It's more than Just a Business
Mulesing warning for lamb producers
PRIME lamb producers consider yourself warned – mulesing is a growing issue for some of your overseas customers.
Most Australian prime lamb mothers, especially Merinos and first cross ewes, are mulesed once to protect them against flystrike, with discounts applied in store sales to un-mulesed breeding ewe lines.
But at a saleyards conference in Horsham last week JBS Australia livestock manager Steve Chapman said some EU customers were demanding that Australian lamb come off unmulesed sheep.
JBS Australia was telling prime lamb producers intending to supply European markets under its farm assurance program to consider phasing out mulesing of their prime lamb mothers and their progeny, he told delegates at the 2011 Livestock Saleyards Association of Victoria conference.
“At this stage we are drawing a line in the sand and there is a bit of a phase-out program with that.
“In the farm assurance program, it (no mulesing of prime lamb mothers and lambs) is one of the criterias, but that farm assurance is for one EU customer only,” Mr Chapman said.
“There are other customers there who at this stage haven’t pushed that as hard, but what is going to happen in the next 12-18 months…all customers will be talking about that.”
Mr Chapman said about three weeks ago a major animal rights group was talking to major United States supermarkets about mulesing.
“We’re sending a message to them (JBS lamb suppliers) now, we don’t want to tell them when that major supermarket in the EU has come to us to and said `this is where we are going and what we need’.”
JBS has invested in its drive into the UK market with the employment of two senior New Zealand management and sales executives in the last month. New Zealand has been the primary supplier of lamb into the EU, but its market share is declining with its sheep numbers.
“We can see the writing on the wall big time.
“It doesn’t matter what anyone else is doing, we need to be the best sat what we do and we need to be up front,” Mr Chapman said.
“We need to be five or ten minutes in front of everybody, not three months behind (or) it will cost the whole industry a lot of money.”
Market sustainability at current prices was questionable for Australian producers unless they embraced change and new markets to maintain global support for the product while the US economy recovered, Mr Chapman said.
JBS was selling 18-26 kilogram lamb carcases into the EU, which had the potential to take more than its current 15 per cent share of Australian lamb production, he said.
“But to do that we must give the consumer what the want and they want full traceability and integrity.”
Click on the link below to see the original article.