Diversify or die: The pivotal moments that have driven beef exporting

Beef exporters now have more than 50 countries on their books as customers.

The pathway to this point has been windy, riddled with plenty of hurdles but also speckled with incredible opportunities that were often unforeseen.

Those who were at the party when any one of the many pivotal moments that changed the face of Australian beef exporting happened say there is not one single event that set the scene for where the exporting sector stands today.

Rather it was a coalition - of people, events, crises and fortuitous circumstances.

When the United States first called, chasing frozen beef for their hamburger patties; when Britain joined the European common market and dumped nasty quotas on Australia; when the beef price crashed in the 1970s; when competitor beef producers were sunk by disease outbreaks and even the more recent Brexit and the free trade deal it led to.

These are among the major turning points, but so much more went on behind the scenes that shaped what today is a trade that ships more than 1.08 million tonnes of meat around the world.

In 1879, 40t of frozen beef and mutton left Sydney for the UK aboard the Strathleven, arriving in good condition - the first successful frozen meat exports.

"For 150 years we expanded our livestock numbers in Australia and we sold our surplus production to a single market - Britain. It was our Commonwealth duty to produce it and it was their Imperial responsibility to take it," former National Farmers' Federation and Meat & Livestock Australia chair, producer David Crombie said.

Exports were dominated by the frozen carcase trade, although beef consultant Steve Martyn, who wrote the definitive World on a Plate, reports chilled beef shipments were made to Britain too as early as the 1930s.

Then, in the late 1950s, the United States came knocking.

"They'd been in drought, the fast food business was booming and they needed the beef to service it," Mr Martyn said.

Unlike the UK, they wanted it boned in Australia and put in cartons.

"The US was willing to pay the price so the whole trade moved that way," Mr Martyn said.

"Quarter beef was also an inefficient way of exporting beef and the ability to bone it out and put it in cartons for the US was not only far more efficient but meant the value-add in Australia was so much greater."

By the 1960s, the US was by far Australia's largest market and with much of the value-adding happening on home soil, it spurred rapid expansion of cattle farming - particularly across Queensland, Mr Combie said.

"That US demand was transformative," he said.

"But it was still a commodity product. Never mind the quality as long as it was wholesome."

The wake-up call, as Mr Combie describes it, came when Britain joined the EU common market in the 1970s and quotas gave other nations far better market access.

It wasn't the loss of the market, as Australia was already focused on the US, but an all-of-agriculture 'paradigm shift' and the realisation that no market was 'safe', Mr Combie said.

"For 150 years we produced what we wanted because we were good at it and being part of the Commonwealth meant we had somewhere to send our surplus to," he said.

"But suddenly the UK market closed.

"We had to look elsewhere and we had to produce what people were prepared to pay for."

Before that occurred, a diversification scheme had already been put in place by the Australian Meat and Livestock Corporation, the forerunner to MLA.

Once quotas were introduced in the US in 1964, it became the largest and best-priced export beef market for Australia and everyone wanted to ship there, Mr Martyn explained.

"That couldn't happen so the quota scheme had to encourage beef exporters to ship to other markets and in that process earn quota to ship to the US.

"It was an attempt to expand Australia's beef markets and it was a key driver of the market diversification that exists today.

"Australia started relationships with all sorts of places - beef was going to Poland, Russia, Yugoslavia, Egypt - and marketing was entirely rejuvenated."

AustMeat chairman Allan Bloxsom, who has more than five decades of red meat exporting experience, said much of that diversification was driven by brokers - companies like Sanger.

"It caused some angst that these brokers, who didn't have investment in processing plants in Australia, were obtaining big chunks of US quota and could trade it," he said.

"The broker community was largely responsible for opening up a number of other overseas markets for Australian beef."

The potential in Asia began to emerge and the demand for quality turned the export game entirely around yet again.

Australia shifted from being a commodity beef supplier to targeting a high-end market, Mr Combie said.

"The Japanese consumer wanted grainfed and we had to listen. Instead of saying 'you can have what we produce, you'll get used to it' we had to change to meet their demands," he said.

"That kicked off feedlotting in Australia.

"We realised we would never compete on price with South America and that we didn't want to play in the basement space.

"It was exactly the same thing for the development of MSA (Meat Standards Australia). The message from the consumer was that beef was not consistent. We got that message and we made it consistent."

Australia never turned its back on Europe and Britain, Mr Bloxsom said.

"Lobbying went on from day one after the common market formed to get more access, much of it behind the scenes," he said.

Long-serving AMLC and then MLA senior executive Dr Peter Banard said beef exporters always saw opportunity in Europe and had representatives and offices stationed there.

"Throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s, the EU had enormous surpluses of beef, brought about by production subsidies," he said.

"To try to shift that so-called beef mountain, the EU applied export subsidies.

"A major focus of the Australian industry during this period was ensuring subsidised EU beef didn't enter our Asian Pacific customer markets."

Amongst other things, this involved the signing of the Kerin Andriessen Accord, whereby the EU agreed to stop exporting subsidised beef to traditional Australian export markets.

From the mid 1990s the EU started to change its subsidy arrangements and its beef surpluses reduced.

But the biggest breakthrough since the common market formed was Brexit and the ensuing UK free trade agreement, Mr Barnard said.