5 March 2025

4 minute read

By: Sarah Mikesell

North America

Bob Lowe, the past president of the Canadian Cattle Association, the current president of the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, and a cattle rancher in southern Alberta, Canada, spoke to The Cattle Site’s Sarah Mikesell at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association conference CattleCon in San Antonio, Texas, USA.

Tell us about the Canadian cattle market – how is it the same or different from the US?

It's just the same. Basically, the US dictates our prices. Canada has a smaller herd than the United States. I think there's around 30 million cows in the United States and we have a small percent of that in Canada (3.5 million beef cows). They dictate our prices, and we are seeing record prices. It's nice to be selling cattle right now. You know backgrounders and feeders are kind of quivering because we're paying way more money for cattle than we ever have before.

The industries are almost totally integrated. The 49th parallel for all intents and purposes, unless politics enters the picture, it doesn't play a role in the cattle industry. We bring feeder cattle into Canada, and we send feeder cattle to the US. We bring very few fed cattle come into Canada to get processed, but we ship a lot of fed cattle south to be processed.

We've fed corn from Iowa at our feed yard. If we can't grow it, we import it from the US or feed goes the other way across the border. We do things the same way, and we speak the same language. It's a North American industry is what it is.

Where are the cattle in Canada located?

Most of them are in western Canada. I'm from Alberta, which has about 50% of the mother cows in Canada and 80% of the feeding capacity. Alberta has most of the cattle with the rest of them being spread out. Saskatchewan is probably second largest area then Ontario. The cattle industry is spread across the country, but it's mainly in Alberta. The feeding industry is mainly in southern Alberta. We have irrigation and sunshine, and that helps make it a good feeding area.

What are some of the differences you see between the two industries?

The main difference is there's a cattle cycle and that's every 10 to 14 years. Nobody can ever predict it , but soaring prices like we have now will tend to get cattlemen to keep more heifers which leads to higher prices because there's less to be processed. Keeping more heifers builds the herd.

In Canada, we had BSE hit in 2003. We export 50% of our production and our borders closed so we had to eat it. The price of cattle went down to virtually nothing for a while and producers were unsure what to do. I'm probably a little bit older than the average producer, but not much. People just got sick of it, and they just left the industry, and they haven't returned. We've maintained or maybe dropped a little bit over the last two or three cycles where the US is still doing what it does. The US is increasing the herd when the time says and decreasing when the time says, but in Canada, we’ve been constant and not followed the cycle.

The Canadian cattle industry is not getting ready to go through a herd rebuild like the US industry? 

I really hope we do rebuild our herd because we need more cattle. The reason the price is so high is the global demand for beef is huge. We're traders and we will sell to the highest bidder.

If these prices can't bring the Canadian cattle industry back, what will?

That's exactly right. I bought calves that were coming yearlings just before I came down here for just under $3,000 ahead at 600 pounds per calf. For the people producing those calves – that's got to be a trigger that says I need more cows. It doesn't happen for two or three cycles, so I don't know. I'd like it to happen but whether it does or not, I don't know.

Tell me a little bit about your Canadian beef consumer, how are they different from the American consumer?

We probably consume on a per capita basis a little less than the Americans. I did see a graph the other day that shows our domestic consumption per person is way down. However, the graph doesn't consider that we've had about 10 million new immigrants coming into Canada that aren't big beef eaters. People who have lived in Canada forever are not eating less, I think it's just that we've got a lot larger population in the last eight or 10 years.