P.PSH.0829 - Pardoo Beef Corporation Collaborative Innovation Program Innovation Manager

Summary

Pardoo Beef Corporation has agreed to commence a Collaborative Innovation Strategy program (CISp) with MLA over a three-year period commencing on 1 March 2017. The focus of the program will be to support the development of Pardoo Beef Corporation’s Northern Australian Wagyu production system and the associated growth strategies for global markets to be achieved via a range of innovative products, packaging, and processes and value chain concepts that extend from the paddock to the plate. The costs of beef production were identified and reduced but remained relatively high by industry comparisons.

Objectives

PDC will implement the innovation strategy in the following key business areas:
- innovation resource planning and people management
- operational efficiency
- environmental sustainability
- marketing, market access and value adding
- new value chain design.

- Make quantifiable improvements in company innovation measures as agreed with the steering group.
- Efficiently deliver projects in accordance with budgets and timelines.
- Submit reports to MLA in accordance with MLA's style guide and report guidelines.
- Contribute to MLA's innovation managers network.

Key findings

• Irrigated tropical pastures in the Pilbara environment are identified as a relatively expensive feed source for beef cattle.
• Utilisation by direct grazing whilst attractive conceptually and manageable in practice, remains an economic challenge. Depending on location, the advantage of annual feed availability of predictable quality may give confidence to target higher value markets.
• Grazing management remains the key component to optimum productivity under this system.
• This project has developed baseline methodologies to better calculate cost of production and identified key cost areas and production components. This has laid a basis on which to better improve efficiencies. This would be applicable across diverse production environments.
• Underground aquifers present very minimal environmental disturbance with monitored water and fertiliser use.

Benefits to industry

This project has outlined cost of production under a range of systems and identified cost and production components. In doing, a foundation exists to improve productivity of such a system in this and other environments and is being actively pursued. It remains a worthwhile goal, although at present is likely to remain as a relatively minor contributor to the overall northern feed base.

Future research

There are several areas that require further investigation identified over the course of the project. These include but are not limited to:

• the extent of nitrogen loss through volatilisation in irrigated tropical pasture production
• the performance of alternative pasture species in comparison to Rhodes grass
• comparison of energy supplements available and methods of provision to understand benefits of energy supplementation for cattle grazing tropical pastures
• trial of crop combinations and rotations superior for cattle nutrition and resource utilisation efficiency.