British Columbia is a difficult province to compete in the egg business, especially as a small-scale egg grader, because you’re up against the egg marketing board monopoly.
In B.C., all eggs are bought and sold by the marketing board, so if you’re in the grading business, you’re buying from the egg board.
The egg board decides how many eggs you will get and which farms will supply them.
But the members of the B.C. Egg Marketing Board are also 50 per cent owners of the dominant egg-grading business, Golden Valley. The other half is owned by Bill Gray of Ontario, the egg grader who stands accused of putting undergrades – mainly cracks – into cartons sold to consumers as Grade A eggs. Gray denies any wrongdoing and the truth between his accusers and his denials remains to be decided in court.
Small egg-grading stations have been driven out of business, and they complain it’s because of a blatant conflict of interest by the egg farmers who are directors of both Golden Valley and of the B.C. Egg Marketing Board.
Take the case of Veekens Eggs Ltd. of Prince George, B.C. It complained that it was not getting its fair share of a provincial fund of about $900,000 to subsidize transport of eggs to remote areas of the province.
Prince George, it would seem to me and most British Columbians, would qualify as one of those communities, but Veekens says the lack of support from this fund resulted in the failure of its business which had been going for 54 years. Golden Valley captures the lion’s share of the fund.
Golden Valley services the biggest accounts in the province, as you might expect, given its dominant position in the grading business. But what seems strange is that its business includes taking eggs produced in the interior to its grading facilities in the lower Fraser Valley, then collecting the transportation subsidy to move them back to supermarkets in the interior.
Meanwhile, local egg graders, such as Mountain Morning Farms at Salmon Arm, have been run out of business. Owner Myles Materi sent me a stack of documents outlining years of battles with the B.C. Egg Marketing Board. Without getting into the details, he believes the egg board/Golden Valley directors ran him out of business as both a producer and grader.
Materi says one of the original charges was that he failed to pay farmers for eggs, yet he furnished copies of invoices from the egg board indicating there had been payment in full.
He complains that he can’t get a fair hearing from the egg board, from its supervisory body, the Farm Industry Review Board (FIRB), or provincial ministers of agriculture.
He has been accused of making death threats, but then exonerated; he has had chickens seized by the board “as evidence” and has been unable to get the board to pay about $200,000 to continue looking after "its evidence" for two years; he has had his quota cancelled for failure to place a flock, which he says he can’t do because his barn is filled with B.C. Egg Marketing Board “evidence” chickens.
Jim Collins, chairman of the FIRB, promised about a year ago that he would investigate. Nobody seems to know where that investigation stands.
The B.C. egg board wrote letters promising Materi and his bank that it would supply him with eggs for his grading station; now it says it doesn’t have to honour those promises.
Consumers are complaining that they can’t buy locally-produced eggs – other than Golden Valley ones trucked to the Vancouver area and back – and they can’t get eggs from small Mom and Pop shops since Golden Valley decided it will no longer service them.
For a while, Golden Valley shipped eggs to a wholesale site in the interior where small grading station owners who had been driven out of business would pick them up to deliver to their small-volume customers; now Golden Valley has stopped supplying them.
Consumers have filed about 80 letters of complaints. Typical is this one, sent in March of 2009, by Karen Nayki who said “I really do not appreciate the Egg Marketing Board telling me that I can no longer buy local fresh eggs, that I have to buy eggs that are not from this area and have been trucked all over the province.
“What happened to the carbon policy? Saving fuel? Eggs that have been trucked from the interior to the coast and back again are not fresh to me," she wrote.
“This is an insult to our intelligence, the egg marketing board of directors having shares, now isn’t this a conflict of interest? So what happens to our local producers now?” Etc., etc.
