LIVESTOCK handling legend Temple Grandin gave the Australian live export industry the “all clear” after a supply chain tour.
Before passing on her verdict at the LIVEXchange conference in Darwin, Dr Grandin paid a return visit to Indonesia, where she has been critical of cattle handling in the past, and made her first visit to Northern Territory station country.
The Indonesian facilities she visited got her tick of approval, aside from a couple of yards she felt needed cleaning, and the station operations got her awe.
“You’re gigantic,” she told Queensland pastoralist Don Heatley, who interviewed Dr Grandin on stage.
“You’ve got a waterhole with 500 head of cattle on it. Each one of these stations is like 25 to 30 family ranches. We have some big operations, but it’s just not on the same scale.”
She felt, too, that cattle production was the right enterprise for the northern rangelands.
“This is a unique situation. You can’t grow crops on this land. What are you going to do? Leave it vacant? I don’t think so.”
“There’s only one way to raise food on this land - and we’ve got to raise food on this land - and that’s raising animals of various types.”
At the other end of the supply chain, over the Timor Sea, Dr Grandin also felt that protein production was being handled the right way.
“I was pleased to see when I went to Indonesia that the cattle are all being fed with byproducts. They are not competing with people for food; they are eating things that would be just thrown away, like residues from the palm oil industry.”
Dr Grandin admitted a preference for simplicity when he came to gauging animal welfare outcomes: signs of lameness, thin cattle, and other conventional indicators of distress.
She saw few of these, suggesting that some of the facilities she saw in Indonesia offered better welfare outcomes than parts of the American dairy industry.
Dr Grandin’s survey wasn’t perfect: as various critics pointed out, she only saw operations chosen by her live export industry hosts, and she didn’t see any stock being transported.
But Dr Grandin satisfied herself to some extent on transport handling when looked at carcases in an Indonesian chiller and found no signs of the bruising that would suggest poor management in transit.