Soaring Grain Prices Empty Australian Feedlots, Bring Beef Price Spike - Reuters

[hatrack]

SYDNEY - Record high grain prices have thrown Australia's A$4 billion (US$3.5 billion) beef cattle industry into disarray, emptying feedlots, cutting cattle saleyard prices and triggering price rises for domestic and exported beef. The world's biggest beef exporter by value and the second-biggest exporter by volume, parts of Australia's beef industry have begun to shut down after feed grain prices doubled since June because of the decimation of crops by drought.

"Supplies of quality beef onto the domestic market and to export markets are going to start reducing quite substantially," said Malcolm Foster, president of the Australian Lotfeeders Association. "It's very bad. There wouldn't be a feedlot making money now," he said. Australia has 700 feedlots.

Cattle on feed had already begun to drop off and the industry, now urgently counting numbers around the country, was already in crisis, Foster said. "You will certainly see shortages of quality beef ... And because pasture conditions are impacted by drought, the cattle aren't going to be anything very flash," he said.

Beef prices would shoot up until consumers were no longer willing to pay, Foster said. "It's already started," he said.

EDIT

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/44567/story.htm

[glowing]

1. Well, its a good thing I barely eat meat. Guess more will have to

learn a vegetarian lifestyle and make meat portions smaller the way they should be.

[cliss]

2. Good. It needs to happen.

Cattle farming is one of the most wasteful, if not the most wasteful Ag industry. It's something like the amount of grain which went to creating 1 pound of beef could have been used to feed 25 people. Or something like that.

Either way, it's a colossal waste of resources. The world needs to "go vegetarian". It's going that way, way.

*on Australia: cattle aren't the only problem they're dealing with "down under". They've had a sustained drought for the past 10 years and it's threatening to ruin their Agriculture.

Looks like "down under" will be "down and out".

[depakid]

3. Some of the sorriest looking cattle I've ever seen

were Brahmans wandering in rural parts of North Queensland. Granted it was December and toward the end of the dry, but man- we wondered to ourselves, who would eat these gristly things?

Obviously, they belonged to the stations, who must have had some sort of feedlots arrangement prior to bringing them to market. Contrasted with some of the sorrier cattle you see wandering in marginal BLM lands throughout the Intermountain West, these creatures were just pitiful- yet somehow they survive.

[NNadir]

4. Jared Diamond's "Collapse" had a really, really, really interesting chapter on Australia

and its agricultural industry.