Brad Wildeman speaks softly, but with a voice that unites the beef industry and drives the amazing story of Pound-Maker Investments
Brad Wildeman’s head is characteristically cocked slightly to the side as he listens intently to my questions. He carefully responds, mentally processing wide swathes of the last few decades of the beef industry and global trade into a neat windrow.
Wildeman is well known in agricultural circles for creating consensus, especially when the quandary of the moment is seemingly unsolvable and potentially divisive. He seems to have some innate talent to quell hot emotions, to patiently draw solutions out of people and to motivate others to make it work.
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“I find if you listen long enough, and ask what do all the parties really want from this, you’ll find common ground,” says Wildeman, general manager and president of Lanigan, Saskatchewan’s Pound-Maker Investments, with its 28,500-head feedlot and 15-million-litre ethanol plant.
Pound-Maker was conceived in 1970 by local area grain farmers looking for an alternative market for their grain. A 2,500-head feedlot was built to use this grain with 50 local farmers as shareholders, including Wildeman’s now-deceased father, Bill.
Brad grew up nearby and his first job was pounding posts for the feedlot, and subsequently he worked at everything from milling feed to riding pen. By the mid-’80s, the feedlot had expanded to 8,500 head, and Wildeman became general manager.
Today Pound-Maker’s gross sales are over $50 million annually and the operation’s workforce has grown to 50 full and part-time employees.
Wildeman leaves the post-pounding to others. Today, he’s busy enough juggling his feedlot management duties with sitting on several other boards — like the George Morris Centre — and federal and provincial advisory groups. He’s also past-president of the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association and the inaugural chairman of the newly formed Canada Beef Inc.
In an industry known for fierce independence and strong convictions, Wildeman is a self-confessed non-argumentative personality. You might think this would mean his voice would be drowned out. In fact, being non-argumentative might be the last strategy you’d ever recommend in the industry.
Yet Wildeman has somehow used his low-key conciliation skills to maneuver organizations through some pretty sticky situations. In back rooms across the nation, instead of stirring up the differences, he helps people focus on a solution. Being able to hear these win-win solutions and sell them has enabled Wildeman to steer the Canadian beef industry — and Pound-Maker — through some historically critical points.
Like the BSE crisis…
In the pandemonium after the world closed its borders to Canadian cattle and beef, the CCA asked Wildeman to help steer the industry. It was a huge commitment fraught with challenges but he stepped up. He ended up spending about 80 per cent of his time working on keeping the Canadian cattle industry intact. “I would have been sitting at the feedlot in paralysis anyway, so it was better to be helping,” he says pragmatically.
In the end, the cattle association managed to convince Canadian consumers to keep eating beef, but it took effort, time, and a well-managed public relations plan. Then there were also the balancing acts of working with government agencies and politicians while also dealing with the on-farm realities. “We managed to hold the industry together with no shooting and burying cows,” says Wildeman.
He was also a key player in the development of government assistance programs to help the industry survive the abrupt stop in trade. Wildeman remembers getting a call from then-finance minister, Ralph Goodale, asking him to meet. Along with CCA executive vice-president Dennis Laycraft, Wildeman spent an evening in Goodale’s office scribbling proposed solutions on a flip chart.
Wildeman also remembers a lot of denial at first. “Many producers kept saying that the whole thing would blow over in a couple of months and that people will come to their senses. I still remember listening to the naive comments that ‘they’ll be rioting in the streets of Tokyo without our beef.’”
Of course that never happened, and Wildeman in his current role as past chair for CCA and as chairman of the newly created Canada Beef Inc. is still working at reopening up markets that closed in 2003. “Markets are hard to earn and easy to lose… slow and expensive to get back,” he says.
The entire beef and veal industry breathed a sigh of relief this year with the reopening of beef and veal trade with South Korea. Wildeman says the Canadian industry is positioned to benefit from exports of 6,500 tonnes worth about $30 million by 2015, with potential to grow to 14,000 tonnes worth $65 million by 2020. “Korea was big for us.”
The Korean market is a trip line for other markets to open up to Canadian beef, and is important for improving demand for both the lower-value cuts, like shanks and internal organs, plus higher value cuts. Asia is a huge developing market for beef and Wildeman’s experience in China is that they know everyone is chasing them and as a result they’re a little elusive.
The European quota for grain-fed beef, although small, is also very positive from a national perspective, says Wildeman. There’s a potential market for hormone-free beef going into Europe, although some larger companies are driving up the price of that quota as traders fight to capture the higher-value European demand. “Basically there’s been no market off the East Coast for a very long time,” he says. “This may revitalize the industry east of Thunder Bay.”
Two challenges in exploiting these trade agreements are the health restrictions that more importers are enacting, plus the shrunken Canadian cow herd. Cow numbers still haven’t rebounded and are projected to decrease again. We’re a long way from our cow herd recovering to the levels we saw a few years ago, and the that means lower feeder cattle supplies for a few years after cow number begin to increase, says Wildeman. The feedlots are still 20 to 25 per cent overcapacity.
