A scoping study with CSIRO's Sustainable Agriculture Flagship to identify and implement sustainable development pathways for the northern beef industry aligned with NABRC RDE priorities.

Summary

​Adoption of new productivity-enhancing technologies and improved management practices is the keystone to ensuring continued viability of the northern beef industry. Positive trends in key herd productivity indicators, such as beef yield per animal, have slowed over the last decade and many beef enterprises are yielding low to negative economic profits. Productivity and cost-efficiencies in many enterprises can be improved in the shorter term by adopting existing best management practices in order to operate closer to current productive potential. However, retaining viability over the medium to longer-term requires the productive potential of the industry to be further increased and this will necessarily require further investments in technological developments and innovation. 
 This project has explored some potential options for sustainable improvement in profitability of northern beef enterprises that are based on technological innovation in order to inform research and development needs for the industry for the next 20 years. What was done? Several approaches were employed for identifying potential new technologies and production issues where cutting-edge research might produce significant improvements in productivity for the industry. These involved consulting people within or associated with the northern beef industry including beef producers, extension specialists and technical experts, and reviews of relevant technical and scientific literature. 
Bio-economic modelling was employed to assess the potential of these pathways for achieving productivity growth of at least 2% p.a. over the next 20 years, while maintaining land condition, reducing greenhouse gas emission intensity and being readily adopted by industry. The production and environmental consequences of both benchmark and the development scenarios were examined for 10 distinctive agro-ecological regions along with the reaction of industry stakeholders to the scenarios. 
Knowledge gaps were identified along with uncertainties surrounding the scenario analyses to ensure that research, development and extension (R, D & E) options for the future can be assessed with all the information and caveats well understood. An important legacy of the project is the development and employment of a new analytical capacity (North Australian Beef Systems Analyser) that offers considerable scope for future application to addressing R, D & E impact issues for the northern beef industry. This analytical tool provides in an innovative way the ability to test a diverse range of development and management options and their resource management implications at an enterprise level. Herd productivity (growth, reproduction, mortality) is driven by energy and protein supply from forage and supplements and there are feedback effects of grazing pressure on land condition and animal production.