WITH less than a tablespoon of rain since mid June, much of the North Coast is running out of feed and there will be temptation to offload vealer calves.
Singleton agent Neil Thomas said the Hunter faced the advent of a warm spring with dams half full because last summer’s rains failed to provide.
“It is crunch time,” he said. “Producers are only just hanging on. If it doesn’t rain in the next month we will start to see a lot more younger cattle as producers offload at two, three, four months of age to give their cows a break.”
Further north, in the Richmond Valley the landscape has endured three floods since March and since the tap turned off mid June less than 10mm has fallen. Pasture not improved is proving not much use.
Grafton agent David Farrell noted producers had already offloaded numbers during the good cattle market which has helped alleviate paddock pressure and he said most Clarence producers would elect to maintain their weaners rather than sell them short.
That’s just as well, because Northern Co-operative Meat Company chairman John Seccombe warns the current price offered for young calves will be constrained by what he describes as a “general malaise” in the meat industry right now.
“If there was to be a big influx of vealers sent to any abattoir they would have trouble finding a ready market,” he said.
“I wouldn’t say this is a result of our export market, and I wouldn’t say it was because of a domestic slump. It’s just a general malaise and processors’ freezers are getting full.
Mr Seccombe advised producers resort to other strategies, like maintenance feeding, until it decided to rain.
Wingham Beef Exports general manager Grant Coleman said the dry was beginning to bite on the Manning. He concurred with Mr Seccombe that the market for beef was lacklustre, on the back of record kill rates in the US, high domestic kill numbers over winter and a high Australian dollar. If there was any positives it could be that cheaper beef might increase domestic consumption.
