Hmmm… I had a roo-wrap at the Ayers Rock campsite, and my thought was that it might as well be beef for all the difference it made.
What do kangaoos eat? Grass, like cattle? If so, are they more efficient in producing meat? SOunds like, from comments above that the acres/grass to meat ratio is better for cattle.
The Roo meat market doesn’t come from culling. On the rare occasion there is a Kangaroo cull, it is undertaken to address a specific overpopulation problem.
On an ongoing basis, Roo meat is provided by registered hunters. The hunters are government licensed and have quota’s for the maximum number of Kangaroo’s they are allowed to shoot. I understand that the market for meat and leather remains sufficiently small though, that the hunters rarely actually take the full quota in any case.
The primary food source depends upon the breed of Roo, but yes mainly grass, with some species of Roo also eating bushes and some leaves.
Not sure on the comparative efficiency on a grass/meat ratio though. Although Kangaroos can survive on quality and type of vegetation that cattle would disdain.
Roos might be more tolerant of drought, which could be handy in some areas of the US, except the culture and infrastructure is already oriented towards cattle. Lots of inertia to overcome.
Weight-for-weight, roos produce tiny droppings compared to cattle, which may indicate that they are efficient at processing what they eat into meat and/or energy. It also indicates that they can get by with very little water, compared to cattle. Thus they should do well iin sparse, dry country.
As has been pointed out, they require a huge range, and if they are to be constrained they require very large, serious fencing. The cost of fencing a large range to a high standard is part of what makes farming unviable.
Plus, they are ludicrously easy to hunt, since they evolved with few or no natural predators. So why would you go to the trouble and expense of trying to enclose and farm a mob of roos when you can just go out and shoot one whenever you feel the need?
To answer the OP with economics. As others have stated, Kangaroos in Australia are not farmed, its shot from private property to a Quota, usually on massive 10,000+ acre properties 4-5 hours drive inland. The lack of water and arid vegetation means its impossible to raise cattle or sheep on this land without importing feed and water from huge distances away.
Meanwhile that same land has many many thousands of Kangaroo’s, that are not bred, or fed or watered, they can survive in that terrain. So the property owner has zero costs to obtain the Roo meat other than the costs incurred by going out and shooting it. No feed or water costs.
I can’t see the US allowing Kangaroo’s to be introduced and roam wild through arid areas, they would always have to be penned and farmed, with vastly higher costs. So it’s always going to be cheaper to import kangaroo meat from Australia rather than farm it in the US.
What!? Is this a joke? You think that the “grazing” industry in Australian raises stock using feed and water imported from huge distances away? The word “grazing” is a clue.
This page has a map of Australian grazing areas. Most of it is not 4-5 hours from the coast but more like ten or more, and much of it probably a couple of days’ drive. A very large proportion of it is “livestock grazing in arid and semi-arid regions and covers 430 million hectares or 56 percent of Australia”.
Cattle and sheep are raised on grass. You know, the stuff that grows on the ground throughout the areas of Australia used for the pastoral industry. The water comes from dams, bores and creeks on the property.
They are fed very largely off the same grass that the cattle or sheep eat, and they water off the same sources as the cattle. They are undoubtedly lighter on the land, grass and water than cattle, that is true. The property owner does not obtain the roo meat. It is obtained by professional licensed roo hunters. Their costs are high because of the very stringent health standards imposed. The one guy I know who is a professional roo shooter finds it hard to make much of a living out of it, although whether he is typical I don’t know.
Well, in fairness, cattle grazed in the way you describe are mostly grazed at a very low density, and even then they don’t thrive; they have to be rounded up and moved elsewhere for some weeks before slaughter for fattening on more productive land or in feedlots (and much of this is done abroad; hence the live cattle export trade). Presumably, it works this way because it’s cheaper to move the cattle than to move the feed.
Kangaroo meat can be produced without this additional expense and, as you point out, it’s lighter on the land than the production of unfattened cattle. Thus you can produce roo meat on land which is not nearly productive enough to raise slaughter-ready beef cattle.
Me too. They served it at the Garlic Festival. It was nasty.
Ostrich meat though is pretty good. And Alligator is very tasty.
Raising cattle is and always has been essentially entirely on grass in Australia. Use of feedlots for “finishing” cattle is a recent development. Feed and particularly water have never been “imported” from huge distances away for grazing stock in Australia to any degree worth discussing.
I just checked on the Woolworths online grocery shopping site for my suburb.
