Cattle slaughter in Australia on course for lowest level in decades
Australia’s cattle slaughter in 2022 is on course to be the lowest in more than 35 years, industry body Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) has said.
In recent comments, MLA said the total in 2021 was just over 6 million head and pointed out that this was a 36-year low.
Now it has said that weekly slaughter rates this have been consistently lower than those of 2021. The rates for 2022 have, on average, been 3% down on last year’s and 23% lower than 2020 figures.
“Supply of cattle has continued to be tight,” MLA’s senior market information analyst, Ripley Atkinson, said. “With the rebuild extending north into Queensland, numbers of cattle fell further.” It said labour availability was also a constraint, but that cattle supply had been the major factor.
