A pathway to improve quality of national beef statistical data

Summary

​A Red Meat Statistics technical working group incorporating the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Australian Bureau Agricultural Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) and Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) was established to review methodologies for measuring and reporting beef cattle herd statistics. Recommendations have been made for specific datasets relating to meat processing, beef derived from the dairy herd and more specific data from live export cattle. Providing these data would enable a more robust prediction of the herd retrospectively, and over time this would substantially improve the ability of industry to predict production into the future. It is recommended that such a model be considered to improve monitoring of the national beef herd.