While lamb prices might be at record highs there are fears they may have peaked.
And there are wildly different opinions among those in the industry about what exactly needs to be done to keep prices high.
Fairton sheep farmer Verne Thomas says he believes the key to success is for New Zealand lamb exporters’ to do a better job of marketing the product overseas.
“My personal opinion is prices are going to stay up as long as meat companies can do their job with the marketing.
If they shy away from what they’re doing at the moment with the supermarkets and actually go and look for some niche markets, it might actually look good for the future, for the long term.”
Verne Thomas believes the answer is in finding niche high paying markets.
“At the moment they seem to go into these big supermarkets and say’ how many thousands of tonnes of meat do you want a year? And the supermarkets? They are just bulk buying aren’t they? Just like your warehouses.”
Verne Thomas says the marketers are making big percentages, with little work involved.
“It’s easy for the marketers – they can go in there and say well we’ve sold so many hundreds of thousands of tonnes of our product and it’s a big percentage and there’s no work involved.
“They’ve got to get off their backsides and start looking for some real markets, like looking at the Asian markets and some of these higher priced markets, and they’d actually make a lot more money.
“I don’t know if they’re just scared to do the work or what it is.”
However, Rakaia sheep farmer and Federated Farmers Meat and Fibre Deputy Chairperson, Jeanette Maxwell, says lamb prices are currently good for all the wrong reasons.
She says there needs to be a fundamental change in the domestic scene for New Zealand lamb to succeed overseas.
“You need to work with the supermarkets and we do need to have these relationships but also you need to have – getting way back down the chain – a good relationship between farmers and their processors.
Jeanette Maxwell says processors and farmers need to learn to be much more loyal to each other.
“I know one blames one, and one blames the other, but there’s an awful lot to be said about having good loyalties between processors and farmers, and having good communication and harmonious relationships right back at that end.”
Without loyalty and good communication companies going to the marketplace cannot guarantee supply, she says.
“It leaves the companies going out to the marketplace trying to win contracts or say they’re going to do a certain amount of supply and having to hedge what they’re doing because they don’t know if their farmer is going to stay loyal to them.”
Other farmers Country 99 TV spoke to point to what they see is the massive overcapacity in the domestic market which, they say, costs the industry dearly.
The Government is due to release its Meat Sector Strategy Report on May 4 which will outline its vision for the sector.
