Animal welfare factors into organic beef buying

Animal welfare is also emerging as a key driver, alongside health and environmental concerns, they say.

September is Organics Awareness Month, which has prompted peak industry body Australian Organic to promote research released this year showing six in ten Australian households now buy organic.

One of the country’s first cattlemen to move into organic production, Western Queensland’s Iain Scholes, Braemar Investments, said both organic beef production and supply had increased every year for the past 20.

He believes that is only going to exacerbate in the coming years.

“Consumers are becoming more and more aware about the food they buy, where it is produced and how,” he said.

“Organics allows us to meet those demands.”

Mr Scholes, Mena Park at Blackall, said the animal welfare interest fuelling organic meat purchases was strongest in the United States but flowing through to Australia quickly.

Organic cattle producers were not necessarily operating at a higher level of animal welfare than most conventional producers but were in a far better position to prove their claims, he said.

Extensive auditing and certification “allows us to make that claim and stand by it,” he said.

“Consumers want proof and we can give that guarantee.”

While undersupply was the biggest challenge to the organic beef industry in the early days, most major processors now had organic labels and “we have now proven this is no fad,” Mr Scholes said.

“We haven’t reached supply saturation and there is still potential for producers to move into organics but don’t do it with stars in your eyes,” he said.

“The desire to produce organically has to be there.”

With his wife Kathy, parents Ted and Robin and brother Craig and his wife Emma, Mr Scholes runs 6000 Droughtmaster breeders on native and buffel grass across six breeding properties.

They take their bullocks through to weights of 620 kilogram.

Drought has meant they are currently running at 70 per cent capacity with around 1600 hectares destocked.

The family opted to move into organic production 20 years ago.

“We felt at the time we were very close to being organic anyway and we were converting completely to cattle, phasing out of sheep,” Mr Scholes said.

“We didn’t enjoy the chemical side of conventional wool production and were very happy to run cattle without using chemicals.

“And of course we saw marketing potential.”

The Scholes supply Toowoomba-based Arcadian Organic and Natural Meat Company, and much of their beef is exported to the likes of the US, South Korea, Japan and China.

The organic premium, which runs between 20 and 30 per cent, offsets the cost of lower stocking rates to account for not using some inputs such as urea as a protein replacement, Mr Scholes said.