An export order of 1600 Angus heifers bound for Turkey next month could be just a taste of a much bigger feast to come for breeders.
Austock Exports Turkey (AET) has spent the past three weeks helping select 1600 females – about half of them pregnancy tested in calf – from Angus herds in northern and southern NSW and northern Victoria to help kickstart a new chapter in Turkey’s beef industry.
The stock will leave for Turkey next month, to be split among three private pastoral companies, and likely fill four 747s and a small vessel.
And AET general manager, Sinan Ogun, who splits his time between Istanbul and Sydney, said orders for another 3000-3500 head would likely flow as soon as early next year and may even extend to some Angus bulls.
“In the past six months, the gates have opened – our Turkish office is now getting eight to 10 inquiries a week,” he said.
It follows trials of about 110 head in 2008 that showed the breed to be a good fit.
Mr Ogun said there was ongoing demand from Turkey for at least 6000 females a year – and potentially up to 10,000 head a year.
“Really they are going to need about 60,000 to 80,000 animals during the next six to seven years to really expand but there’s no way they’re going to be able to do that through live imports alone.
“It’s going to have to happen through ET (embryo transfer) as well.”
And while the Turkish industry lacked experience in large-scale ET, the current order included HBR females that would make good donors.
Mr Ogun said most of the beef being eaten in Turkey currently was from two-year-old Holstein bulls.
“And when I say that I mean bulls – not steers. It’s a credit to Turkish chefs that their cuisine is so good.”
He said the Turkish beef herd was principally based on Holstein, Brown Swiss and Simmental genetics – and even the latter was bred principally for milk production.
Beef imports were almost nil, with a tariff of about 135 per cent making it price prohibitive.
While meat prices were double what they were in Australia, so too were production costs with as much as 78pc of farm outgoings typically going to feed.
Mr Ogun said Angus looked to be the right fit for the Turkish industry which was looking for highly fertile, highly feed efficient and moderate framed breeders that could acclimatise to properties that were typically about 1200-1300 metres above sea level.
At this stage they weren’t selecting for specific meat quality traits such as marbling though this would likely follow down the track.
He said about 95pc of the Turkish herd was run in feedlot conditions although one of the current buyers of Angus females, Panagro, planned to use them in an open grazing venture it was developing with the help of university researchers.
In filling the current order, they’d aimed for a broad selection of bloodlines in the hope of building a big genetic pool of material able to adapt to Turkish conditions and different disease pressures.
With Turkey a BSE-free country, Mr Ogun said the options for sourcing breeders had been restricted to Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay, and some states of the US.
And while Australia’s “clean, green image” had helped make it attractive as a source of females, Mr Ogun believes the local industry isn’t pushing that selling point strongly enough.
“Australia has an exceptional reputation as a clean, green producer but I don’t think we do enough to promote that,” he said.
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