G’day,

I am back on Australian soils, another update of my Nuffield travels is due. In the past six odd months I’ve covered 16 different countries, been on over 70  flights (chartered that is!) and able to build a very solid foundation for knowledge and opportunities into the future.

Travelling began in June when a great dynamic of ‘food producers’ of wheat, cheese, oysters, wine grapes, apples, celery, milk, sheep and importantly beef.  (and all sorts of other titles too long to mention!) set off on our pre arranged six week global focus whirl of the world including NZ, Ireland, France, US, China and Philippines.

We roamed or more to the point galloped over a diverse mix of farm tours across the globe. From the 10 000 head grain fed dairies in Texas to the one of the most efficient grass operations in NZ, from the Maryland oysters and crabs to the New Zealand muscle farms and mountain cattle! From French tomatoes, strawberries, cut flowers and carrots, and witnessing extremes of wheat yields from there to Oklahoma and perhaps the similarities of their piggeries! We saw Chinese peanuts and French chooks, Irish horses and Chinese lobsters. Plus rice and a little more rice, the diverse list goes on!

We also moved beyond the farming tours, its was the US congress, New Zealand environmental law and European environmental compensation issues! Chinese schools as well as super glue, tarp and mag wheel factories, the International Nuffield conference in Ireland, the very successful dog racing in Kilkenny, bank visits, the battlefields in Somme and most importantly we drove right past the Robinson helicopter factory in LA, I was almost choking the driver to stop and take me back!

I then returned to Perth and finished my private helicopter license, went home and also worked for a mining exploration company as a field assistant to help bank balance. I really enjoyed my short time following the geologist through the bush chipping rocks and learning about the fascinating geology of the Pilbara, we also spent time in the Great Sandy Desert east of home, which is a very special part of the world.

Indonesia and Sabar were next on the agenda, through the assistance of Meat and Livestock Australia and some helpful industry members I was able to spend time in abattoirs, feedlots, supermarkets, local markets, breeding cattle operations through Java, Sumatra and Sabar. A special thanks to Jason Hatchett a consultant for the MLA who spends his life improving abattoirs, markets and generally monitoring the live export market in Indonesia, his industry knowledge invaluable and the time he took to show me about I appreciate to no end.

Finding Australian cattle (some of our own) through out Indonesia is always rewarding, the value chain of this trade not only supports Australians, it is an industry alone for the country of import. An excellent trip where I was able to meet many inspiring industry members, it has also sparked many ideas and questions around the Australian live export industry for this region which will all be in my report! In very basic terms though; We have a productive desert full of cattle and a closest neighbor with 240 million mouths who value fresh beef for a healthy livelihood. If these people importantly have money one of the first things they do is buy fresh beef, it is mainly a matter of consistent supply, the economy and some political barriers.

There are always experiences for the good and not so nice; especially in northern Sumatra which sadly included our car hitting a beautiful lady on her scooter in a small village and her passing away shortly after, my heart still goes out to her husband and family.

A few days back at Yarrie to reorganize the bag and rehabilitate myself with some rotor time before heading on my trip to the Middle East.

This trip would not have been possible with out the help of Peter and Sharron Dundon who are based in Bahrain and work with the Meat and Livestock Australia and Livecorp joint livestock export program. I was very lucky to be able to stay in their home and spend time with their daily activities, a great way to learn the varied dynamics of the livestock export trade and their goals for the region. The program focuses on the sustainability of the trade by improving animal welfare practices and the general productivity of Australian live animals once they arrive in these countries. It still surprises me how many people in Australia even involved with this industry are unaware of all the improvements and hard work that is done in these countries by Australians through Australian livestock levies.

Over the 7 weeks I was able to spend time in Bahrain, Oman, Dubai, Qatar, Kuwait, Egypt and Jordan to give me a small but fortunate taste of the livestock industry as well as the everyday life, culture, values and importantly food in these regions. On the first day of my arrival I was informed by a local that my Arabic name was to be ‘Zanib’ and it seemed to stick!

I was genuinely overwhelmed of the welcoming and kind people in these countries, many will literally walk up to you and ask your name, where you are from and welcome you to their country. They seem to care about your general safety and quality of stay in their country.

Every country in the Gulf have their similarities and also their vast differences with history, livestock operations, markets, consumer demographics, livelihoods and cultures.

I managed to witness the discharge of two vessels in Bahrain and Oman, met an astronomical amount of colorful, inspirational characters and business operations. I’m still having withdrawals of not being able to visit a slaughterhouse or feedlot everyday or heard the 5 preys calling from the mosque and also at practicing my very poor attempt of Arabic!

I had a great experience in Egypt at the new Sokna Feedlot and abattoir located south of Cairo, Thanks so much to the kiwi’s Richard and Mel and the Argentines Nacho and Maria who are involved in this impressive operation and looked after me so very well on my stay. Hopefully Australian cattle will be there soon!

I also managed to trot (and for a very short time canter) a camel around the Pyramids and visit the Cairo museum, which I must say was major highlight of the trip, it just blew me away what the human race were doing 5000 years ago and makes my time on earth very short! We defiantly get too hung up in the small things in life.

