26 July 2008
Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry - Tony Burke
NT farm manager - Patrick Underwood
Tony: G’day it’s Tony. I’m out at Riveren in the Northern Territory at the moment and this is Patrick Underwood who’s grown up on the property and now manages the property next door at Inverway. The process you’ve gone through here Patrick (inaudible) the process that you’re going through today, how does that feed through to the properties here, right through to the export market?
Patrick: Well we’re selecting, these are our studs so basically we’re selecting the good young calves for our (inaudible) breeding basically and we try and breed (inaudible) Brahman cattle and we’re aiming at the live export market. So we turn off steers at basically 18 months to two years old and basically these cows will be the genetics and the calves will be the genetics for the genetics for those steers.
Tony: So what are the stock numbers…you’re neighbouring…you’re the property next door, how far away is that from where we are now?
Patrick: It’s about 100 kilometres by road, in a straight line 80 kilometres.
Tony: Ok, what's the size of your property?
Patrick: It's about 2,800 square kilometres. Riveren is about 3,200 so the two family blocks are about 6,000 square kilometres, or one and a half million acres.
Tony: Ok…so how much of what you do here is live export market?
Patrick: It's total…it’s 40,000 cattle all our turnoff every year we try and put about 80,000 cattle into the live ex market and we have to because the nearest abattoirs are the west coast and the east coast of Australia. Further away than the shipping destinations in Southeast Asia. So predominantly our main markets Indonesia and we try (inaudible) cattle there. We can’t finish or fatten cattle here bit we can breed cattle very well. So that’s what we’re doing, breeding cattle and it’s a perfect market; I think it’s a natural partnership.
Tony: Ok…well I’ll be up in Indonesia shortly myself so hopefully (inaudible).
Patrick: You’ll enjoy it, because having seen the young cattle here and what you saw yesterday, to see those same cattle in an Indonesian feedlot (inaudible) I mean, they just do so well over there on all the by-products (inaudible) it’s great for the Northern producers to go over there and see their cattle.
And I commend you and your government for the work you’re doing over there in market because its important and we’re doing a lot of animal welfare stuff, industry has been doing it for years but now we’re dong it with the support of the government.
We’re doing it with the Indonesian industry and government, and thank you for your work you’re doing up there and I hope it continues because it’s really good to see that the improvements we’ve seen through the whole process over there from (inaudible) right through feedlots into slaughterhouses (inaudible) going to see more and more good cattle, product from Australian cattle in supermarkets (inaudible) it's great. I’ll take 600,000 (inaudible).
Tony: That sounds terrific.
Patrick: (inaudible)
Tony: Thanks very much.
Patrick: Good luck.