NZ Beef’s US Opportunity and the Dairy Beef Initiative

At the recent Red Meat Sector Conference, Greg Foran, the former CEO of Air New Zealand and now head of giant US retailer Kroger, talked up the opportunities for selling our beef there.

Kroger owns nearly 3000 stores and services close to 11 million customers. Foran noted that the US beef herd is at a low point, consumer demand is high and this can only be met by quality imports from countries such as NZ.

This was backed up by another speaker, Ken Bacus of the US Beef Cattleman's Association, who said that the US beef herd was at its lowest level for more than 70 years.

He made the point that his organisation had no concerns about NZ beef as it was complementing US beef production and keeping beef on supermarket shelves.

A key initiative to produce more quality NZ beef is the $20 million Dairy Beef Opportunities initiative (DOB) which was launched earlier this year. This is a joint venture between B+LNZ, DairyNZ, DCANZ and MPI. Half the money is provided by the industry and the other half by government through the Primary Sector Growth Fund.

One of the keynote speakers at the Red Meat Sector Conference was Simon Limmer who chairs the governance group of the DOB initiative.

He says a key objective of this initiative was to capture greater value from the 1.8 million non-replacement calves (bobby calves).

"There is an opportunity with those animals because effectively we get very little value from them. This is a problem because at this moment there's strong protein demand - especially red meat around the world - and we are seeing a lot of conversations around the potential of those animals," he says.

Limmer adds that in reputational terms, the killing of four-to-ten-day-old calves, which are something of a by-product of our dairy industry, is not a good look for NZ.

He says key outcomes of the DOB will be to see an increased proportion of calves reared from dairy operations, integrating calf rearing with livestock finishing systems and aligning genetics, breeding and animal health decisions to support long-term performance.

He says naturally dairy farmers will use sexed semen to breed their replacement heifers.

"But beef sires that have good genetics that can accommodate both dairy and the beef industry means you can get better animals that can go into the beef supply chain. So the objective is to genetically deliver better animals, then also rear and feed them. The challenge there is having feed and land availability to grow those animals out as well as the infrastructure to do it," he says.