Positioning Pound-Maker around that weakness is something Wildeman has been working on. Recently the company bought some nearby marginal grainland they are converting to grass to feed up the lighter calves. In future they may expand this strategy further and build their own cow herd.
“With the advances in technology and changes in how cows are managed now, with swath grazing and crop residue, it’s possible to have a corporate-size herd,” says Wildeman. “When you get into that size cow herd, you can pay for the management it deserves.”
Even 1,000 cows are hardly going to make a dent in the 50,000 head per year requirement of their feedlot. However, Wildeman sees a well-managed large cow-calf operation using residue grazing as having a potential margin of opportunity. Moreover, it’s also a way to control the supply chain.
“The dynamics have changed, some big stores are supplying some specialized markets now,” says Wildeman. “Having a captive supply of cattle with a strict production protocol may be a valuable asset to us. The question is can we do it at a cost structure that makes sense?”
Again it comes back to the original vision and mission for the feedlot. “Pound-Maker has foundational objectives to use grain production and add value to it,” says Wildeman.
To further that goal, in 1990 Pound-Maker Investments Ltd. established a new entity, Pound-Maker Agventures Ltd. (PMA) with minority shareholders Saskatchewan Wheat Pool and Mohawk Oil. This capital helped fund expanding the feedlot to 10,000 head and building an ethanol plant.
Significantly ahead of the green energy push, the facility became the world’s first feedlot fully integrated, wheat-based ethanol plant. The cattle are fed the byproducts of ethanol production, including dried distillers grains and wastewater loaded with nutrients.
Wildeman says the first couple of years producing ethanol and feeding the byproducts meant a steep learning curve. “At the time we were the first feedlot to feed these wheat-based distillers grains,” says Wildeman. “Now everybody does.”
Since 2002, all of the shares of Pound-Maker Agventures Ltd. have been repurchased by Pound-Maker Investments Ltd., and Pound-Maker Agventures Ltd. is the operating company of both the feedlot and ethanol plant. Both their corporate partners have been gobbled up by larger entities, Saskatchewan Wheat Pool by Viterra and Mohawk Oil Ltd. by Husky.
The decision to add ethanol was based on a commitment to making ethanol benefit the rest of the organization. By contrast, for example, although they transport feed, cattle and manure, the trucking business is simply not their thing. “Synergies between management teams is important,” says Wildeman. “We’re always evaluating a number of opportunities. Many are profitable but not within the scope of our vision.”
In the past five or six years, company investments have shifted toward buying land locally to ensure they’ve got ground for spreading manure on in the spring and also so they can grow more of their own forages, straw and grain. With farmers adopting no-till, it had been getting more and more difficult to find farmers who work up their soil in the spring and therefore could incorporate manure.
Growing their own feed has also provided opportunities to try some new crops in the area that better meet their needs. Soft white spring wheat wasn’t grown in this area east of Saskatoon until Pound-Maker tested some varieties and had it as a field-scale demonstration crop. Soft white has a better fit for ethanol production too, and now over 70,000 acres are grown in the province.
Pound-Maker has also been researching triticale and next year plans to test 300 acres of dryland silage corn. “Innovation comes from people seeing an opportunity,” says Wildeman.
In the post-CWB monopoly world, Wildeman hopes that farmer will be growing more varieties so the characteristics of grain will be connected to use and more higher yielding feed grain will be on the local market. He’s enthusiastic that more crops will be grown with specific attributes, instead of trying to fit into the strictly CWB grading protocols. “I don’t care if it’s grade #1, 2 or 3,” Wildeman says. “We want starch.”
Similarly he’s excited about the future of Canada Beef Inc. This one national independent agency has risen from the ashes of the Canadian Beef Cattle Research, Market Development and Promotion Agency (National Check-off Agency), Canada Beef Export Federation and the Beef Information Centre to conduct the industry’s marketing, promotion and research activities. The reality is that the cow herd has downsized, and likely will remain smaller for some time, so there will be fewer checkoff dollars to invest in marketing efforts.
Quietly at the helm of this merger, as co-chair for the CCA’s Canada Beef Working Group, Wildeman has somehow emerged with a solution that all groups could live with. How the three parties got there was vastly different but each of them could see the same final goal as the most important thing.
“If you listen long enough you always find a few common things,” says Wildeman. “Even when it seems like an impossible situation, we ask ourselves ‘what do you really want out of this?’”
In the summer of 2010, the CBWG produced the initial merger proposal and Wildeman was elected as chair of the first board of Canada Beef Inc. The major changes have been to the governance model, reduced administrative and management costs, increasing accountability and focus, and the ability to better share expertise within the organization. “As long as we are fair to people and respectful, the process can be a fairly positive experience, no matter how painful it may seem at first,” says Wildeman.
Meanwhile, in the last year Wildeman has also been slowly transiting out of Pound-Maker’s day-to-day management activities and encouraging others to take a leadership role in the organization.
He tells them: ”Even if it’s the wrong decision as long as you used the right thinking process, a 360-degree analysis of the situation, the results are not going to be too bad.” CG
