Kangaroo meat hops into Russian market

Another important area of opportunity is kangaroo meat. Russia is the major market for Australias kangaroo meat exports and demand continues to grow. The bulk of this unique meat goes to the Russian Far East, where its popularity is growing. Many meat-processing plants in the Russian Far East have developed technical conditions and recipes specifically for kangaroo meat.

To maintain and further expand kangaroo meat promotion, Austrade conducted a number of successful seminars in conjunction with Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) and local importers in the Russian Far East regions of Kamchatka, Khabarovsk and Vladivostok. These seminars targeted meat processors, veterinary officers, technologists and local media.

Currently Austrade is assisting kangaroo exporters to expand their business into European Russia through presentations, sampling and certification with relevant Russian authorities.

I see roo meat in my local non-boutique butcher all the time, and sometimes at my local Coles, neither place present it a “boutique” product.

I have tried roo meat many times, and the main problem with it is the lack of taste consistency. Sometimes it is very good, but sometimes it is very gamey and (to my palate) inedible. If the taste consistency was solved, I would buy roo meat every time. It is much healthier for you than ovis/bovis meat, and a lot cheaper too.

There are other native possibilities, such as croc meat, which is also very healthy, and crocs are much more amenable to farming than roos, (apart from that nasty biting behaviour, of course). I hear emus are both good eating and fairly easy to manage as well.

I think the problems with farming roos are as much a lack of practice and understanding and appropriate techniques, as any intrinsic insurmountable difficulties.

FDB wrote:

Kangaroo is woefully marketed

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The situation you described isn’t poor marketing, it’s poor product. If you can’t reliably supply what you are trying to sell, the public won’t bother looking for it unless they’ve got a special reason to.

I’m sure MLA would love to collect a per-head levy for each kangaroo if it was organised (that’s what they do with sheep and cattle). Marketing funds generally come out of there as I understand it.

I used to see a bit of ‘roo in the supermarket when I lived in Sydney, but out here in Armidale it’s regarded (like rabbit) as dog food rather than than people food. I doubt that even if the supermarket stocked it there would be many takers. Personally I’m a bit mixed on eating it, I’ve had some nice roo and some absolutely awful, gamey rubbish I was convinced was dressed up roadkill. The other meats aren’t perfect, but they are more consistent. Cattle and sheep are generally slaughtered young-ish, selectivity which is hard to do at midnight off the back of a ute with a spotlight.

I’ve no doubt that most of these problems are solvable, but who is going to put in the effort?

I take you don’t work for the Marketing Department of Meat & Livestock.

Kangaroo is woefully marketed, from advertising through to supply chains. At trendy inner supermarkets here in Melbourne it’s delivered weekly and gone (apart from the supposedly value-added marinated ones which, being your basic hamfisted honey soy or herb & garlic, do not appeal to DIYers) by 3 days after delivery. Elsewhere it sits there until it goes off because people haven’t tried it and have no idea how easy and delicious it is.

Haven’t TRIED it!!! I’ve yet to see an advertisement for kangaroo beyond the little tags in the fridge section.

Hang on, maybe you DO work for the Marketing Department! ;)

As for transport issues and on farm slaughter – it’s a serious problem for food security. You just don’t know how long the animal has been hanging on the side of a Landcruiser (is it one day? two days?) before ending up in a fridge. Eating quality is determined in a huge way by the way the animals are slaughtered. Ethical treatment of livestock is becoming a huge issue that the industry is facing up to, which would be multiplied trying to harvest what is essentially a wild animal. Sheep and cows have been domesticated for millenia and their temperament is reflected in that.

The boutique markets for roo meat should be pursued Nabakov, I agree – the mass processing issues are not so difficult to overcome, but wholesale replacement of sheep and cows with Kangaroo is a pipe dream without massive pull coming from consumers.

amphibious – stocking rates have declined partly because we know a lot better through research than we used to. The industry is striving toward sustainability based on research, not eyeballing roos in the background of TV pictures. Truth be told, we’d probably be better off harvesting goats (and they do at Charleville for example), but the big international markets are for beef (lamb less so). No point telling the customers what they want, that’s their job.

You say that like it’s a bad thing.

As Amphib points above in response 4 – there’s some great value adding opportunities for roo meat in os markets.

Bit of nifty processing and packaging, a clever marketing campaign (eg: Natural! Free Range! Healthy! Exotic! Exclusive!) a la King Island diary products and we could be adding a 3000% markup to protein that otherwise ends up as a blot on suburban green strips.

