I WAS surprised to see two stories about the livestock industry in the mainstream print media last week.
The industry's old nemesis PETA has been at it again in its usual highly volatile style - a video of I Killed the Prom Queen guitarist Jona Weinhofen holding a forlorn foam copy of a bloodied and battered lamb, supposedly depicting injuries sustained during shearing.
But this time the story was featured with a very credible article accompanying a very good rebuttal from a couple of local shearers.
Apparently Mr Weinhofen is some sort of celebrity. I suppose I'm showing my age and ignorance by saying that I have never heard of him or his band.
Reportedly he has been a vegan for 15 years so that explains why, with his vegan beliefs, he could only be shown holding a fake lamb instead of the real thing - maybe they couldn't find the real item with any damage so they had to fake it.
Congratulations to Jamestown-based shearer Trent Higgins. He has, on his own, shown a more positive response to the PETA ridicule than I've seen from most of the much more powerful industry bodies.
The photo of Sean Harrison holding a real lamb with a nice clean shearing job was pure gold!
The other news to hit the mainstream media was the announcement of the planned sale of the Kidman empire. I've yet to speak to anybody in the livestock game who was not taken by surprise. By the same token, I haven't spoken to a soul who, on reflection, hasn't agreed that the planned sell- off shouldn't have come as a surprise.
Like most rural enterprises of long standing, the Kidmans are probably facing the problem of too many generations of family interest in the business.
Most people's reaction to the sale is an immediate fear of a foreign entity buying an iconic Australian brand. Chinese, Middle East or Indonesian buyers seem to be the popular choice of suspects.
I have read all of the statistics about the size of the Kidman enterprise, the number of cattle, the annual turn-off and the group's strategic interests in the export meat business.
The only price I've seen bandied about is a figure of $300 million. This sounds like a lot of money, but to my pure layman's mind, this sounds too cheap for such a sprawling mass of land and cattle.
The sale of Kidmans as a whole makes it a bit problematical for most people who aspire to launch themselves into the pastoral industry.
We have seen some of the barons of industry dabble in rural properties before. For example, Kerry Packer had a fairly diverse rural portfolio that included pastoral properties in the NT and Qld, however an investment of this size and scale would test even the most intrepid entrepreneur.
The things that really favour the sale of such a huge business is the apparent settling of the live export trade with Indonesia, the new free trade agreements with South Korea, Japan and China and most importantly, escalating prices for cattle in the local saleyards.
Prices up to $2.66 a kilogram liveweight this week at Dublin are a sure sign that prices are edging ever more surely toward the $3/kg that I suggested at the end of 2014.
I don't like to gloat so I will wait for it to happen - soon!
