The Country 06/11/25: Chris Russell talks to Jamie Mackay

Our Australian correspondent talks about the Melbourne Cup, beef prices, and feral pigs eating lambs.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chris Russell's there asie correspondent based out of Sydney, but
all the action this week was in Melbourne. Chris, you'll
be interested to know I won the office suite for
the Melbourne Cup with Half Yours.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Well, yeah, it did well. I didn't, but you know,
I thought it was a fantastic story young Jamie Mellen
coming through there. She and her story because she was
the first husband and wife combination to have ridden in
a Melbourne Cup. And she's quite different to her husband
reportedly in that she very much just sort of sees

(00:31):
how it goes when she gets in there. He's very
much a strategist, and they had talked about tactics before
the race and he suggested she really needs to get
over to the rails in the first hundred meters that
he and she did that in fact, and then of
course she came up behind her husband who was writing
smoke and romans. That was already tiring a bit when

(00:54):
it went at the top of the main Flemington strait,
and Half Yours took the decision out of you about
the scream and her husband get out of the bloody road.
But in fact her horse tooking that out of her
hands and duck of the side through the really narrow gap,
pushed her husband asides. All he got was a show
over Ben and then he came up. We kept on

(01:14):
going through and pulled into the next gap, where there
was hardly any room, but the horse just managed to
find a hole in there and through he when well.
Of course, when the horse went through, it was no
stopping because it was She said, it was the fittest
horse she's ever ridden.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
Great story, great race, great result, even though I lost
money in the end. Another story for another day. Hey, Chris,
talking about races, there's an arms race on sort of
really a global power struggle if you want, between America
and China. She up against Trump. Obviously, how's that going
to affect Australian cattle or beef farmers.

Speaker 3 (01:48):
Well, there's been the last twelve eighteen months or there's
hundreds of beef licenses out of the US that China
hasn't renewed, and that's given us a new.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
Market for our grain fed beef. Now we're not talking
about the same beef that the Americans are buying from us.
They haven't got enough of. What they want is lean
grinding beef for mixing with their very fatty grinding beef
for hamburgers. But this is a much more expensive grain
fed meat, and it's been a wonderful boost to our
grain fed industry. But overall beef trade to China in

(02:23):
fact thirty five percent up on previous years, and in
Japan also fifty three percent in career of eleven percent
just by the bye. But those big markets have been
going well. But now there seems to have been a
little sort of love trust between Trump and She, although
while Trump's talking about it, she isn't. But nonetheless they

(02:44):
are expecting that the controls on Chinese import of American
beef are going to be lifted, along with the other
things they talked about, rare earth and so on. And
if that happens, then we can expect to lose some
of that market. So we're expecting that to drop. But really,
in the big scheme of things, the amount of business
we're doing, we just can't sell all the beef we're

(03:05):
producing now, so I don't think it's going to have
a massive effect on our prices.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
Jamie from The Believer or Not Chris Russell files Feral
pigs take and eat ninety nine percent of lambs on
a New South Wales farm that wouldn't have helped the
old tailing or docking percentage.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
Well, when I saw this, I thought, no, they must
mean because the headline was the feral pigs are eating
ninety nine out of one hundred lambs on a property.
This is a property blunt to' neil nevil Mattic in
central West New South Wales. I thought he must have
been out eating them or taking the grass away. But no,
what he's saying is he's been breeding sheep on this

(03:43):
farm for one hundred and forty years with his family,
and these pigs are eating his lambs alive, with few
of them one in one hundred surviving this season. One
in one hundred is all he's getting, and it's plummeted
in recent years. He said that, in fact, the amazing
thing about this is when they take these lambs, there's
nothing left of them. You're flat out actually finding any

(04:05):
trace of the lamb that they've taken. We've got about
twenty three and a half million feral pigs in Australia
and of course with the rise in national parks, I
think you've had the same problem in New Zealand. Where
hunters have not been allowed to go in to remove
the pigs. They just come in out of the national
parks and might do their damage and go back again.
I reckon the estimated cost about one hundred and fifty

(04:26):
million dollars this year, So you know it's that's I
couldn't believe that only one in one hundred we're not
being fully eaten, and these pigs are obviously gone carnivorous,
and it's bastly meant that he's going to get out
of sheep completely next year because he can't compete with them. Jamie.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
Yeah, their problem's not the national parks, it's the carbon
farms that they're coming out of to eat our lamb.
Chris Russell, thanks as always for your time.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
Look forward to seeing Betty next week. Jamie,