Floating in the dead sea in Jordan (I now understand where the story of Jesus walking on water comes from!) and discovering Petra was also apart of my small tourist days! I also managed to spend time in with Geoffery Beere a consultant for over 20 years with MLA primarily designing very practical, economical and proven abattoir improvements to improve efficiency and animal welfare in just about every countries we export into, he is a wealth of knowledge and an enormous asset to our industry. I was very privileged to spend a few days with his work.

I also managed to organize a visit to Princess Alia Hussein of Jordan in her home/palace (I did manage to polish my boots but seemed to have misplaced the lipstick at the time!). The leader of Animals Australia Lyn White was also in attendance. It was a very interesting evening and apart from sipping on tea and eating dates it importantly gave me the chance to try and understand the reasons of such opposed views of the Australia live trade. Clearly there is much misunderstanding from many of these people but there is also some valid points targeting our industry and it is something we should address into the future, more in my report!

I returned to Bahrain (to my new home and family!) in early December for the 3 days leading up to the Festival of the Sacrifice (Eid Al Adha). This is where Muslim people purchase a live animal for a home slaughter and give to the poor over Eid (a little like our Christmas period). Quite often the whole family will arrive at the feedlot to select their sheep this is a special occasion to observe, it would be so valuable for our society that are so far removed from the food chain these days.

It is these three days of the year that the local feedlot will sell sheep as ‘private sales’ and a proportion of them are taken home instead of being directly transported to their private abattoir for slaughter. These are the days where less than 10% of Australian sheep sales have caused much of the controversy over the years, mainly due to families putting sheep in their boot to take home. Bahrain Livestock Company with the support of Sharron, Peter and the rest of the Aussie livestock crew worked together this year and no sheep were transported from the feedlot in a car boot.  The campaign was ‘Keep in Mind to keep in kind’ and ‘Ute It, Don’t Boot it’. It was a busy couple of days with some interesting reactions from the public on the first day, however over the next two days there was little resistance and people accepted this practice remarkably quickly.

Compared to many parts of the world Australia is indeed a dry arid piece of country. However it is not until you experience such dry and severely arid conditions in the Middle East that you really understand that logistically these countries will never be able to produce enough animals on their own soil for everybody to have the choice of buying fresh meat (and they do have the money these days to eat more than just dates). ‘Fresh’ in the Middle East is quite often deceived very differently than the average Australian. This issue is not simple but I believe a very important topic as to why I believe there is a strong future for the trade, it will be a major focus of my report.

I then flew to the UK for a quick two week stint, it was my first trip so the traditional London site seeing was undertaken. The highlight though was heading out to Stropshire and meeting retired farmer and cheese maker Jill Hutchinson Smith, one of the first women Nuffield scholars in the world. She is over 80 and still attends every hunt for about the last forty yeas. I was privileged enough to join her and the family for a day. They dressed me in the coat, jodhpurs and jacket and I headed off with a sherry under my belt with a brilliant horse in the English saddle! A great experience and I have to say ditches and hedges can be a bit disconcerting with size and the English mud soft and sticky!

My scholarship has given me the scope to witness global agriculture and indeed world trends in general. Following this we quite often then seek to predict our future influences and direction, dangerous but comes naturally for people who seem to be continually searching for answers! However I now believe that all major issues and influences that  lead to the predictions of global agricultural outcomes are usually based on the basic factor of supply and demand, which are mainly influenced by climate, diseases, politics and the economy.

There are always the hot issues of the industry that are dependent on the globe and its influences at the time, these change very regularly and seem to drive this roller coaster of outcomes that we operate under in Agriculture. We only have to look back over the last 24 months, we’ve gone from excitement of the lucrative biofuel industry to finally fill the farmers pockets, to a rapid acceleration of farm inputs, the carbon farming and carbon reduction scheme, to the global food crisis, climate change, water a don’t worry I haven’t forgot it the mighty GEC (global economic crisis) all hot issues in agriculture that automatically steer our direction in such a short period of time.

Above all this I’m excited in the future of Australian agriculture we have built many advantages over our global counterparts and there has been many times during my travels where this has really hit home. Overall feeding the South East Asian, Middle East and African nation population excites me far greater than supplying the developed western world and in particular as an Australian livestock producer supplying animals to these people is about complimenting our advantages of having enough grass and area for my animals to happily breed and grow and then supplying the choice of fresh safe meat for people who value this in their life and culture, whilst hopefully making a comfortable profit and  a consistent demand.

I also have the opinion that the world is not necessarily in a global food shortage, it is more at the moment a political and distribution crisis. People are starving to death and people are also eating themselves to death and I have personally witnessed so much valuable soil across the world that is underproductive simply due to these social and political issues. Besides if there was such a shortage all farmers (not just some!!) should be millionares.

Things are still busy, I have many loose ends of research to tie up, the report to complete and the presentation in Cairns in April this year. whilst still planning to return to the Middle East in March for some work related issues!

cheers

Annabelle