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MIKE BUIS AND FAMILY
 Ontario Beef:
Tell us a little bit about your farm.
Mike Buis: I’m a third generation, and my son, John, farms with me
full-time, so he’s fourth generation on this farm. We run about 350 cows, we
raise the calves to finish, and we’ve recently expanded to retail meat
sales. One of the other things that we’re doing is that we farm 700 acres.
I’m growing cash crops such as sweet corn, green beans, we rent some ground
out for tomatoes and cucumbers, and we also grow seed corn and some winter
wheat and soybeans. So we’re quite busy. We own all 700 acres, it’s a
family-run corporation, so my Mom and Dad are partners with me and my son,
John, as well. We own land and farm it altogether. It’s truly a family-run
operation.
OB: Has anything changed in the past five years?
Yes, we went through a serious change. We went from where we
were strictly a beef feedlot to a cow/calf, and now a retail, so we’ve gone
the full gamut. We want to be able to be beef producers and to sell our
product directly to consumers, and that’s our target. We’re producing a
premium product and we want to get it to where we can make the most profit
on it, obviously. As far as conditions changing in our operations, yes,
we’ve gone from more of a cash crop where we were just corn and soybeans
into more vegetables; we have some good ground, and we’ve been able to
utilize that for growing vegetables.
The other advantage we have growing vegetable crops is they’re
either planted later or harvested earlier, which obviously spreads our
workload out, but it also gives us the opportunity to put cover crops down,
and what we’ll do is graze the cows all winter on the cash crop ground. So
we have cows that we’ll put in December without any extra feed on that group
until March, depending on the growth and what’s available, and then they can
stay right on that field until May when we have to take them off to plant
crops. So we’ve cut our winter feeding costs down tremendously.
The other advantage to that is that the cows are exercised,
which is very important if you’re calving, that they’re well, and in good
condition, and they’re well-exercised. So that basically eliminates almost
all of our calving problems. We can calve out on those open fields where the
cows have lots of room, they can go back off by themselves, have their calf,
and come back and join the herd when they’re ready, and we basically have a
hands-off herd at calving time. It’s made us a one-person -my one son John,
can literally calve out more than 300 cows by himself in a few months
without a lot of trouble. So that’s really paid off for us, by fencing off
the ground.
The neighbours were convinced we were completely crazy putting
wire up around this expensive cash crop ground. But now that they’ve seen
what we can do, I think they’re starting to take a second look. One of the
other questions we had was about compaction, because obviously the cows are
walking on the ground all the time and in the winter, it’s not frozen all
the time, so they’re compacting the ground, and does that cause problems?
Well, we’re one of the top producers of sweet corn on that ground, green
beans don’t tolerate compaction at all, and we’re able to be in the top 10
growers of green beans on that land. So no, we’re not doing anything to the
ground at all. In fact, by putting the cover crops on, and letting the cows
eat them and spread their own manure, we’re actually improving the ground by
letting the cows walk on it.
We’ve tried to do some compaction studies on that, and haven’t
been able to see any significant compaction at all by doing that. In fact,
we’ve got one piece that we had -it was an ally-way that was 90-feet wide,
and the cows had to walk through that to get back and forth to the back farm
to graze all winter. So there were times of the year in the fall when it was
really wet, and early spring, when they were up almost to their bellies in
the mud walking through it, it was a sloppy mess. By planting time, it
looked like an airport, it was so beat up and packed down, just because we
restricted them to that one area. It was a little heavier clay, we thought
there’s no way we’re going to be able to grow anything on there. Our local
Pioneer dealer said, “If you can get things growing there, I’ll give you the
seed.” So he gave me the seed because we got a nice crop of soybeans growing
on that piece of ground, so it was just incredible. So, yes, the cows walk
on it, but no they don’t do any damage. Whether it’s the shape of their hoof
or what it is, I don’t know the science behind it; all I know is I grew
beans on that ground.
We make use of all of our manure, so we buy very little
commercial fertilizer. In fact, we have enough manure that we can sell it to
some of the neighbours, and we’ll barter, we’ll trade straw for manure, so
that decreases our input costs, we don’t have to buy straw as bedding, and
we can trade the manure back to those farms that need it to touch up their
sandhills.
