Supporting Manitoba’s Cattle Producers Impacted by the Pandemic

Marie Claude Bibeau, Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food and Manitoba Minister of Agriculture and Resource Development, Blaine Pedersen, announced the launch of the 2020 Canada-Manitoba Finished Cattle Feed Assistance Program, which will provide up to $2.5 million to in direct support to Manitoba cattle producers impacted by the pandemic

The 2020 Canada-Manitoba Finished Cattle Feed Assistance Program will provide owners of finished cattle $1.20 per day per animal to help offset costs to feed animals beyond their expected marketing dates, due to slaughter plant closures and operational reductions resulting from COVID-19 outbreaks, or disease control measures. Cattle producers can now apply for support, the deadline for application is December 1, 2020. The program will cover eligible extraordinary costs incurred between April 15, 2020 and August 31, 2020.

Funding for the program is provided by the Government of Canada. The province of Manitoba will administer program applications and payments to producers.

“Trade in agricultural products has been more resilient than overall trade”

 

“COVID-19 forced a bottleneck in our processing plants and a backup in demand that caused stress and added costs on our cattle producers,” Bibeau stated. “Our Government acted swiftly to announce supports such as the Emergency Processing Fund and national AgriRecovery initiatives that have helped our producers to continue to supply their top quality products to Canadians. With today’s announcement, our Government is directly helping Manitoba cattle producers with added costs they faced during this unprecedented time.”

The funding is provided through AgriRecovery, a Federal-Provincial-Territorial disaster relief framework to help producers faced with the extraordinary costs associated with recovering from disasters. Last May, the Government of Canada announced the launch of national AgriRecovery initiatives of up to $100 million in assistance for extraordinary costs of managing livestock backed-up on farms (pork and cattle), due to the temporary closure of food processing plants affected by COVID-19. Extraordinarily for the 2020-21 fiscal year, the federal government announced it will provide the federal share of funding without requiring provincial contributions, and will cover 90 per cent of eligible extraordinary costs, up from 70 per cent.

AgriRecovery is a disaster relief framework that is part of a suite of federal-provincial-territorial (FPT) Business Risk Management (BRM) programs under the Canadian Agricultural Partnership. It is intended to work together with the core BRM programs to help agricultural producers recover from natural disasters with federal, provincial and territorial governments investing, on average, close to $1.6 billion annually in business risk management programs to help producers remain viable under difficult circumstance. These programs include AgriInsurance, AgriStability, AgriInvest, and AgriRecovery.