Chicken board eyes specialty markets

The Ontario chicken board is introducing a new program to exploit specialty markets.

It is inviting its quota-holding members and/or processing plants to submit business plans for developing new markets, ones that do not cannibalize existing markets, and is offering to supply them with chickens to meet their needs.

It may be a coincidence that this program comes on the eve of final negotiations with the national agency that should yield a major increase in the volume of chicken that Ontario will be allowed to produce.

The program was quietly launched with a posting on the Chicken Farmers of Ontario website a few days ago and gives the industry only a couple of weeks to meet the deadline of March 4 for applications.

Those who miss this deadline can try again in October which will be the annual application deadline for the next five years.

The board is calling for proposals to produce specialty chicken that is:

         “Any distict chicken product (unique growing or processing method) AND

         “Sold exclusively to a distinct market AND

         “Build overall market (without cannibalizing conventional chicken markets).”

The board will appoint a panel of four to six people to evaluate applications and make annual recommendations to the board.

While the program will be evaluated every year, it will be up for total review and/or renewal five years from now.

That policy review is to include the Ontario Independent Poultry Processors association, not just the Association of Ontario Chicken Processors.

The OIPP has been frozen out of membership on a Chicken Industry Advisory Committee that was formed in 2012 and is chaired by the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission.

During public hearings when the OIPP appealed that exclusion, there was testimony about work between the OIPP’s John Slot and chicken board staff to develop this program, but it was shelved because of opposition from the Association of Ontario Chicken Processors.

The chicken board says this new specialty market policy will be closed to farmers participating in the Market Development Program. That program has granted additional production volume to all processors on a pro rata basis, but they have to convince the farmers who supply them to participate by increasing production.

The board is going to charge five cents per kilogram for participation in the specialty market program.