The Olliffe Team recently took a trip out to Prince Edward Island to see how the tiny province has begun producing, in our opinion, some of the best tasting beef in North America. Included on the trip was head butcher George Madill, my brother Ben Gundy and Le Patron of George Restaurant and me.
In Prince Edward Island, the most important agricultural employer is the potato industry, and therein lies part of the answer. Unlike in other Canadian provinces and across the U.S., the fields on the Island are lined with potatoes and not ubiquitous stalks of corn.
In essence, the P.E.I. beef industry was designed to enhance the sustainability of both the potato and beef industry, and it all comes down to the three-year crop rotation cycle of the potato.
As the province’s main industry, a potato field can only be planted with potatoes once every three years. For the PEI farmer running the family business their land has to be productive when not growing potatoes. In other words, the beef and potato industries are complimentary, as both require pasture and fallow land.
Our first visit on the island was to Tim Dixon who owns a mixed farm producing some organic products. It includes a large Black Angus operation by PEI standards with 150 head of cattle. Tim breeds some of his animals and buys calves from other maritime provinces which he pastures until they reach about 900lbs. From there his animals are “finished” with a diet of silage lots of grass, potatoes, sometimes barley and navy beans. The potatoes are culls or rejects by island processors looking for specific size requirements. In fact, a ton of rejected potatoes delivered to the farm costs about $10 dollars therefore they are inexpensive and enable the PEI industry to compete pricewise.
Another farmer we talked to Dean Baglole, says an important factor accounting for the superior taste of the beef are that the cattle are culled at a minimum of 26 months and quite often over 30 months. This compares to cattle in confined feedlots that can be slaughtered as young as 18 months. Unlike in industrial feedlot operations where animals are processed in batches according to a fixed schedule, PEI animals are sorted individually when a farmer determines if they are ready. The greater maturity of the animals provides superior beefy taste, more fat and better marbling.
Also Mr. Baglole said that taste would be affected by the cattle receiving smaller daily doses of grain averaging 5 -8 pounds per day compared to up to 20 pounds for regular North American commodity beef. You cannot call PEI beef Grass-Fed due to inclusion of some grains in the feed with the exception of corn.
Going it Alone
In 2002 the Maple Leaf subsidiary Hub Meat Packers located in Moncton, New Brunswick was shuttered. The farmers of the Maritime Provinces no longer had a local packer who had the certified regulation to be able to ship across provincial lines. Needless to say this was devastating not only for PEI beef farmers but potentially the potato farmers who operate both types of farms.
Beef farmers from PEI were forced to send their live cattle to large meat packers predominately in Quebec and Ontario. These trips are very difficult for the welfare of the animals and consequently the financial returns on each animal, said one farmer we spoke to Dean Baglole. He likens the experience to long-haul flights where passengers are subjected to thorough searches, cramped cabins, and then refused vital services like food and water for two days.
Atlantic Beef Products was established on PEI in 2004 in order to combat the problem. The average farmer who sends his steer or cow to the federally inspected abattoir currently receives on average 7 cents less than sending down the road to Quebec or Ontario. But the success is clear with a penetration of nearly 90% of PEI’s farmers keeping their cattle in-province to be slaughtered.
The trucking of live cattle is not preferred but even avoided when the farmer is compensated at a lesser level.
The Inadvertent Success Story
According to Atlantic Beef Products (ABP), the sole federal meat packing plant in the Maritimes, the average beef cattle farm on PEI has 40-50 heads generating annual sales of 100 million dollars to the industry. Compared to the beef economy of Alberta and even Ontario, the PEI beef cattle industry is tiny.
The method of raising the animals is far different from conventional confined feedlot operations. The feedlot consists of the family farm, its pasture and barns.
Growth promotants such as hormones or steroids are not administered. As well, preventative antibiotics are never given to the cattle. These are low volume family farms, which supply beef to the Atlantic Provinces and now Ontario. Can the beef be called natural? A debate rages as to what this means. But 35 year old Tim Dixon, the PEI farmer told us “my farm has been in the family since 1916 and we have been raising the animals the same way since then. I would call that natural.” And he has a point.
Our tour of the newly built, and provincially subsidized Atlantic Beef Products meat packing facility was instructive. Modern automated machines are manufactured in Holland and made of stainless steel. One of the interesting achievements of the Atlantic Beef Products operation and its supplying farmers is their ability to send an unusually high level of premium graded beef through the system.
In Canada, we have four grades of beef: A, AA, AAA and Prime. Mike Nabuurs, the head of ABP is able to get up to 65% of all beef graded as AAA or higher. This is a formidable achievement as mostly all other abattoirs in North America cap out AAA or higher at a rate of up to 40%.
Atlantic Beef Products Mike Nabuurs and the farmers we met attribute the exceptional grading to two instances; letting cattle age on farm longer than normal and the unique PEI feeding program.
PEI Beef Tastes Better
All of this serves to explain why the beef tastes differently and why we think better. With its greater age before kill and unique diet, to us the beef has a more beefy taste– resembling what beef used to taste. With age comes more time for marbling to develop. The marbling produces a smooth richness that is satisfying.
Further, it is the close proximity to the abattoir plus the relatively light-graining of the animal that is a contributor to the success story.
Why should anyone be surprised that a small-scale carefully cultivated agricultural alternative beats an industrially large scaled product? It all makes a good case for supporting the efforts of the farmers and people in PEI who are promoting a product as an important answer to their community.
We returned from Moncton using the new Confederation Bridge which one of our party was stunned to learn was not floating. To catch the flight on time, we had to drive reluctantly by Shediac, New Brunswick where some delicious east coast seafood could have been had. Perhaps next time.
