In response to a question from Parliament this week, Minister for Agriculture Damien O’Connor said that this year, animals worth about $406 million will be exported.
The value of livestock exported in 2021 was about $340 million, which was up from $261 million in 2020.
Mark Willis, who is the chair of Livestock Export NZ, said that the value of animals exported went up by more than 20% from the previous price highs.
He said that Chinese importers and farmers wanted to get breeding stock from New Zealand before the ban, so the demand for breeding stock from New Zealand went up.
Data from the Ministry of Primary Industries showed that 109,921 animals were exported in 2020 and 134,722 animals were exported in 2021. So far this year, 109,835 had been sent abroad.
Willis said that a cow meant for export now sold for between $2,000 and $2,200 at the farm gate.
He said that China had a lot of dairy farms, but it could only breed about 40% of the cows it needed. The rest had to be brought in from other countries.
Willis said that about 4000 farmers sold their goods on the export market.
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Lyle Williams is a dairy farmer in Ashburton. For the last three years, he has sold about 150 young cows for export each year.
He said that he would usually get between $1600 and $1900 for an export cow.
In New Zealand, where there were already too many young cows on the market, he would get $500 to $600 for the same animal.
Williams said he was worried that putting even more animals on the local market that aren’t needed would hurt the whole business and cause prices to drop.
Williams said that the dairy industry was getting smaller and wouldn’t need the cows that were being sent abroad.
Since it costs him about $400 to raise one cow, he would also lose a lot of money if he raised them himself.
He thought that cows might be sold as bobby calves, but he said that this made about $25 per animal.
He said that there wasn’t enough grass to raise the replacement cows that were already there, and that more cows would put pressure on the grass.
Richard McColl, who works for the Meat Industry Association as manager of industrial operations and innovation, said that the export dairy cows couldn’t be raised for the meat trade because there wasn’t enough demand for meat in the country.
McColl said that the extra animals would also take the place of animals that are already raised for meat.
He said that when the live trade market was shut down, the animals lost a way to make a living.
He also said that farms wouldn’t be able to raise them because they would take the place of cows that are raised to give milk.
