Beef City is a massive feedlot and associated abattoir located 40km west of Toowoomba in SE Qld.\u00a0 JBS has announced that staff will be stood down due to a glut of boxed beef, resulting from the downturn in\u00a0customer purchasing\u00a0since\u00a0Japan’s tsunami disaster earlier this year.\u00a0 Ostensibly the Beef City meatworks\u00a0closure is just for two weeks however it appears likely that it could be 3-4 weeks or even indefinite.\u00a0 The Beef City Abattoir\u00a0employs 940 people and \u00a0has a daily capacity of 1100 head according to the AMH-JBS website and the Beef City Feedlot has a capacity of 26,000 head and employs 48 people, according to the JBS-Swift website.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There is also an associated\u00a0farm which\u00a0grows corn,\u00a0cereals and\u00a0sorghum for the feedlot cattle.\u00a0 A 2 week Beef City Abattoir closure would presumably have a ripple affect back onto the feedlot operation and thus, cattle purchases.\u00a0 Running a feedlot profitably and efficiently is a very precise business.\u00a0 The store cattle bought have to be a very specific type and weight and they are feed a very precise ration which maximises weight gain in as short a time as possible for the least cost.\u00a0 In other words, you can’t just suddenly decide to keep feedlot cattle for an extra two weeks because the abattoir they were headed to closed down.\u00a0 It’d stuff up the finished carcase specifications and put a massive hole in the feed budget, for starters.<\/p>\n
60% of the Beef City\u00a0Abattoir output is destined for the Japanese market.\u00a0 This grain-fed beef is a\u00a0very high-quality product, not cheap to produce,\u00a0which means it is not cheap for consumers either.\u00a0 Alternative markets are obviously being sought but will be thin on the ground; you can’t produce Bentleys, have a market downturn and find an alternative market suddenly materialises out of thin air.\u00a0 Any other markets available for this particular product would have been pursued by JBS long before now, so they could expand production and be less reliant on a single market for profitability – a position no producer likes to be in.\u00a0 No doubt\u00a0a glut of boxed beef from Beef City Meatworks would have to be sold onto another market at a discount, in order to shift it, but it would still not be cheap (a discounted\u00a0Bentley is still way beyond the means of most people).\u00a0 \u00a0 Undoubtedly, some of the animal rights extremists will take the opportunity to suggest the high-grade Beef City boxed beef is sent to Indonesia.\u00a0 I hope they are going to volunteer to reach into their own wallets to fund the difference between what the producer needs to cover costs and what the Indonesian consumer can pay.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
JBS is the world’s largest meat company, owned by\u00a0the Brazilian family of founder Jose Batista Sobrinho, who began as a sole trading\u00a0butcher in 1953.\u00a0 An interesting family, obviously extremely good at what they do.\u00a0 JBS didn’t get this big by running their family business like a charity.\u00a0\u00a0But at times they are obviously generous, too – some managers of Australia’s largest cattle stations received invitations to a JBS family wedding in Brazil several years ago.\u00a0 JBS bought Australian Meat Holdings (AMH) from Swift, an American company, in May 2007, and trades as JBS Australia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Beef City is a massive feedlot and associated abattoir located 40km west of Toowoomba in SE Qld.\u00a0 JBS has announced that staff will be stood down due to a glut of boxed beef, resulting from the downturn in\u00a0customer purchasing\u00a0since\u00a0Japan’s tsunami disaster earlier this year.\u00a0 Ostensibly the Beef City meatworks\u00a0closure is just for two weeks however […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[158],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1622"}],"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=1622"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1628,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1622\/revisions\/1628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}