What's Your Beef

Beef Australia’s National Beef Carcase Competition is one of the most anticipated competitions within the industry. With fierce competitors from around the country, Committee Chair David Hill says there’s an unprecedented number of processing plants involved with the competition for Beef24, as well as some new categories involved in the competition. 

In this episode hear from David, whose industry experience and family’s commitment to breeding high quality beef has seen him at the forefront of some of Australia’s most innovative approaches to meat grading.

Preparations for Beef 2024’s stud cattle program are in full swing, with the new committee having met for the first time. James Kent is a beef producer from Queensland’s Callide Valley and has taken on the role of Chairperson. He’s delighted with the team tasked to bring the centre ring alive, with the best of what the Australian stud stock industry has to offer. In this episode listen to a little about James and what has motivated him to join the Beef 2024 committee, including some of the challenges and excitement ahead for the committee.

David Foote has spent an inordinate amount of time in the Australian beef industry, with at least 20 years at the helm of Australian Country Choice. He’s forged relationships, ideas, and directed many a difficult conversation to the betterment of his business and the industry. He’s also the inaugural chair of the newly formed Cattle Australia. He’s taken on the role fully aware of the challenges ahead, but with the upmost respect for the industry and its sustainable and successful future. He sees his role as a new opportunity to help represent the beef industry’s 40,000 cattle producers, managing 28 million cattle across 300 million hectares, and generating $7 billion for the Australian economy. This episode covers David’s strategies for taking the industry forward and how the new board intend to deal with the controversies surrounding its formation.

It’s been a couple of decades since Brigid Price appeared on the first episode of Farmer Wants a Wife, and not only did she snag a country boy (not while on the show), but is now a vital part of a successful family beef business. 

Brigid, her husband Owen and three children manage an organic beef business in Central Queensland. In this episode we discover Brigid’s hilarious introduction to bush ‘lingo’, how she moulded their business to include her impressive commerce and HR skills, and how she is determined to build and nurture meaningful relationships in the bush through her website www.ruralresources.com.au. Besides playing an active role in the beef business, Brigid is also committed to her local and extended community, reflected by her various awards such as 2019 Citizen of the Year, Maranoa Regional Council,  the 2018 Australia Day Award – Member Contribution, Maranoa Regional Council and 2017 QRRRWN Strong Women Leadership Award, Volunteer of the Year. She’s also just completed the Australian Rural Leadership Program, and the National Farmer’s Federation Diversity in Agricultural Leaders Program.

Moira Lanzarin is a fourth-generation grazier from the Northern Territory. Moira’s story starts in the basalt country of North Queensland where her deep love and understanding of country and cattle was ignited. A move to the Territory in the early 90s with her parents Mike and Clair O’Brien and her three siblings meant building a stud business together in a completely different landscape, but with modern ideas to land management. 

Moira manages the family company’s stud and beef operations in the Northern Territory and has been instrumental in introducing Holistic Management to the NT. Her contributions to Regional Australia have been recognized by receiving the Centenary Medal for Services to Regional Australia (2003); NT Young Cattleman (2011); being named NT Rural Woman of the Year (Runner up 2009); and NT Young Australian of the Year (1998).

The loyalty and camaraderie of producers and patrons to the Beef Australia event is well recognised, but what about the volunteers? There’s about 150 people that give up their time to assist attendees to find their forums, get on their tour bus or find the perfect place to get a bite to eat and they adore the event just as much as the ticketholders.

Alice Kelly and Don Bellert have volunteered since the first Beef in 1988 mainly to keep in touch with old bush friends and over 30 years later they are just as excited about the event and are counting down until Beef24.

The Jefferis family are synonymous with the Brahman breed. Having notched up a multitude of trophies over their long association with the Beef Australia event, they have a deep affection for not only the event, but the kinship it represents. Rodger and his late wife Lorena built the Elrose Stud into one of the most recognisable names in Brahman cattle. It is the biggest Brahman stud in Australia, having been built up from their Cloncurry base and more recently Central Queensland.

In the latest episode of What’s Your Beef, we catch up with Rodger over a coffee and talk all things from what growing up in Cloncurry was like, to the experience and importance of building up a purebred Brahman herd and his concentration and focus on data and genetics.

Vicki Revett can’t remember a time in her childhood when any of the adults attended a first aid course, despite them all working in the cattle industry- rife with potential accidents. Skip forward a couple of decades and the emergency nurse has taken the situation into her own hands, writing Australia’s first rurally specific first aid course and delivering it across the country. Having returned to her home turf of Alpha in Central Queensland, Vicki shares how she was lured back by love, but has forged her own destiny by preparing hundreds of Australians to save the lives of those closest to them.

In this week’s episode of What’s Your Beef, beef industry stalwart Don Heatley reflects on family, industry representation, the power of networks and dealing with absolute devastation. Don Heatley has spent decades advocating for the beef industry and representing beef producers across the world.

His passion for the beef industry stems from a childhood spent in the paddocks of his family’s North Queensland beef operation. The drive to venture into the world of agripolitics was ignited by a talkback radio session on live export- a topic that didn’t relate to his business, but certainly did to his industry. Not all his interactions have been positive - nothing could have prepared him for the extremely personal interactions with growers, politicians and industry he faced following the Australian Government’s decision to halt live export trading in 2011 when he was serving as chair of MLA.

The Beef Australia Next Gen committee is one of the cornerstones of the Beef event and while the committee itself is in the very early stages of formation, it’s already attracted an exciting cohort. Callan Daley is one of them. With a real passion for the beef industry formed during a childhood on a western Queensland cattle property, Callan has gone on to represent the industry in a range of roles, including his most recent- as the Field and Operations Lead for MEQ Probe, a start-up aimed at building consistency in meat eating quality.