Former Inmate, President Of Ontario Goat, Question 'Prison Farm' Logic

Mar 03, 2021

Former inmate, President of Ontario goat, question 'Prison Farm' logic

“Just because you buy a Tesla, it doesn't mean that you know how to drive.”

That's how Dirk Boogerd, the President of Ontario Goat, the association of goat farmers in Ontario, reacts to the proposal by the Correctional Services Canada to invest in a large scale goat dairy operation at the Joyceville Penitentiary, north of Kingston.

Boogerd and his wife run a 500 head goat farm in the Woodstock area. They sell their milk through a broker. They started up their goat dairy 12 years ago after both of them had worked on cow dairy farms for 10 years.

“It was a steep learning curve for us when we started out. People think that goats are easy but they are not. And there are a lot of factors at play, a lot of expertise is involved. In my opinion it is set up to fail.”

Boogerd said that one of his concerns is that whoever is managing the farming operation has the necessary skills to follow all the legal requirements and consider all the factors that play in to producing goat milk on a commercially viable basis. He also wonders how much the operation will benefit the inmate population.

“My understanding is that they plan to have 60 people working there on a full time basis, with something like 1500 – 2000 milking goats. My wife and I milk 500 with one or tow people, a couple more during kidding season. I don't know what they plan to do with 60 people.”

On the other hand, he is also concerned that, if Correctional Services Canada is able to enter the goat dairy industry with the financial support of the federal government and a pool of labourers who are paid just a few dollars a day, they will have an unfair advantage over the rest of the industry.

“The Ontario goat industry has been growing, although there was a glut in the market a coupld of years ago because production had ramped up and the market was soft. When that happens everybody takes a fall on their own.

“Things are looking better now. The industry is stronger and the market has recovered. But it can change.”

Most of the goat milk produced in Canada, and Quebec, the other major producing province in Canada, is turned into soft goat cheese (chevre). Ontario production has almost doubled over the past 10 years, from 30 million litres in 2010 to 55 million in 2019, while production in Quebec has been dropping, from 11.5 million litres in 2010 to 8.4 million in 2019. Competition from Ontario is the main reason for the decline in Quebec.

The Feihe factor

When the announcement that Feihe, the giant Chinese baby formula maker, was planning to produce fomula with Canadian sources goat's milk at a plant that they have now built in Kingston, “it created a lot of excitement in the Ontario goat dairy industry” said Boogerd.

But between the issues with over supply in recent years and the scale of the Feihe operation, he said that the goat farmers are wary.

“Our goats produce between 28 and 3 litres of milk a day, 1,000 litres a year. To supply what Feihe was initially looking for $75 million litres a year, another 750,000 milking goats would have to come into production. And with concerns over pricing and dependency on a single customer, we are not jumping into it. The CSC should be concerned about that as well, aside from everything else.”

Shaun Shannon was front and centre in the “Save Our Prison Farm” movement. He spent over 20 years in the prison system after being convicted of bank robbery, the last 5 working in the cattle farm at Collin's Bay Penitentiary in Kingston.

He said that working with the cows at Collins Bay “saved my life”.

But as enthusiastic as he was about the how the prison farm at Collin's Bay operated in the late 1990's when he was there, and as happy as he was in 2018 when it was brought back, he said that the psoposal for a goat farm “is a travesty”.

“When we worked with the cows there was interaction with the animals, and we got to know the local dairy farmers who worked there. They were real dairy farmers. They went home to work on their own dairy farms, and they treated us with respect. It was all about rehabilitation. The goat plan is nothing like that. No good will come of it, and it won't work.”

Shannons said that the way the federal penitentiary system works, inmates who work in the new prison farm system will be working under forced labour conditions.

“If they say no to this, even there is no more incentive pay, then they go back to a worse place. No one wants that. It takes too long to get that far.”

He said that the information about the goat farm proposal that has been gathered in the recent report by Evolve Our Prison Farms is consistent with what he told Correction Services Canada on four separate occasions when he was consulted about how he thought the new prison farm operation should be set up.

“I'm just a regular guy who made a mistake. But i told them, a goat farm is not going to work, plain and simple. They can sugar coat it any way they want. It is not going to work.”