Jamie Mackay: The Country host on livestock shortages impacting meat plants

Meat plants across the nation are struggling to match low volumes of livestock coming through with staffing levels.

New Zealand's national sheep flock and dairy herd have continued to decline in recent years, impacting the flow of livestock into meat works.

The Country's Jamie Mackay explains further.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Jamie mckaye, host of the Countries with us Alo Jamie, Hello, Eather.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
I guess we can blame climate change for that as well.

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Probably there's a kind of climate change I'm into. I
don't know about you, but I quite like rolling around
without a jacket on.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
What about you? Well? As a landowner down in Southland,
I'm already planning my keyw fruit orchard.

Speaker 1 (00:18):
Are you okay?

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Fantastic?

Speaker 1 (00:19):
I can't wait to try it grow the red stuff
now because I haven't. I haven't got my hands on
that yet. Now, talk to me about this GDT auction tonight.
What are we expecting?

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Well, look, it's been down the last couple of actions,
and futures is suggesting whole milk powder could be down
by four percent. My man, that I go to Mike
Mcintyret Jardon's picking a less drastic two percent, he said.
Watch out for butter though, yellow gold as it's known
these days. They've loaded up the platform with extra volume.

(00:49):
So the question as will price as fall as a
results supply and demand or is there just an insatiable
demand for butter. Interestingly, the futures for the milk price
twenty five, twenty sixth the season we've just moved into,
still at a very healthy nine to seventy five. But
I look at Open Country Dairy, the second biggest process

(01:09):
of behind Fonterra. They put a fixed price out on
the market a month or so ago at nine point fifty.
They came out again last week at nine thirty five.
So I'm not saying the golden days are over, far
from it, but maybe ten dollars might be just confined
to this season. I hope I'm wrong on that one,
because we need ten dollars for everything absolutely.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
Now, what's going wrong with the meat plants?

Speaker 2 (01:34):
Well, the part of their problem is the farmers, as
bizarre as it seems, are getting ten dollars, are up
to ten dollars for their lamb per kilogram at the moment,
nudging nine dollars for the beef. Last time I had
a look, and we've just got less of these animals
running around, partly and a big part due I guessed
carbon farming and land use change. So what we're seeing

(01:58):
is these meat companies are compete really hard to get
the last of this season stock, and they're having to
pay perhaps more than they want to. They're having in
the case of Silverfern Farms. I was at the Primary
Industry summit last week. I heard Silverfern Farm's chief executive,
Dan Bolton, they're the biggest meat company in the country,
saying they've had to lay off three thousand seasonal workers

(02:22):
who are normally going flat out at this time of
the year on the kel kill. Try saying that quickly
three times in a row, you know. And the problem
being we've had real issues in the meat industry in
recent years attracting good quality workers because there hasn't been
the surety of employment. So this is not happening at all. Look,

(02:44):
the farmers are enjoying a purple patch, but the meat
companies aren't. Beef kill down four percent and twenty twenty
four lamb kill down nine percent, so it's sort of
it's diminishing returns really, and I just hope it's not
last man's standing in the red meat industry when it
comes to livestock supply.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
So, Jamie, apparently we're past peak tractor right. This used
to be the bell weather. We'd look at how many
tractor sales there were, and then we could determine how
the rural economy was doing. But nowadays we don't buy
that many tractors. Well, we don't buy as many tractors
can buying other stuff, But what are we buying?

Speaker 2 (03:17):
I thought that this is a quirky little story from
your mate Brad Olson from Informature. It's he did some
really interesting numbers on peak tractor. We've heard about peak
cow and all that sort of stuff. So apparently we're
just not buying as many tractors as we used to,
or not having as many tractors owned by farmers as
we used to be. Reached peak tractor back in twenty

(03:40):
twenty two, we're down about five percent since then. And
you know this is due once again to land use change,
I guess, changing the way farmers do business. Increasingly, we're
seeing a lot of farm operations using contractors. They might
own one tractor to do the basic stuff on their farm,
but when it comes to the big job, they'll get

(04:01):
a contractor in. Also, the other thing with tractors over
the years is they've got bigger, they've got more efficient.
They cu't bigger gear behind them. They do the job
twice as quick as they used to do in the
good old days. So you know, bigger tractors are working
more efficiently covering more land equals less tractors needed. So yep,

(04:22):
peak tractor it has been and gone. We may never
get there again.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
Interesting stuff, Jamie, thanks very much, appreciate it. Jammy mckae,
host of the Country.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
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