Small abattoirs say DEXA sums don’t add up for them

Meat and Livestock Australia has put forward a plan to use producer levy funds to help fund the $150 million roll-out of Dual Energy X-ray Absorptiometry (DEXA) technology across all 90 Aust-Meat registered abattoirs in Australia.

DEXA can accurately differentiate meat from bone and its supporters say it will not only lead to big efficiencies in abattoirs but will be a significant step towards value based marketing, which is expected to underpin Australia’s beef competitiveness in the future.

Some of the larger processors have expressed support for the technology, including Teys Australia which says it will move on DEXA with or without MLA’s funding plan, such is its confidence in the system’s ability to deliver a far greater demand-driven cattle supply.

But smaller plants say the numbers just don’t add up for them.

They say the sort of dollars being earmarked for DEXA could go a lot further in terms of delivering efficiencies to the beef supply chain spent in areas like feed conversion research.

Millmerran Meat Holdings’ Scott Glasser, who is also president of the 35 member Queensland Country Meat Processors Association which represents owner-operators, said at a figure of $150m divided by 90 plants, the technology would come in at a price worth more then his entire meatworks.

Mr Glasser’s meatworks processes cattle, sheep and pigs in small numbers and has just six to eight suppliers. Beef is sold under the Glasser’s Yagaburne brand.

“It’s difficult to justify spending the sort of money they are talking about, regardless of who is paying, on a technology we still know so little about,” he said.

It was not yet known how much individual processors would have to put towards installing DEXA and then maintaining it, he said.

Likewise, no figure had been put on the savings and benefits delivered to a plant.

Processor representative groups have commissioned a study to determine this information but Mr Glasser said the numbers small plants had crunched so far showed DEXA would be economically unviable for their operations.

“We can’t see any benefits for the producers we work with either,” he said.

“We buy locally from producers whose stock we know. We have close working relationships.

“We’re not against the technology but there are other areas where this sort of money could be much better spent to deliver productivity gains to both processor and producer.”

Small southern abattoir owners echoed the Queensland concerns.