The Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Beef Australia are attending Canadian Western Agribition for the first time.
Simon Irwin and Bryce Camm are at Agribition to check out everything Agribition has to offer as well as promote their cattle expo that’s held once every three years.
“Cannot tell you how impressed we are. We’re very fortunate to have some people from Agribition come out to our event in May this year, so it’s just great to come and see everything that we were told over there in action,” said Irwin who is the CEO.
Beef Australia signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Agribition earlier this year for collaboration purposes. One of Irwin’s takeaways from Agribition was a dinner reception for exhibitors on Monday night called the Beef N’ Barley Reception; another was how the CWA Newsroom works with media briefings every day of the event at 9 a.m. with local news journalists and dedicated staff ready to handle any media requests for interviews and story leads. Irwin, who was also a former journalist in Australia, says their event has something similar called “Beef TV” – a studio set up that does 48 hours of coverage throughout the week but was impressed with the setup of the CWA Newsroom. “We will improve that when we go,” said Irwin of making improvements to their media coverage.
Irwin then talked about his show, Beef Australia. It got it’s start in 1988 and since then grew into an international cattle expo held tri-annually and welcomes guests from 34 different countries. Beef Australia has three different events rolled into one – for most of the day it’s a cattle show, then the evening features a family carnival, and entertainment the rest of the evening. “We do much the same things you do here except we have ten celebrity chefs, we have a lot more emphasis on the actual eating of beef, so we are for the beef community not the beef industry,” he explained.
He says Beef Australia has similar challenges to Agribition in finding more accommodations for attendees. Beef Australia is held in Rockhampton in Central Queensland, a city with a population of over 79 thousand but when the event starts the population more than doubles from attendees. “Rockhampton, like Regina, is not overly well serviced by air routes,” he noted. “You can’t get a booking now for 2027 so we put up tent cities, we put up glamping, we have Airbnb. Rockhampton in 2023 was the most searched town in Australia on Airbnb so people are desperate to get there.”
Bryce Camm, who is the Chairman of Beef Australia and a livestock producer, talked to reporters about the Aussie cattle industry. Camm says the cattle herd is coming off a decline driven by drought three years prior and prices rose as a result, but has since stabilized to about 28.5 million head. “Prospects are pretty strong for global beef, particularly on the back of a declining U.S. herd and so exports are a big part of Australia’s production – about 75 to 80 per cent of our beef is exported each year and prices are rising again which is giving a lot of confidence in boosting investment in the sector which is good.”
Camm also says they’re checking out the different cattle breeds while at Agribition.
