12min read
Canada’s 60,000 cow/calf ranches offer circumstances:
to deliver a strategic Canadian initiative securing multiple priority outcomes:
for a significant ($5B revenue) Canadian agriculture sector.
There is a generational opportunity to improve productivity and prosperity for Canada’s ranching families by leveraging imminent regulation implementation to deliver, at little if any additional cost and effort, a comprehensive solution that delivers multiple benefits, incremental revenue, and productivity improvement, to Canada’s 60,000 ranching families.
But urgent attention, and significant collaboration and process innovation, from leadership and stakeholders is required to realize this opportunity.
In the next 24 months Canada’s 60,000 ranchers will secure compliance with an amendment to Canada’s livestock animal traceability regulation. This amendment resolves decades understood deficiencies in Canadian livestock animal traceability that compromise Canada’s capacity to manage animal health incidents like the current Bovine TB outbreak in Saskatchewan and H5N1 flu in Cattle when it arrives in Canada.
Miranda Leybourne’s item “Countdown begins for traceability” in the Western Producer provides an excellent overview of the situation.
Authoritative sources have shared with Flokk Systems the same information that Rick Wright shares in the article; the amendment will be published Q1 2026 with full implementation in 2027.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) and Canadian Cattle Identification Agency (CCIA) have, and continue to, prepare materials, programs and tools (CLTS Mobo) that support Canadian livestock producers securing compliance with their new traceability obligations.
But current strategy of the CFIA, CCIA, and provincial extension departments; apply punitive incentive (financial penalty) to secure traceability compliance, will at best secure a single objective (traceability) while leaving huge opportunity unrealized.
And even this unambitious objective is unlikely to be realized.
Flokk has always understood that traceability alone does not provide sufficient value proposition for a rancher to implement digital agriculture. And no one is motivated to pursue constructive change by threat alone; ranchers even less so that most.
Engaging ranchers to participate in traceability in isolation, motivating them solely through threatening the stick of financial penalty, will cause resistance and push back. And is unnecessary when, approached collaboratively, a compelling and engaging value proposition for digitizing a ranch can be provided that incites participation with multiple carrots instead of a single stick.
Highlighting comments by Rick Wright in Leyborne’s Western Producer item:
The new regulations will position Canada ahead of the United States in livestock traceability, according to Wright, who recently returned from the Livestock Marketing Association convention in the U.S.
“They are way behind us on traceability and the understanding of traceability, the understanding of the need for a better traceability system,” he said.
“We certainly will be positioning ourselves for a better position in the global market by getting this done.”
The timing is particularly relevant given current trade considerations. Having a robust traceability system provides advantages in international markets, especially as Canada looks to diversify its export destinations, Wright said.
“One of the mainstays that we’ve talked about since the Trump administration has come back into play is being less reliant on the U.S. for our export markets, and certainly having a robust traceability system will give us a little bit of a foot up over some of our other competitors when it comes to trading internationally.”
We concur with Wright; rigorous and verifiable traceability is fundamental to Canada securing and sustaining export markets other than the US. This was confirmed in RBC Thought Leadership’s report “Food first: How agriculture can lead a new era for Canadian exports”:
In a similar vein, gaining market share requires robust inspection and control services that ensure food safety and agriculture production’s protection against new diseases and pests. … Pooling public-private resources, the federal government could work with industry associations, companies, and provinces in region-specific, agile taskforces to promote exports and inform regulatory bodies on what’s needed to support growth.
Canada’s ranching families sustainably produce the best beef on the planet. Implemented concurrently, providing Canada’s ranchers the tools necessary to meet export traceability requirements, and in particular EU requirements, would require no more effort or cost than that required to secure domestic traceability compliance alone.
Wright and I are presenting Canada a three for one offer; ensure domestic food safety, advance pandemic preparedness, and expand export market access, all at the same cost and effort of securing any one outcome alone. Canada would be advised to accept it.
Which makes Flokk’s four for one offer impossible to say no to.
Canada’s national beef sustainability beef initiative Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (CRSB) remains challenged to secure participation, and supply, from cow/calf. Thank you Melissa Jeffers-Bezan and Ryan Beierbach for the item Sustainable beef faces supply crunch that documents the situation.
