Community & Business
14 December, 2024
Local aims to boost Far North beef industry
ROCKY Creek local Cailan Byrnes has successfully completed a “rigorous” process to be accepted into the esteemed Nuffield Australia scholarship program, which he officially started in Spetember.
Cailan currently operates the Rocky Creek Abattoir, which is just one of the links in the Byrnes Meats business chain.
As a Nuffield Scholar for 2025, the 29-year-old will study how to implement “cost-effective beef grading systems with innovative technology to optimise eating quality” in the Far North region.
“I decided to pursue this challenge because there’s a bit of a hole in our beef market up here,” Cailan said.
“In regard to what feedback an abattoir can offer to producers to stay competitive, everything comes down to eating quality.
“So with the cattle we eat, there’s a rigorous set of processes to go through to ensure that steak is going to be of high eating quality.
“Those measures are a very expensive process for an abattoir to undertake and require a lot of training, and on top of that, the business needs to be able to keep the staff that are trained in that area.
“My topic explores how to reduce that cost and how to make the process more practical so that an abattoir like ourselves can offer a premium, pasture-fed beef brand up here.
“This not only benefits us, but also offers other people the ability to access that.
“In short summary, you take cattle, process them and then grade them.
“Not all cattle are going to be of high quality, so you filter them by selecting what cattle will meet the quality for the brand you are trying to create.
“Just by simply splitting the produce and ensuring that consistent quality, then the theory is that the brand will basically build itself,” he said.
Nuffield Australia awards scholarships each year to farmers in Australia to increase practical farming knowledge, management skills and techniques.
These scholarships give Australian citizens the opportunity to study farming practices domestically and internationally over two years.
By the end of the program, they will be able to actively spread the knowledge they have gained from their experiences.
“The program will fund you to not only research the topic, but to also give back to your industry through knowledge you acquire,” Cailan said.
Cailan aims to use Meat and Livestock Australia’s MSA (Meat Standards Australia) system to determine the quality of beef more efficiently.
The system gathers data points from a carcase such as marbling, colouring of the meat and fat and the pH level, for example, and gives a score pertaining to the eating quality of the meat.
“It’s a whole new process, and it works, so that’s what we’re trying to follow here,” Cailan said.
“We want to implement this new process but that will take some time, so the first step is to just get out there and get around the world to see how other people do it.
“I’ll be going around Australia to see how some of the other big plants operate and see what technologies are already available here that can be offered to us.
“I’ll also be going to New Zealand in March, then in September I’ll be going to Adelaide, Borneo, Philippines, Denmark, California and Chile over a four-week period.
“The following year I’ll be going to the States and Japan, all to research and see how those other countries operate.
“So it’s a lot of travel, but it’s all covered by Nuffield which is a really great thing.
“At the end of the program I will be writing a 10,000-word scientific article and once that gets approved it’ll be published,” he said.
After going off on his own path for a while, the now 29-year-old, who grew up on the Rocky Creek property and worked in the plant for the majority of his life, has been running the abattoir for four years now and looks to keep the family business alive in the years to come.
“I’d gone off on my own path for a bit and I’d just come back to give Dad a hand,” he said.
“I guess it’s one of those things where you don’t realise what you’ve got around you until you come back.
“I was 25 when I came back and just really enjoyed the industry and the challenges that we were faced with.
“Taking over and running the business is definitely one of my goals, when the time comes.
“It’ll just be small steps for now though, one of the first ones is to just get the abattoir to its full potential and to really try and get it to look after the Far North region.
“Burns Meats is very much committed to ensuring a high eating quality. It’s really important to us to build that high quality, paddock-to-plate product up here in Far North Queensland.
“Not only to look after ourselves but also help the Far North butchering industry, the abattoir is there as a tool for the Far North Queensland beef industry,” he said.
