23 November 2007

2 minute read

Oceania

“At this week’s Cattle Council of Australia (CCA) meeting in Rockhampton, a resolution was passed to explore and conduct the certification of a pasture fed standard,” Mr Brown said.

“This resolution arrived at CCA from an AgForce Central Queensland branch, going through the channels from branch to regional level, onto AgForce Cattle and from there to the national level.”

Mr Brown said the marketing of grassfed beef needed to be driven forward and CCA, working with Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA), would be able to ensure that happened.

“Queensland’s $3.6 billion beef industry pushed for this certification to provide it with another marketing avenue for its well-known product,” he said.

“This is how, taking our producers’ feedback, we have pushed at the national level for a pasture fed marketing certification to be immediately developed.

“As an industry we need to capture the opportunities for new consumer requirements, both here and overseas, and certified pasture fed beef will certainly be a crucial element.”

Mr Brown said the future of the beef industry would involve a greater differentiation of beef in the terms of the environmental, health, welfare and production attributes and all of this would be backed up by Meat Standards Australia (MSA) as an eating quality guarantee, all of which would ensure the industry could better satisfy emerging customer demands.

“Some processors have already begun to take up the grassfed challenge by offering further differentiation on these grounds,” he said.

“A pasture fed certification is also likely to lead to increased consumer interest in beef both domestically and in our export markets and the spin off of having increased and more viable market options for producers of pasture finished beef should quickly flow on to store cattle producers.”

In other news from Rockhampton, AgForce Cattle president Greg Brown was re-elected as CCA vice president this week. The beef activities continue with MLA’s National Beef Industry Forum tomorrow (Wednesday) at Paradise Lagoons, Rockhampton from 8.30am to 6pm and the MLA annual general meeting is scheduled for Thursday.

TheCattleSite News Desk