The Alberta Dairy Congress celebrated its 30th anniversary this year and hosted its annual five-day event at the Leduc Recreation Centre with a dairy show, herd builder sale, luncheon, breakfast, and other events.
Last weekend marks three decades of one of Alberta’s largest dairy shows, with the 30th Alberta Dairy Congress being held at the Leduc Recreation Centre.
About 200 head of cattle were shown, judged and sold over the five-day event, stretching June 7-11.
During the last 30 years the dairy industry in Alberta has changed tremendously, and those trends have been echoed by the congress.
“It’s evolved. The first five years were basically just trade shows. This was a very dairy-oriented area, with about probably in excess of about 1,000 dairymen,” said congress chairman Orville Schmidt. Since then, numbers of dairy producers in this region of the province have dropped to about 200.
Schmidt said, though that’s more due to specialization and technological advances in the industry than a waning of the industry itself.
“That’s just economics. The original homesteaders and settlers all had dairy cows to feed the family and sell a bit of cream, and with the way the world goes everyone has specialized. So we have that many less people, but we’re probably milking the same amount of cows,” Schmidt said.
Schmidt estimated average herd sizes have grown to around 150 head, many of which can still be managed by a single family thanks to progresses in robotic milking technology. Events like the congress are major hubs for the remaining producers, looking to add numbers and genetic diversity to their herds.
The congress dropped its trade show a few years ago, but retains the heart of the event – the dairy shows. Both “black and white” and “red and white” shows are held to judge the quality of cattle specimens, as an adjunct to the herd-building sales.
Numbers at the congress has not been overly affected by the down economy. Schmidt said producers are still relatively prosperous, and the market for their products isn’t disappearing anytime soon.
“Hey, even if you can’t drive anywhere, you’re still going to be hungry. Food is still a driver,” Schmidt said. “The people who are still in it are still doing very well, and they’re expanding and putting in modern technology, but [the dairy congress] still needs to continue to work and make it more interesting. That’s why we focused now on the actual livestock sector. Our show has grown because people from all over Western Canada know the value of Alberta genetics, so they want to see them before they’re gone.”
Dairy, beef industry becoming more local: Conklin
Beverly Beckett and John Schonewille of Leduc City Council and Leduc County Council, respectively, gave kudos to Schmidt and the Dairy Congress for its longevity at a Friday, June 10 afternoon luncheon jointly hosted by the Dairy Congress and the Leduc Regional Chamber of Commerce.
The luncheon featured guest speaker Gary Conklin, owner of Conklin Dairy Cattle Sales in Ohio, who advised the crowd, largely made up of producers in town for the congress, to “get closer to the consumer.”
“76 per cent of Millennials…that’s the biggest demographic and consuming group that companies have to look at…they’re interested in buying local food and 42 per cent of them do not trust large food companies. That shows there’s opportunities to create a niche and produce something they will come and buy, and often at a higher price,” Conklin said.
Producers close to major urban centres like Edmonton are especially well placed to capitalize on that trend, Conklin added
“If you’re within, say, 25 miles of Edmonton, you have a tremendous population of consumers who want to be buying what you’re producing, and they want to buy from you rather than from grocery stores or some other places. That opportunity is more for those individuals than for someone who is three hours west of Edmonton, though their opportunities are different.”
Source: Leducrep
