Hi Ben, we used to be in the dairy industry, and yes the quota system is still in place. A young farmer has really no way of starting unless an inheritance because of the cost and lack of quota available. No cattle can leave our beef farm now without the special tag with a barcode in it that identifies your farm, at a cost of around $4.00 per head. Even sending a cow to slaughter last fall for myself I still had to put a tag in for the 30 minute ride there.
I most wholeheartedly agree with policing ourselves in the maple industry. I will not allow anything to leave here that I would not consume myself, yet I know of an individual who passed away that used to make syrup, and was nothing but a sore spot for the industry.He would allow sap to sit for weeks at a time until he got enough to boil late in the season, and he would simple state"I don't have to eat it". I see some posts on here where I have read about smelly sap, buckets full of flies, moths etc, and still think you can make good saleable syrup from it. I guess you can talk yourself into anything, but the point is it doesn't look good for the industry, you wouldn't want to but that head of lettuce,etc if you saw maggots crawling over it before it was washed off, so why should the consumer receive any syrup that is not as high a quality as possibly can be made?