Were good at cattle and sheep… probably the best in the world

that must be why we’re constantly rescuing the ovis & bovis industries due to climate and ‘culling’ ‘roos.
How blind do you need to be to reality to say a thing like that? APART from the damage they do to our unique soils, they are utterly unsuited to this continent, odd that, considering their origins.
When the Western Division of NSW was first settled in the mid 1800s it needed 10 acres per sheep, today it needs 25 and risen, a couple of hundred per DCE.
This is like the old saw in Ireland, ” the son was flailing in the byre and kept banging his knuckles on the rafters. He didn’t move coz this was were my father stood and his father before him…”

There are plenty of farmers out there who would turn off their sheep and farm kangaroos if it were even slightly plausible. There are some issues:

1) They don’t herd properly – they do not stick together like cattle or sheep.
2) They jump over stuff like fences. Even big fences.
3) They are nearly impossible to transport live, so must be killed on farm. When you try to live transport them, they injure each other.
4) There are no overseas markets for them.
5) There are precious few markets for them here outside boutique sausages and dog food.
6) They take forever to gestate which is fabulous in the wild but useless when you’re trying to build a proper business.

We’re good at cattle and sheep. In fact, we’re probably the best in the world when you take into account food security issues like disease. You don’t have to eat it, the rest of us can still enjoy it and the massive benefits the industry brings.

Really nice piece, Don. Well done! Cop that Michael Duffy and the rest of you so-called main stream commentariat.

i too found it absolutely ludicrous to suggest that people who drive don’t eat as much meat as walkers. come on. “drive thru macdonalds”, anyone? of course if people were supposed to ditch their car and walk forty kilometres to work they might need a few steaks for morning tea, but walking short distances hardly requires the same fuel, gimme a break. the real problem is how our world is designed around car use.

i agreed with him about the plastic bottles (though oddly enough he doesn’t mention the way San Francisco has led the world in banning them recently) but why should it be limited to water–there are too many plastic bottles and plastic inserts in everything–duh, the hippies were right and we need to look at everything we buy in terms of production processes involved to make it; manpower, machine power, oil. every extra packaging insert needed oil to make it. if we want to keep enjoying all this magnificient capitalism we obviously need to be far more intelligent consumers. recycling just ain’t enough.
anyway, if the bottled water market dries up and people stop buying water trucked down from the mountains and drink reservoir water like us, we’ll all have to drink poo sooner, won’t we?

about the blog/msm debate, when you read the Keen excerpt you see it really all boils down to certain newspapers’ flagging circulation and the need for them to adapt or die, ie go online successfully. turning on blogs is a red herring since we are not genuinely competition. after all, we are self-referential egocasters! we don’t break news and we certainly don’t compete with them for revenue. making money from web advertising and subscription models must be a tough business but geez, don’t blame bloggers for people not buying as many print papers as before. simple fact is, the real competition is other online newspapers with free content.

The beef and lamb production industries are well aware of the impact of methane and the amount being produced by our herds during the production process. They are funding research directly to address the problem. For example:

A range of detailed research projects are investigating the ability of digestive microbial
populations transferred from kangaroos and innovative supplementary additives to increase
the efficiency of rumen digestion in cattle. Outcomes from this work have the potential to
significantly increase rumen microbial production, improve fibre digestion, reduce methane
emissions and improve the efficiency of liveweight gain in cattle.

When the animals are producing methane, they are not producing meat, so getting rid of it is a win-win for everybody (this is just one of the research initiatives).

See here for more

http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article1961429.ece

Michael O’Leary of Ryanair has a keen interest in scientific work on cattle and climate change.

And a lot of the time nobody cares whether the opinion is right or not. For example, if a journalist reported Peter Costello saying that the war in Iraq was a mistake the quote would be news. You wouldn’t check to see whether the war really was a mistake, you’d check to see whether Costello really said it was.

It’s a game that has rules and journalists are careful to play by them. There’s a certain amount of quality control. But if blogging has rules journalists aren’t sure what they are. Are bloggers sources? Are they reporters? Are they commentators? How do you tell the difference between people you can trust and those you can’t? Who’s filtering it?

It’s all very disturbing and some journalists wish it would all go away.

Of course it’s ridiculous to think that amateur blogging can replace newspapers is ridiculous.

Besides, consider how much methane gas six billion humans excrete each day. Time to get rid of them I reckon!

http://www.newstatesman.com/200704300044

And my point is the absurdity of thinking that newspapers are engaged in some earnest process of gathering and distributing facts.

Like bloggers, newspaper columnists often spread unreliable factoids just because they’re amusing. I doubt that there was a sudden surge in car use in response to Duffy’s piece.

Some bloggers have more time, resources and expertise to write informed opinion about particular issues than do the expert-on-everything pundits who infest newspapers. Who can forget Paul Sheehan’s evangelistic embrace of the magical properties of Unique Water?

Apart from that, the vast majority of ‘news’ reports are based on agency feeds like Reuters that are also available to bloggers. Once again, a blogger who gets interested in an issue will often spend time tracking down a number of agency stories and put together a much more informative contribution than a newspaper article that regurgitates one agency piece full of allusions to unnamed officials and people who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Bloggers immediately jump on the MSM when it peddles transparent bullshit, such as the fabricated rubbish published to discredit Haneef Mahomed. If and when the MSM starts to apply this process of basic critical evaluation to its own material BEFORE publication, it might be in a position to claim the high ground from bloggers.