Beef herds continue decline: Ontario lost about 100,000 animals since last year

Ontario and Canada’s beef herds have both continued to decline.
Ontario’s cattle inventory at the start of 2020 fell to 1.5 million head, down from 1.6 million last year, Statistics Canada reported.

Both dairy and beef herds have been declining for years, though the beef herds have lost more in absolute numbers since they were larger. Dairy inventories went from 701,000 to 691,000 and the beef herd went from 903,000 to 892,000.

That mirrored a decline that has been ongoing across the country. Canada went down to 11.2-million head at the beginning of this year, from 11.4 million last year. All the losses were in the beef inventories, which, at the beginning of 2020, were at about 9.2 million.

Ontario’s cattle herd was at its largest, about 3.3 million head, back in 1975, but has declined more or less steadily since then.

The overwhelming majority of cattle in Canada at the time were beef cattle: 86 per cent of Canada’s cattle herd was beef animals.

Alberta, which has the largest cattle inventory of any province, had its heyday in the mid-2000s, when its total herd inventory hit 5.9 million. Of those, 5.7 million were beef cattle.