Beierbach is correct; most ranchers already apply the practices necessary to acquire and sustain sustainable practice certification, understand the value of certified sustainable practice to their industry, and see potential for financial reward from sustainability. But for the moment the cost and effort of manually collecting and retaining the data necessary to prove sustainable practice is hard to justify while financial return from sustainable practice remains more potential than actual.
Implemented through an integrated process, the effort and cost to digitize a herd to prepare it to sustain certified production requires no more cost and effort than that required to prepare it to comply with traceability requirements.
Four benefits for the price of one. Three carrots and one stick. A value proposition for cow/calf digitization that ranchers, and Canada, should find impossible to decline.
Not ready to say yes? How about five for one?
The final outcome that makes digitizing a cow/calf herd a compelling value proposition is productivity. Data enabled analytics that improve productivity are realized for free when appropriate tools are used to achieve traceability.
Three organizations have documented opportunities lost in productivity and sustainability due to lagging digitization of Canadian agriculture:
Decades of studies, projects, extension offerings, and workshops like those of the “The Alberta Digitalization Agriculture Program” have had, and will continue to have, no impact realizing digitization of cow/calf because productivity alone does not provide sufficient ROI to justify digitization of a commercial cow/calf herd.
But the productivity gains of digitization can be realized when a rancher chooses a tool set for traceability that enables analytics. And this opportunity will be lost if ranchers are incited to implement lowest cost solutions for traceability like CLTS Mobo.
Five outcomes for the price of one. And I don’t have space here to document the opportunities in:
realizable once Canada has digitized ranching.
There is a huge opportunity in delivering a:
process to deliver to Canada’s cow/calf ranching families an affordable solution that enables them to prove, and reap full reward for, the role they already hold; sustainable producers of the safest and highest quality beef on the planet.
This initiative delivers a single, affordable, actionable process that in two days realizes for a typical Canadian ranch:
Two day, quadruple play; four outcomes realized with same disruption, and little additional cost, to the rancher than that required of them to secure any single outcome in isolation.
The alternative? Each ranch digital solution provider like Flokk and TELUS Agriculture & Consumer Goods have to impose the cost of resources to onboard a customer. It will not be viable to provide on site traceability advisors that could accomplish in an hour what a rancher will need multiple days and calls to the CCIA to achieve. Verified Beef must impose the cost of putting an evaluator on the ranch to determine certification. And productivity improvements pursued by The Simpson Centre and Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute continue unrealized.
All because every stakeholder stubbornly insists on working independently towards the same outcome; application of digital agriculture to advance outcomes for a Canadian ranch.
A template for this program exists in the “Building resiliency for Alberta beef farms” program, a joint project of Government of Alberta (GOA link to program) and the Government of Canada (GOC link to program).
Flokk conceived and initiated this program when we identified to Alberta Minister of Agriculture RJ Sigurdson the opportunity to reduce costs to, and improve outcomes for, Alberta’s cow/calf ranchers by consolidating existing uncoordinated and redundant support and sustainability programs into a single program delivered in collaboration with the industry’s sustainability program. This joint Alberta/Canada program provides Alberta Beef Producers with $1.9 million to support ranchers securing Verified Beef Canada’s Verified Beef Production Plus (VBP+) sustainable production certification through the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership (Sustainable CAP).
It is an active choice for Canada to continue as we are; institution driven independent agendas where requirements, and processes, are set unilaterally, independently and redundantly, serving first institutional agendas and administrative convenience. Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency and Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef and Verified Beef and ARECA and Canadian Cattle Association and Alberta Beef Producers and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and Alberta Agriculture and Irrigation and The Simpson Centre and Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute and Alberta Innovates and EMILI and Flokk and Telus could continue as we are; working independently, without coordination, and with limited, if any, engagement with ranchers, pursuing different objectives, offering uncoordinated programs and tools, and seeking redundant submission of the same fundamental data.
The outcome of status quo? These institutions, initiatives, and expenditures will all, understandably, continue to be ignored by most cow/calf ranching families because from their perspective it is un-engaging and un-actionable chaos.
Alternatively, this proposal delivers a single window and actionable process that empowers Canada’s ranching families to take on the world.
Flokk has made our choice, and are taking action as best we can to realize it. We are keen to engage with others interested in exploring this opportunity.
Come join us!
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