The Chicken Farmers of Ontario marketing board has made huge strides to improve over last five years.
It has opened up to small-scale producers who no longer need to buy quota.
It has set up an artisanal chicken program.
It has set up a specialty breeds program.
It has persuaded the national agency to give Ontario a bit of extra room to increase production because market demand is so much higher in Ontario than most provinces.
But some issues remain.
The specialty breeds and artisanal chicken programs are fine for allowing entrepreneurs to explore niche markets, but the limit on volumes is too low to enable them to become competitive when market demand proves to be keen.
For that, they need to buy plant supply rights, and those rights are limited by marketing board policy and divided among existing processors on an historical basis.
A newcomer who wants to break into this league needs to buy or rent from existing members of the board-run cartel.
It will cost them about $30 per bird.
That is ridiculous. It is a required investment that does little or nothing to improve quality, service or efficiency.
The board introduced plant supply quotas to get rid of bidding competition among processors, bidding that was hard to justify to the public.
To be fair, the marketing board was pressured by the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission to get rid of the premiums processors were bidding. And the commission seemed to be okay with the plant supply quota approach which was already in place for milk processing companies.
But plant supply quota should be just as hard to justify to the public as premiums offered to line up chicken supplies from farmers.
But when it comes right down to it, sky-high prices for chicken, egg, pullet, turkey and hatching egg quotas are also hard to justify to the public.
At least the Dairy Farmers of Ontario marketing board has placed a cap on quota prices, but that has given rise to a whole other set of unintended consequences, such as higher bids for farm land and investments in robotic milking, feeding and monitoring systems.
It has been a bold experiment with a socialist economy nested within a capitalist society. And a lot of bugs remain to be worked out or tolerated.
But right now, the chicken board needs to ponder what it can do to enable successful niche-market entrepreneurs to break into the big leagues.
