During the 1970s beef crash in northern Australia, there was no money to employ staff, muster, wean and truck cattle as sale prices were at rock bottom.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Many beef producers simply went broke.\u00a0 Others\u00a0hung on by the skin of their\u00a0teeth with\u00a0increasingly large debts.\u00a0 They\u00a0had no option but to leave cattle to die in overgrazed paddocks at the end of the dry season, and many cattle were shot.\u00a0 Many thousands of cattle died in paddocks.<\/p>\n
It would be interesting to contemplate what would have happened to cattle in northern Australia if there was no live export market market to send young cattle off to during the recent severe droughts, when there was no grass to fatten or even just keep them alive on, and feedlot grain became prohibitively expensive.<\/p>\n
Naturally\u00a0cattle producers would greet new abattoirs for their fat cattle and cull stock with great enthusiasm,\u00a0especially in the Kimberley and northern NT.\u00a0 Long distance livestock\u00a0transport is not ideal for stock, truckdrivers\u00a0or\u00a0producer profitability.\u00a0 But needless to say,\u00a0meatwork selling\u00a0has to be economically viable.\u00a0 If livestock buyers are unable to pay enough for cattle to enable producers to cover their business costs plus a profit to pay living expenses, \u00a0then cattle producers have no option but to sell to alternative markets.\u00a0 Cattle producers don’t expect abattoir employees to work for little or nothing, so it’s puzzling to again here the ‘chip on the shoulder’ comments about livestock producers being responsible for the demise of abattoirs because they sell cattle to the live export market.\u00a0 (Cattle producers aren’t running a charity for the benefit of others, any more than abattoir employees are doing their work out of the goodness of the hearts.)\u00a0\u00a0In any primary production and manufacturing industry, the fattest profit for the least risk and outlay\u00a0is invariably made by the ‘middlemen’ – not the growers or makers, and not the end sellers.\u00a0 But for it all to work, everyone<\/em> needs to make a profit in the long term.\u00a0 If one sector of the chain doesn’t make a profit then the link is broken and\u00a0the system changes.\u00a0 It’s basic economics.<\/p>\n Too often meatworks closures over the northern wet season are still blamed on the live export trade.\u00a0 Northern cattle stations only muster during the dry season – which is usually from around April until October\/November.\u00a0 This is because it is cooler (not because it’s cooler for staff, but because it’s cooler and better for travelling cattle, especially calves) and the cattle are in the best condition.\u00a0 Obviously\u00a0while it might be possible to horseback muster for some periods during the wet season, roads and creek and river crossings\u00a0are often impassable to heavy trucks; and the unpredictability of the weather makes planning a nightmare.\u00a0 So other than on smaller places close to towns and\/or right beside good quality all-weather bitumen roads, virtually no mustering on the vast majority of northern cattle stations occurs between November and April.\u00a0\u00a0So northern Australian meatworks have always had difficulty\u00a0obtaining sufficient cattle to stay open all year round.\u00a0 In fact, due to road and cattle station management improvements,\u00a0meatbuyers probably could source more fat cattle in recent years, over the wet season,\u00a0than was possible several decades ago.\u00a0 \u00a0In the past cattle have not gone on live export boats during the wet season either.\u00a0 Now the live export industry is well established, some producers have bought smaller properties close to live export shipping ports.\u00a0 Cattle are mustered from remote properties during the dry season and taken to these depot properties which can be mustered and trucked from in all but very heavy wet season weather.\u00a0 However as illustrated by the wet season just experienced in northern Australia, heavy and prolonged rain brings live export shipments to a halt for weeks or months.<\/p>\n The AACo plans to build an abattoir in Darwin however it is to process 90% AACo cattle.\u00a0 Any other abbatoirs\u00a0must be commercially viable from everyone’s point of view or they will fail.\u00a0\u00a0Obtaining labour will be a major issue also, due to\u00a0Australia’s mining boom which has soaked up any excess in the labour force in much of northern Australia.\u00a0 Undoubtedly a new abattoir in northern Australia would have to be staffed by overseas residents.<\/p>\n Ultimately – there has to be sufficient customers to pay a sufficient price for the specific product being marketed, for any business to be viable.\u00a0 In recent years live export buyers have been paying for lighter weight, young,\u00a0bos indicus cattle to ship to countries such as Indonesia.\u00a0 It’s not simply a matter of turning around and selling these cattle to meatworks instead\u00a0– they are not suitable, as-is; and if they were, we’d need to find a market that could pay the price required for profitability, for another 500,000 head turned into boxed beef.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" During the 1970s beef crash in northern Australia, there was no money to employ staff, muster, wean and truck cattle as sale prices were at rock bottom.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Many beef producers simply went broke.\u00a0 Others\u00a0hung on by the skin of their\u00a0teeth with\u00a0increasingly large debts.\u00a0 They\u00a0had no option but to leave cattle to die in overgrazed paddocks at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,7],"tags":[100,147,158,176],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1557"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1557"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1570,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1557\/revisions\/1570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}