Bad Beef Suckles Soy?
The news of a mad cow disease outbreak in Europe forced Sevastian Boiko, a Kuzminets farmer, to put off his desire to buy Dutch cows. Expressing respect in a letter to his partner Pieter, the Khmelnytsky oblast farmer said the latest news forced him to renege on the commitments he had made when the Dutchman visited Kuzminets. “I intended to buy a few heifers from the Dutchman to make them my first high-yield cows. But I had bad luck,” Mr. Boiko told The Day’s correspondent. Do we need any foreign pestilence if we’ve got enough of our own?
Mr. Boiko says he has about two hundred nationally-selected cows each of which annually brings forth not only milk and manure but also calves. Mad cow disease or, in scientific terms, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSF), does not threaten his cattle because he has never fed and will never feed them with meat-and-bone flour. As for hoof-and-mouth disease, of course, it would be a good idea to vaccinate the livestock against it, but the district authorities don’t seem to be terribly concerned with the problem. Nobody has ever offered a hoof- and-mouth vaccine. It must be too expensive. Maybe his farm will escape the disease if he strictly follows all the other veterinary and hygiene regulations.
Then Mr. Boiko remembered an unknown Englishman or Irishman and pictured desolate overseas farms and empty supermarket shelves without traditional British veal. Look at the gap in the world meat market! But why should he, Sevastian Boiko, care about any such gap if buyers are already coming in droves here, to his place, although his steer is only trying to stand on its four feet? The buyers are Ukrainian, of course, for now the demand for cattle outruns supply. Every time he goes out for diesel fuel or fertilizers, he hears people talk about barter. “We’ll give you,” they say, “both fuel and granulated fertilizer for meat.” All the farmers tug at his sleeve: “Give us meat!” But where can he get so much?
IMPORTED CATTLE REMAIN HEALTHY
Mykola Aishpur, chief of the Oblast Veterinary Medicine Administration, speaks highly of Mr. Boiko: “An efficient farmer! If everybody was like him, there would be no problems.” Mr. Aishpur also says he has no problems with his domestic cattle. Over the years, 108 heifers have been brought from Denmark to Kvitneve, Belogorsk district, 391 from Holland to Sakhnovtsi, Starokostiantyn district, and 35 from Holland to Krushanivka near Kamyanets-Podilsky. This is the total number of imports. All the imported cows have already calved. This cattle is under special surveillance. God forbid they should go mad! So far, there is no reason, reportedly, to raise alarm.
My interlocutor recalls that hoof- and-mouth disease last mowed down the cattle in this area about thirty years ago. But he is not so optimistic in his forecasts: “If the disease spreads to Germany, it will be a step away from Poland, our neighbor.”
However, the situation is that the cattle population will find the sharp knife of a slaughterer more horrible than the overseas hoof- and-mouth disease. A veal gourmet from Britain will get no help from our modest farmer Boiko or his still more modest local colleagues. The point is that now, in the time of property share distribution, villages have fallen apart. Figuratively speaking, what has remained of a cow in some places are warm reminiscences in the shape of a horn-binding rope.
Mykola Pliuta, a department chief at the Oblast Administration’s Main Directorate for Agriculture and Food, stubbornly refuses to discuss this. Earlier, local farms used to keep as many as 250,000 cows. How many of them are now on the list? Statisticians give the figure of 98,000, down 20,000 head for last year. The tendency is for each fifth head of the oblast milk-producing herd to go under the knife every year.
At last, Mr. Pliuta agrees, “It’s really like this: no cows, no calves. Where will they come from?” Indeed. Or shall we take up cloning? Thus if things go on like this, hoof- and-mouth disease will never threaten our cattle. By the time this disease crosses our border, there will be no cattle to catch it.
While the world is worried about mad cow and hoof-and-mouth diseases, our farmer is about leucosis. “We’ve got about a hundred cows, a third of which are leucosis-affected,” complains Oleksiy Petrushko from Ozhyhovtsi, Volochysk district. Peasants in Myroliubne, Starokostiantyniv district, are quite alarmed: as soon as the grass grows up, the farm will have seventy leucosis-affected cows taken away, so will this pestilence infect their individual cows? But they are not the English who raised a hue and cry all over the world after learning of only one case.
WILL SOY REPLACE CATTLE?
Statistics reports that meat sales in the oblast center’s marketplaces have been cut in half over the past year. True, our compatriots have become vegetarians for a different reason than the British: lack of money. Meanwhile, meat prices are rising. Nowadays, a kilo of beef on a Khmelnytsky market goes at 18 hryvnias. Only a year ago it was half that. The European mad cow disease has had a marginal effect on demand but not supply. Those who buy cattle in the villages say bluntly that meat resources are running out. According to them, the peasants have no fodder to feed the cattle. This is why you can buy only a small calf, not a bull. This in turn has made prices soar to the western levels. Whoever is unable to buy young veal, turns to out-of-market hawkers who sell cheaper meat which, however, has not undergone veterinary and hygienic examination.
It is this meat and sausage that is sending mad cow disease signals from Albion. “Once we withdrew ground meat of unknown origin from illegal sale,” Mr. Aishpur recalls. He does not deny that far from every seller of the meat of dubious origin is being waylaid by a veterinary- hygiene inspector at every step: “Things do happen, you know.”
What is also evident is the confluence of nasty circumstances in global production processes. Here meat resources are running out and prices rising, while over there the demand for this product is dropping. But a good thing must not be allowed to go to waste. The chief of the Oblast Veterinary Medicine Administration comments on transit: “Supplies are coming in from the neighboring countries, and we have no idea where that beef came to those countries from.”
This is a real danger — not so much for the herd, now being slaughtered at a record pace, as for the people. Mr. Aishpur thinks there is only one way to avert disaster at the local level: “We must improve our public-hygiene explanatory work among the people. As to the situation on our fatherland’s borders, “this is in the competence of higher echelons of power.”
...Sevastian Boiko phoned me from Kuzminets to break the news: he had bought a so-called soybean cow, that is, equipment for making so-called powdered milk. So, as soon as the right time comes, “I will sow up to a hundred hectares with soy.” He explained to me: “Soy is a crop that contains a lot of protein.” But, of course, not so much as in the same amount of veal.