Because we’re in a vegetable-growing area, some of the other
neighbours grow crops, and don’t really like all the top growth left in the
field -it gives them trouble in the spring -so we’ve been able to make deals
where we’ll go in and we’ll harvest that cover crop and round-bale it and
wrap it and feed it to the cows, and they’re just happy to get it off their
fields. So it’s a win-win situation for both of us, because it encourages
them to grow a cover crop and it gives us extra feed for whatever we need
through the season. We also take expired fruits and vegetables from local
grocery stores. They’re happy to get rid of it, the cows eat it and it cuts
our feed costs.
So unlike most Ontario producers, we’re almost completely
backwards; we have cows that spend summer in the barn, and the winter out on
the field. We do pasture some, but we do have some locked in the barn in the
summer, just because the crops are growing, we have to wait until harvest
time. We thought we were going to be in trouble last winter, when we had
heavy snow, and down in this area, we take advantage of whatever Mother
Nature gives us, so we don’t see a whole lot of snow down here, which is a
great thing for winter grazing. But we did have snow, we had six or seven
inches of snow; it melted, and it had a hard crust on the top, and I thought
we were going to have to start feeding cows. But the cow’s a pretty
resourceful animal, and she would just punch her foot through the crust, and
then put her nose in there and shove the snow aside, and she knew the feed
was down there, and they get along just fine. A lot of the cows originally
come from Western genetics, so we have cows that have never ever seen a
barn, so why should we start now?
OB: Where do you market your cattle?
We’ve been trying to work our way up to finishing all of our
calves, but the past few years, we’ve been marketing some of our calves and
we’ll sell those through OLEX. Because of our current size, we’re
able to put together pretty good groups of cattle, so we’ll advertise them
as our own calves and we do everything right; they’re all pre-vaccinated,
the horns are off and they’re all castrated properly. Everything’s done like
we would want them in our feedlot, so we’re able to get a bit of a premium
when we sell them. The finished cow, we also sell through OLEX and they’ll
go direct to the packer. We like to sell right from the farm, directly to
the packer because that eliminates that one stress-step for those cattle.
OB: And there’s a price advantage to that?
Yes, because we want to make sure that when we’re selling the
calves, that they’re an animal that we would want in the feedlot, so
everything’s done right to them when they’re sold.
OB: Where do you se yourself, your operation in five years?
If you’d asked me that five years ago, I’m not sure that I’d
have been able to answer that we’d be “Right where we are today,” because
every time we see an opportunity or advantage to change something or
fine-tune something, we give it a try to see if it’ll work. Which is one of
the great things my Dad taught me, and that was not to be afraid to try
something new. And we try to do that with my son John, if he has an idea,
we give it a try, try to make it work, so there’s always room for
improvement. I would hope that in five years, we could see our retail end
expand to the point where we’re selling quite a bit more than we are now.
OB: Where do you see the Ontario beef industry in five to 10 years?
That’s going to be a challenge. I’m not sure there’s room in the
industry for hobby farmers. I think there’s probably a lot of them that have
exited already, and there will probably be a few more to exit. We need the
guys in the beef business that are serious about producing good quality
beef. We can’t send cows to market that aren’t castrated properly or have
horns; we have to make sure that everything’s done right when they go to
market. We also have to make sure the cows are fed right, so that when they
get to market, they’re not 18, 20 or 30 months old, that they’re youthful
cattle, and that improves the whole gamut of beef that ends up at the
supermarket and is a lot better quality. If we see some of these 30- month
cattle, they’re too old and too big to get to market, and you lose on the
quality.
OB: Does anything need to change for this to happen?
I think as the parameters get tighter and the profits get
smaller, we’re going to weed out some of those poorer producers. You
mentioned washing the animal which probably isn’t really practical, but what
is practical is making sure they don’t get dirty in the first place. If you
take care of that calf right from the day he’s born until he goes to market
and you make sure he lives in a clean environment, that you have lots of
bedding and that he’s always kept reasonably clean, then you have a clean
animal going to market, but also, that whole growth time is optimal level.
Because he’s not dirty, so he can sweat in the summer, he’s not cold in the
winter, and there are plenty of studies on that, but that truly increases
your rate of gain by doing that. So there are efficiencies that need to be
tweaked on a broader scale. |
