*No-one believes for a second that the 'poor WA farmers' will go broke - they get far too many handouts for that.*

Yabby, please explain this.
I commenced my first retail butchery in 1989 and sold lamb loin chops for $7 per kilo, F1/4 chops for $4 per kilo and legs for $6 per kilo. Farmers were fetching around $6 per lamb.

Today I sell lamb loins for $19 per kilo, F1/4 for $11 per kilo and legs for $11 per kilo, farmers sell lambs for around $60 per lamb on average.

So farmers are getting 10 times their 89 price while we are getting around 3 times our 89 prices. You tell me who is making the money?

Just for the record, I don't think anything should be exported alive, not fish, not prawns or meat. We have seen the decline of our stocks, both wild and farmed to the point where some industries are going broke. Now if that's good business then I'll eat my hat.

*and legs for $6 per kilo. Farmers were fetching around $6 per lamb.*

And so rectub, you were selling 1 single kg of an 18-20kg lamb to
pay for the whole lamb. What a frigging ripoff!

Do you know what it costs to run a farm these days? I just bought
some DAP fertiliser for next year and at $1.50 a kg, its 50% more
expensive then mutton, which is worth around 1$ a kg in the WA
saleyards right now.

What do you do as a butcher? You smile at the housewife, make
a few wisecracks, chop up the lamb and get it out the door within
a very few days.

By contrast the farmer spends 12 months feeding the mother, feeding
the lamb, facing all sorts of climate calamities.

I remind you that the 3$ a kg that the producer is paid for that
lamb, will hardly buy a cup of coffee in the city.

What will you do for 3$ rectub? Will you nurture and grow a
kg of nutritious meat for over a year?

Nope, you will buy it for a song and flog it off for all that you
can get for it.

As we see above, you want a single kg of meat to pay for a whole
lamb, so you are generously giving the grower 5% of your takings.

Wow!

No Yabby, you are engaging in your usual wild generalisations. I only despise cruel farmers, including those involved in the live export trade. And what makes you think that "city slickers" - or in fact anyone in employment today - do not face all sorts of threats to THEIR livelihood? No, of course, it's all about how tough FARMERS have it, handouts and all.

Not sure about the witchcraft stuff, or that last link PALE posted; I couldn't find anything there.

rehctub. nice to see you. I don't know a lot about meat prices, but as it happens I was passing a butcher's shop the other day, and I noticed prices like you mention. Your maths seem pretty right to me. Any notion of YOU making money seems to be offensive to Yabby though. Let's not forget that you have to pay staff, superannuation, infrastructure, WCI, payroll tax and any other incidentals that the government chooses to impose on you. Not so the live export trade though, it's pretty much clear profit all the way for them. No wonder they cry tears of blood when it's threatened. BTW - did anyone see the seven or eight pages of total claptrap, in glorious, living colour that the trade put out last week?

And you're right - nothing should be exported live. Except Yabby (and all those like him).

Nicky

And so rectub, you were selling 1 single kg of an 18-20kg lamb to
pay for the whole lamb. What a frigging ripoff!

Yes good point yabby, well it appears that way however 1 kilo today at say $19 equates to less than 20% of the cost of the lamb. Have you gone backwards like that?

Furthermore, my rent in 89 was $128/M2, today it is $1242/M2. So my rent alone has increased some 10 times and I have not even touched on the other costs, many of them as ‘additional costs’ conjured up post 89.

It seems the farmers aren’t the only ones raising their prices X 10 hey!

And, don’t forget, we don’t get handouts if your sheep die, or the drought/flood effects meat prices and or availability. I say again, ‘farmers are a protected species’ they get hand outs if it rains, hand outs if it doesn’t rain yet they have seen a 10 fold increase in their gross return on product during this timeframe.

The facts are plain and simple.

Live export rewards the grower, the transport companies and the agents. Where processing here rewards all of these plus thousands more who work in and rely on the local meat industry right from the guy who sweeps the processing floor to the kids raising money for their events by way of ‘sausage sizzles’. Live export does very little in the way of benefiting our community and you know it!

The cruelty of animals is not the only issue we tax payers should be aware of when it comes to live exports.

Why should we prop up your farms in tough times when on the one hand you except our ‘hand outs’ while at the same time take the easy option of ‘live exporting’ knowing full well that your actions are creating meat shortages in our (your) country which in turn forces the very ones who provide the assistance for your farms to pay excessive prices at times?

Care to justify this?

Good to see the real subject being discussed. Welcome back rectub.

There is a lot I would like to say but wont until Yabby`s replied so we stay on track.
For what it is worth the Government have sold 'both' farmers and private operators. Below are some threads everybody should read.

http://www.pc.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/83289/sub100.pdf

http://www.austbeef.com.au/Content.asp?regID=15403&id=73794

Oh, and you be careful not to trip down the stairs Yabbs:)

I cannot believe the blatant attacks on farmers in this thread, I am offended by the accusations of living off handouts and all the other bull that has been thrown around.....it is completely obvious that a large majority of australians have absolutely no idea about the running costs of a farm.

Id like to point out that when we sell the lambs at our local markets it is not us who control the pricing - basic economics tells you how any market operates...supply and demand pretty well says it all, also major buyers like Woolworths with large orders to fill have a massive impact on the price of lamb.

By the time we pay for drenching, animal health, feed, agistment costs, freight, agent commisions, levies, fees etc etc we may come out even - we recently bought some 'weanerguard'(a drench for lambs) it was $400 for 500mls, fertiliser for this years cropping was approx $30,000 - thankfully we had rain so the wheat looks great, however the prices have dropped to a point where we wont cover our costs.This was our last year of hope, we have had 3 years of crop failure..about $100K lost. I doubt the bank will allow us to extend our overdraft for next years crop.

So, to the butcher man, Im not sure where you get your info from but its all wrong. Handouts for us are NIL, we dont get interest rate subsidy, we dont get EC payments, we dont get the diesel rebate.We have off farm income which makes it impossible to be eligble for alot of these so called handouts
If we did get the EC payments I think we would get $380 a fortnight, so Im not sure that would stop us from going broke