Chicken Quotas

Yesterday I started the Farmer's Growing Farmers program through Everdale Farm. They offer several courses and I'm taking the Farm Planner where you develop a farm business plan with the mentorship of some experienced local farmers.

We visited Magda Farm & Trout Lily Nursary in Rockwood, ON. Vera Top used to work at FoodShare Toronto and now farms beef, chicken, pigs and eggs as well as running an organic seedling business. Lots of her seedlings are sold at Urban Harvest in Toronto. Which means I have grown many of her plants in the past few years in our Toronto garden. Neat!

Vera gave us a great tour of her farm. At the end we talked about chicken quotas in Ontario. Currently, chickens are a supply managed commodity - in attempt to provide stability for chicken farmers, the production of chickens is regulated through a quota system. This is to keep prices steady over time, to ensure supply matches demand, and to make sure consumers can obtain a consistent supply. To be able to produce chickens, you have to buy quota which is sort of like buying a license to produce and sell chicken - getting a piece of the overall chicken pie.

The tricky part is that buying into the quota system is expensive. The minimum entry point in Ontario right now is 14,000 birds. With 7 cycles in a year, you would produce 90,000 birds which Vera says at current prices would cost about 1.4 million. Just to enter the market! This, for sure, is incredibly cost prohibitive for farmers that are just starting out and farmers that are not interested in running a large operation.

(Side note: I tried to do that math on my own to double check that super high number and just about lost my mind trying to calculate it - you need 14,000 units of quota at $74/quota unit at one unit being 13 kg/year - very challenging to actually find the right information and then calculate that many birds. That alone is a challenge for new farmers.)

The good news, there is an exemption! The bad news, the exemption is tiny! Currently, without quota you can only produce 300 birds per year. This would provide a small scale farmer with maybe a few thousand dollars in sales. Not much in terms of growing an economically sustainable farm business.

This small flock exemption is a lot different in other provinces - 2,000 in Alberta, 999 in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Other provinces also do not have minimum quota holdings as an entrance point such as BC and Alberta.

Currently, the small flock exemption makes it a real challenge for small scale diversified farmers to make any sort of living off of their chicken production. Which means folks that are doing it sustainably are restricted and, as consumers, we don't have a lot of good birds to choose from with an overwhelming supply of factory farmed chickens.

For more info you can check out the Small Flock Campaign from the Practical Farmers of Ontario, The Chicken Farmers of Ontario who manage the quota system and also this Metcalf report prepared by FarmStart that talks about the challenges and possible alternative solutions to the restrictive supply management system.