Kangaroo meat ranges from $7.85/kg (for mince) to $19.95/kg (for fillet steaks).
By comparison, on the same website minced beef ranges from $7.96 to $13.91 per kg, and beef fillets from $21.99 to $39.99 per kg.
So kangaroo meat is generally cheaper than beef, and no doubt this is partly a reflection of the lower production costs discussed in earlier posts.
But I think it’s also a reflection of market demand. Traditionally for (whitefella) Australians roo meat was low-status; you didn’t eat it if you could afford something better. I think this is no longer the case, but this view has established dietary habits and preferences which are hard to break.
Plus, cooking roo meat is a bit of an art; it’s easy to get it wrong and overcook it, and I suspect that when people report a poor experience when they sampled roo meat, this is often the cause. (Plus, the flavour’s a bit gamey, which is not to everyone’s taste.)
Australia exports a large chunk of both its beef production and its roo meat production, so - unless there is an import restriction at the US end - if Americans want roo meat, or can be persuaded that they want it, there seems to be no obvious barrier to their buying it from Australia, and no obvious advantage in either (a) attempting to farm it in the US, an attempt which I suspect would be doomed to failure, or (b) attempting to establish a feral population in the US so that in time it could be commercially hunted, which is how it’s produced here.
That’s because we move the cattle instead. And a lot of Australian cattle are fattened in feedlots; it’s just the feedlots are in other countries, like Indonesia. But I confess I don’t know how long the live cattle export trade has been going.
That, of course, is going to be the trick.
Exotic meats just haven’t made much headway in the U.S., even with native “exotics”, like bison or alligator. I’d guess that bison has the biggest market share among meats other than the traditional (beef, chicken, turkey, pork), and it’s still pretty uncommon, if not unheard of, in most supermarkets. Yes, there are restaurants which carry it (even specialize in it), but it’s a common meal for very few people, and it’s still tiny compared to beef or pork – and that’s meat from an animal which looks roughly like a cow.
Now, you want Americans to start eating kangaroo – something which looks nothing like the sorts of animals which we’re used to eating, and which might be seen as “cuddly” by people with memories of Kanga and Roo from Winnie-the-Pooh? That’s going to be a very, very steep road to climb.
Given previous problems with the intentional introduction of non-native species (not to mention the unintentional introduction of invasive species), I don’t see this as being something which would ever have a chance of being approved, anyway.
Actually what your figures seem to show is that that basic beef and basic kangaroo are about the same but high end beef is more expensive. Which is what you would expect given the intensive breeding and feeding that goes into high end beef. What this says about what roo prices would be if intensively farmed is probably approximately nothing. That’s the problem with the whole debate. You can’t compare anything about what the economics of roo meat would be if people liked roo enough to support roo farming (and if roo were farmed) to anything about the economics of roo meat now, because the two scenarios are so different that everything would change.
Look, firstly, are we in agreement that Australian cattle and sheep on arid properties are not, as a matter of fact, raised using feed and water imported from huge distances? Yes? Good, then why do you keep arguing as if I said anything different, or as if coremelt’s post wasn’t utterly wrong?
Secondly, I am just not at all sure you have a basic grip on cattle grazing in Australia. Finishing beef on feedlots is something developed in the last 30 to 40 years. Before that, Australian beef was just grass finished. So any suggestion that grazing in arid or semi-arid areas is only possible by finishing using feed is just wrong. Secondly, if you think the grain feeding of Australian cattle occurs in other countries and is co-incident with the live export trade, you need a reality check. There are over 700 feedlots in Australia.
Ditto Buffalo meat, which does have a following here (USA) for it’s lack of fat, for certain cultists, in my opinion (pork has been bred to near tasteless “leaness”).
I’ve seen it even in some corner coffee shops now, but of course they’re bred and ranched
Fair enough.
My suspicion is that roo farm is prevented not by a lack of demand for roo meat, but rather by the fact that roo hunting is a cheaper way of producing roo meat.
This will continue to be the case until - if ever - demand for roo meat rises to a point where it cannot be met by hunting. (And if that ever does happen, roo meat will of course become more expensive, because farmed roo meat will cost a great deal more to produce.)
In the context of the OP, the question “why don’t we farm roos in the US?” is answered by “because it is cheaper to import hunted roo meat from Australia, and we don’t envisage this situation changing”.
Yes.
My point is that cattle raised by grazing on arid land are not slaughter-ready. They need to be fattened, and this is done, not by bringing feed to the cattle as coremelt suggested, but by bringing the cattle to feed. The cattle get moved to more productive grazing lands - i.e. not arid - or to feedlots, and the feedlots may be in or outside Australia.
