Producer engagement is an issue that needs addressing, MLA’s general manager Richard Norton told central Queensland graziers last week.
Mr Norton said it was an issue identified at the annual general meeting last month.
“Less than 2 per cent of the levy payers actually voted, and even fewer attended the meeting,” he said.
In addition, misinformation about MLA’s role persisted. Mr Norton set about dispelling popular myths during the AgForce-organised tour that saw him visit St Lawrence, Nebo, Middlemount, Clermont and Alpha.
“If you ask 85 per cent of producers, they think MLA is an industry representative,” he said.
MLA is not an industry representative organisation, it does not collects all the levies and processors do not dominate the votes, he said.
“We don’t know who pays for the levy; it doesn’t come directly to MLA but is collected through a government agency and distributed to MLA, Animal Health Australia and the National Residue Survey.”
Mr Norton is no stranger to the region and has spent many a visit repeating the same spiel. MLA is a service organisation delivering R&D and marketing determined by the industry, he rattled off.
“The stream in which the levies come in is how they must be spent - so if so much comes from grass-fed producers, we have to spent that much on grass-fed, and if so much comes in from grain-fed, that proportion must be spent on grain-fed.”
Mr Norton explained the new, four-tiered consultation process that sees committees within each region determining the issues and providing feedback through to regional councils and eventually to the Red Meat Panel.
MLA, meanwhile, had a few successes worth celebrating, Mr Norton pointed out.
“MSA [Meat Standards Australia] is still the number one program for MLA, and industry decided that the consumer was the most important aspect of the value chain.”
In fact, over the next two to three years the meat defining language may even go international.
Mr Norton highlighted the financial gains for producers who hit the MSA grade, where the differential between not grading and grading was $98 a head.
The MSA Index, which allows for rating from 30 to 80 points - the higher the better, introduced last year has seen 3.3 million cattle graded.
In Queensland the average is 55.
Mr Norton said producers could log on to MyMSA on the MLA website and benchmark their cattle against the national herd or with their region.
MLA had also hit some research milestones, he said, including developing a polled gene that is more than 99 per cent accurate.
“So this is coming back to the welfare of the animal,” he said.
Psyllid-resistant leucaena was now being trialled commercially and has been 12 years in the testing.
“This will open up enormous areas of Australia to leucaena.”
There are currently 200,000 hectares of the legume in central Queensland, boosting production by $100 million per year, and the psyllid-resistant leucaena has the potential to increase this to 1.5 million hectares and double production.
The third study is looking at the impact cattle have on the climate, and scientists have found that feeding them a particular red algae can reduce carbon emission and increase production.
