ANZCO confident no repeat of horror year

ANZCO’s 2018 pre-tax loss of $38 million was the worst result in the company’s history. The exporter has traditionally posted a profit, even in difficult years for the meat industry which has always had a chequered history, so it is critical to assess what went wrong and, more important, how to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

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Two reports, two different audiences

ANZ Bank’s Red Meat Benchmarking report and KPMG’s 2019 Agribusiness Agenda were both released during Fieldays week and both addressed the challenges facing the agricultural sector and farmers, but that’s just about where the similarities end. The ANZ report focuses specifically on the red meat sector with the objective of providing a stable and consistent basis for assessing and providing options for improving farm performance. In contrast the KPMG Agenda is a much more ambitious document which, in its 10^th iteration, seeks to educate the whole sector on the accelerating speed of change and how participants need to adapt to remain relevant.

More dairy beef unlikely to flood the market

Meat processors have tried for years to encourage dairy farmers to up their numbers of beef cross calves and either keep them or onsell to rearers at three months old. Rearing white face dairy beef calves has long been an option for dairy farmers to generate more income, with rearers looking to buy bull calves to put weight on and sell to bull farmers targeting the US lean beef market. But the lure of higher profits from maximising milk production has until recently made it a relatively unattractive option.