Technology is developing to measure quality, but how farmers be rewarded remains unclear

Lamb is moving towards value based marketing but it is coming at a production cost. We explore the complex factors driving the push.

How producers could be incentivised to produce tastier, more tender lamb which consumers are happy to pay top dollar for – without compromising on-farm profitability and sustainability – is a hot potato in the sheep sector.

Lamb sits at a high price point compared to many proteins, and a push for more efficient on-farm production has led to an increase in the lean meat yield of carcasses.

But with this, some of Australia’s sheep flock has become tougher to eat, and with volatile pricing, demand from food service outlets is declining, researchers say.

While many studs target eating quality, breeders say a finely-balanced approach is needed to protect on-farm profit. This is because productivity traits are negatively correlated with eating quality drivers.

To produce better lamb meat, producers urgently need more transparent carcass feedback from processors, and price signals.

How Meat Standards Australia technology may be employed by more processors to measure, then feed information back to producers, also remains an open question.

The topic was frequently raised at LambEx in Adelaide last week, where 1500 people gathered to consider the big issues facing the supply chain.

For processors, the challenge lies in building premium brands to incentivise this breeding direction, underpinned by MSA models for lamb.

Keeping lamb on menus depends on consistent taste, tenderness and price, researchers say, but how to produce it efficiently and pay farmers accordingly is the challenge ahead of the industry. Picture: Richard Gosling

But, they also need to move large volumes of lambs through processing lines efficiently and create a home for lower-value cuts.

In an industry panel session the potential downside of moves to value-based marketing were flagged.

“Be careful what you wish for,” JBS livestock manager Steve Chapman said, suggesting rapid change could have unintended consequences.

Mr Chapman warned there was potential to create winners and losers and pointed out the “whole beef industry does not revolve around wagyu”.

He said revenue may be there at the top end, but questioned where the “bottom 20 per cent of stock sit”.

Thomas Foods International’s assistant livestock manager Jack Thomas said there was danger in trying to reinvent the wheel.

“What we have is bloody good … Australian lamb is a very high end product,” he said, and added that achieving MSA measurements at speed on a processing chain had challenges.

Meanwhile, volatility of lamb supply and price was pointed out by many speakers as a detrimental factor to all, including consumers. But no clear path forward was identified.

Tom Bull, Lambpro, Holbrook NSW said industry needed more entrepreneurs and fewer bureaucrats – and more innovation to boost the value of lamb.

Meat and Livestock Australia managing director Michael Crowley said technology had been developed that measured IMF at chain-speed in lamb, which would allow commercialisation of a “cuts-based model, through MSA for lamb”.

“What that allows the industry to do is identify products that they can harvest into brands that capture more value,” he said.

“There’s a lot of moving parts – developing markets, developing brands – but the technology is there to enable the MSA model to be commercialised and feedback on quality to go back to producers so they can make better genetic and management decisions to target those markets.”

Meanwhile, on-farm in Victoria, stud breeder John Keiller, Portland, told The Weekly Times, producers had to balance eating quality with other productivity traits, like growth, lower emissions intensity production and parasite resistance.

“We have the ability to select animals for good eating quality with intramuscular fat and tenderness increasing, however those characteristics run against some of the production traits that we current have, one of those is growth, which is very important to increase efficiency on property, which also has good methane positions.

“(Growth) also has the ability to increase and change muscle in our animals, muscle is correlated to internal parasites in our animals, and we have some headwinds coming in that area as resistance is rising across all the five families of anthelmintics that we use in our sheep.

“We have to be quite careful about how much pressure we are going to put in eating quality, if it is going to be detrimental to the productivity of the farm and our long term sustainability of how we operate in our ability within an increasingly aware customer base and the environment we raise the animal in.”

Looking ahead he said there were three key challenges. “There is no prime lamb industry if there’s no customer satisfaction,” he said.

“We have to balance the three areas that are important; customers need to enjoy Australian lamb, so it must be tender and tasty and the customer must keep coming back.

“We also need to produce lamb sustainably; it needs to be healthy and so the environment isn’t degraded and in a way that the social license is there, and the third one is we need to make profit, as producers.”