Opinion: Opportunities for beef sector have never been so good
© Adobe Stock If politicians and retailers want a warning of what happens to an industry when you run it into the ground, just look at UK beef.
It has been neglected and forgotten about for the past 20 years and they are now paying the price, with rampant food inflation on the cards.
On the positive side, the opportunities for UK beef farmers have never been so good.
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With an increased beef spend of 6.1% in the UK and exports at their highest level ever in 2024, worth a whopping £1.77bn, the demand created by Gen Z wanting high-quality unprocessed protein has added significantly to sales.
In this volatile market, prime beef has reached the dizzy heights of £7/kg deadweight.
This demand isn’t all due to primal cuts, we mustn’t forget offal – one man’s junk is another man’s treasure, after all.
I recently attended the Sial food exhibition in Paris with the AHDB where I saw the export potential of British beef.
There is a huge global demand for fifth-quarter beef and the AHDB is doing a fantastic job of promoting it – increasing shipments to Europe by 10.6% and creating new markets in Ghana and South Africa.
This has created an additional £70m for the sector.
This is not just a UK phenomenon. Global cattle finishers and growers (cow and calf rearers) have felt the economic pressure for too long with low returns and high risk versus reward and have exited the industry.
The old-timers have got sick of keeping cow and calf couples for less than the cost of production, and young farmers neither have the capital nor the appetite for risk.
Only the hard-core producers are left, and the days of cheap protein are over. The effort involved in getting protein onto our plates must be recognised.
With world beef prices running at this level, it is only now we can pass the true cost of the upkeep of the cow back to the grower/rancher.
Without the cow, we are obviously missing the first building block, the raw material that feeds into the beef supply chain.
Yes, to some extent we could use the progeny of the dairy industry, but there is some serious heavy lifting to be done on their part.
More forward-thinking dairy farmers have started to address this problem with the use of dual breeds, ditching the Holstein with its many problems, and going down the Montbeliarde route.
With cow longevity you don’t need continual replacements and can start to cross back to the beef breeds to produce R4L Angus factory cattle.
I go to meeting after meeting where more emphasis is put on getting livestock back into an arable rotation, so maybe now is our chance to redress the balance.
But be wary, arable skills don’t always translate into livestock skills – and you have to work weekends and there will be no more ski trips and shooting in the winter.
If Bill Gates and Dale Vince had their way, we would all be eating lab meat, but unfortunately for them the consumer has rejected “Frankenstein meat”, with sales falling this year by 14%.
The consumer is far savvier now and no longer believes in half-true scare stories.
People prefer real food, too. And when it comes to beef, there’s a saying I like: People eat all the chicken they can stand and all the beef they can afford.