Australia cannot beat Brazil on low-cost commodity beef and should push deeper into premium grainfed markets instead, industry leaders told the BeefEx conference on the Gold Coast last week, as protectionist measures and competition from big producers put key export markets under pressure.
"We can be a low-cost commodity producer or we can be a premium operator," said Brendan Tatt, chief operating officer of JBS Northern. "We are never going to beat them on low-cost commodity." He said feedlots have moved on from feeding any animal for 100 to 105 days to sorting cattle into specific programmes, and the goal now is to feed for less time while getting more weight and marbling. "That is where you make money, selling quality product."
Tatt said growing feedlot capacity would also let Australia turn off cattle more reliably and serve the 800 million people in the arc from Indonesia to Thailand. "We have great genetics in Australia and we have a really big paddock. It is unreliable, but we can run a lot of cows," he said.
Andrew Cox, Meat & Livestock Australia's Singapore-based international market manager, agreed that Southeast Asia offers big opportunities for boxed beef and said the industry is working to win consumers there, as it did earlier in Korea and Japan, which have matured into major markets. He added that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan are growing rapidly.
The panel, which included Australian Lot Feeders' Association chief executive Christian Mulders, was summarised by Beef Central's Eric Barker.
Photo: CSIRO / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)
Source: Beef Central
Comments
(0)