In short, arid rangelands cannot on their own produce beef economically; they need to be supplemented by more productive land, either in the form of better pasture to which the cattle get moved at a certain point, or in the form of cropland which produces grain which gets fed to the cattle. Whereas the arid rangelands can and do produce roo meat economically. Coremelt was wrong about the way in which cattle are fed, but he was right about the need for feed which does not come from arid rangelands.
I’m aware that feedlots are comparatively recent, and that they are to be found within Australia as well as abroad. None of that affects my basic point, which is that arid rangelands alone cannot produce beef economically. Even before feedlots, when beef was grass-finished, that finishing did not take place on arid rangelands, did it?
What’s the relevance of all this? The point is that roos are well adapted to the arid rangelands which about in Australia - much more so than cattle - and they will always be plentiful and hunting them will always be easy and cheap, which is why roo farming is a very unlikely venture.
If the demand for (and price of) roo meat did rise significantly, is it wildly fanciful to think that the response - at least in part - would not be an attempt to establish roo farms, but rather a switch in arid ranges from cattle grazing to roo hunting? The roos and the cattle presumably compete for grazing, and if roo meat is valuable whereas the return from cattle becomes increasing iffy due to drought, political uncertainty over the export trade, an uncertain supply or price of grain, etc, then the rational choice might be to focus on producing roo meat.
The lack of apples to apples comparisons are the trouble. Cattle can be raised and finished in arid and certainly in semi-arid areas. They will not reliably be as large and fat as cattle finished on grain or better pasture but that isn’t the point.
Kangaroos can reliably be raised and finished in arid and semi-arid areas but how will their yield compare to that of cattle raised in the same area? I wouldn’t be too quick to assume the 'roos would yield anything better than the equivalent carrying volume of cattle in similar circumstances, even if the cattle are in far from peak condition.
I’m also not sure about the idea that kangaroo would be more expensive if farmed. 'Roo hunting is presently an operation in which an individual guy drives long distances in a small truck with a refrigerated compartment finding and shooting 'roos one by one, then returning with a small load to a processing plant. It’s a “cottage industry” and cottage industries are very inefficient.
I don’t know exactly how 'roo farming would work but I would not be too quick to dismiss the massive efficiencies that farming (as opposed to hunting) yields.
I agree with you entirely however that lack of demand is a key (probably the key) reason for lack of 'roo farming. There is no point in making massive investment to efficiently and cheaply produce a large amount of something few people want.
Roo shooters or hunters as you put it kill roos all year round, that’s how we get the meat for human consumption and pet meat. Farmers also kill them when they see them around their crops (but usually a shot into the air is enough to scatter them and move them on). Alot die on the road as well, there are huge debates here about if we are killing too many. There are lots of arguments from both sides like only male roos should be shot, this is definately not what happens because where I work we get so many joeys bought in whos mothers have been shot or run over on the road( female roos will actually eject the joey out of the pouch when being chased or scared so whatever is chasing them goes for the joey and the female lives to breed again…harsh but effective in terms of keeping the species going) We don’t farm them in Australia because we don’t need to, besides the red kangaroo for example are pretty big and I doubt they’d stay behind a fence if they didn’t want to lol 
I actually don’t like kangaroo meat, I feed it to my dogs though as it’s pretty much fat free and really good for them. In some breeds of dog it is too rich and can cause problems.
It’s not possible to actually farm kangaroos.
They can clear a 6’ fence from a standing start and can scramble over a 9’ fence if they have an inclination to do so. They can dig as well as any dog and will happily go under any fence that isn’t buried at least 6 inches with a right angle bend. As a result the cost of fencing kangaroos is in excess of $5000/km even under ideal conditions. If we assume we can run 20 head/km^2 and can sell them at $100 each then it would take 10 years of kangaroo farming just to cover the cost of fencing with no other outlay. If conditions are anything other than ideal, such as the presence of watercourses or rock close to the surface, the cost of fencing skyrockets.
Kangaroos are highly disease prone when kept in conditions that are even slightly overcrowded. They can’t be herded at all. They die of stress when kept confined especially during transport. They are extremely nomadic. They are notoriously sensitive to pesticides making parasite control almost impossible.
The list goes on and on. Kangaroos simply are not a suitable candidate for farming. It’s quite difficult hard to think of a worse candidate amongst grazing animals.