” Hastie says. “We will have facemasks donated by AFSC, Westerner will be doing extra cleaning of touch points, and we’ve really stretched out our spacing.”

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This year’s show will be limited to industry workers to prevent the spread of COVID-19, though organizers do hope to welcome the public back in the future.

The show will also feature the Mega MOOla draw, where one lucky attendee will win their choice of a premium holstein heifer valued at approximately $6500. Additionally, proceeds from the event’s live auction will be donated to The Mustard Seed’s school lunch program.

There will also be live broadcasting throughout some of the event’s sales. A link to that broadcast will be posted to westernerpark.ca.

Meantime, the world of dairy is facing challenges, though not so much directly due to COVID-19 as other industries.

“Overall, there were a few people that had to dump some milk because they were overproducing, and our board did limit some of the ability ship past over our quotas,” says Hastie, whose family has run Chalack Farms east of Innisfail for over 45 years.

“The biggest impact was at the processing level with changes in the demand. We had restaurant closures and kids not in school, so adjusting quickly to those changes was the biggest hurdle.”

She says with both of those things back up and running, demand has increased. Hastie notes that farmers have been given a number of extra days this fall when they’re allowed to ship, incentivizing them to keep up production.

Aside from the pandemic, she adds that the industry faces trade negotiations related to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) and the Trans Pacific-Partnership (TPP).

“Those agreements allow for the U.S. or other markets to come in and limit what we can contribute to the market. It cuts back our quotas,” she explains. “We have little control over it. In the U.S., the market is over-flooded with product because there are no controls, so then producers are not getting a fair price. It’s also heavily subsidized in the U.S., which it isn’t in the Canadian quota system.”

A joint report recently published by the University of Guelph and Dalhousie University suggests half of Canada’s existing dairy farms will have to close down by 2030.

It cites a reduction in use of dairy products by coffee chains, and how consumers feel about the ethics of dairy, as main reasons for potential closures.