Small flock owners protest Health Canada egg guidelines

Glenn Black, spokesman and blogger for Small Flock Poultry Farmers of Canada, has written to Health Canada to protest that its guidelines for the egg industry will put small flock owners out of business.

Black says small flock owners already pay more than twice as much for feed as quota holders and “adding a CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) approved egg grading station, HACCP Start Clean-Finish Clean, vaccination, etc. to the mix will price small flockers and farm gate egg sales out of existence.”

He also challenges the assumption that the guidelines will have minimal effect on the industry and says the risk assessment employed “specifically excludes small flock producers from analysis.  

"What is the scientific justification for using this limited risk assessment to ban what was excluded from analysis?


He says the experience with XL Foods Inc., which held a third of the beef-slaughter market in Canada, shows that concentrating an industry in few hands is risky and he notes that two egg-grading companies, Burnbrae Farms and L.H. Gray and Son, control about 90 per cent of the Ontario egg market.

He notes that they are allowed an “administrative tolerance” for cracks and undergrades.

“Either my wife or I wash every single egg by hand, inspecting for crack, and 100 per cent clean on all surfaces. 

“It takes about 30 to 45 seconds per egg to wash & inspect & dry.  We do not candle our eggs, nor weigh them.

 

“We have zero tolerance for defects, unlike CFIA with a 10 per cent administrative tolerance, which is then exceeded in practice,” he writes to Health Canada, citing CFIA data from its random-sample checking at Gray and Burnbrae egg-grading stations.”

Health Canada posted the guidelines last week and says they are to take effect in December.