Researchers help cattle farmers beef up income and ease up prices
“I’d love to cook beef rendang more often, but it’s just not possible with my budget for food and the beef price being so high,” complained Ibu Imah, 45. Ibu Imah works as a housemaid for a middle-class family in South Jakarta and was looking at beef one morning while buying groceries at a mobile grocery seller. Beef rendang is a favourite Indonesian dish of beef cooked slowly in spices for hours. The current price of beef in Jakarta is around Rp 100,000 per kilogram, but it skyrocketed to Rp 180,000 during the month of Ramadan. Indonesians have long complained about the price of local beef, which is generally twice as high as in the neighbouring countries of Malaysia and Singapore.
Even with such high prices, Indonesians’ appetite for beef remains robust, with per capita beef consumption increasing by 14 percent since 2013 according to the Indonesian Agriculture Ministry. This year alone, the per capita consumption of beef is predicted to be 2.85 kilograms, an increase of 10 percent from last year’s figure of 2.5 kilograms. This is still very small compared to the American consumption of 34 kilograms, but there is no weakening of demand for beef. To increase beef supply and ease prices to work towards beef self-sufficiency, the Indonesian Government created several programs worth more than twenty trillion rupiah to support the domestic cattle breeding and cow fattening industry. A severe lack of supply has forced the Government to increase import permits of live cattle to at least 700,000 in 2017.
Complicating efforts to increase local beef production is the fact that Indonesia’s cattle producers are largely smallholder farmers who lack sufficient resources for quality feed and modern cattle management. For example, there is strong domestic demand for high quality Bali beef produced in eastern Indonesia, such as Bali and Sumbawa in East Nusa Tenggara. Meat from Bali cattle raised by smallholder farmers has lower cholesterol than other local beef produced in Java, and is free of artificial hormones, as the cows are fed only greens without feed concentrates. However, these smallholder farmers are unable to keep up with demand due to poor cattle management, a lack of high quality feed, and long market chains which reduce farmers’ ability to demand better prices.
In mid-2015, researchers from the University of Mataram in West Nusa Tenggara went into partnership with a meat producing company, PT Dharma Raya Hutamajaya, to help around 1,000 smallholder farmers in Sumbawa address these specific challenges. The collaboration is supported by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and centres on introducing the high-quality fodder tree, leucaena. It is a nutritious shrubby browse legume which, research shows, can significantly increase live weight gain of growing animals and help increase calving rates of cows. In Queensland, Australia, graziers have planted more than 200,000 hectares of leucaena pastures, which have allowed them to produce ‘grass-fed’ beef of superior quality. There is already a plan to expand leucaena pastures in Queensland and the Northern Territory to two million hectares.
The tree legume should also grow easily in Sumbawa, which has a similar climate to northern Queensland. An additional advantage of these tree legumes is that they are drought resistant. This is ideal for the Sumbawa area, which generally has a drier climate than the western parts of Indonesia. The project is currently working with around 1,100 farmers to establish plots of leucaena, which is harvested daily and fed to cattle kept in small household feeding stalls. The increase in productivity is expected to be around 50 percent more than the traditional method.
Dr Dahlanuddin, the head of Konsorsium Riset Ruminansia Besar at the University of Mataram (KKRB Unram), which leads the research project, believes participating farmers can expect an improvement in their income of at least 30 percent. In the initial months of the project, researchers visited the farmers every week to help distribute and plant leucaena seeds, and train them in cattle management and improved cattle handling. Improved cattle nutrition using leucaena fodder and cattle management have resulted in reducing calf mortality while increasing calving rates. The farmers’ cash cows have literally fattened up.
PT Dharma Raya, which has a meat processing factory in Sumbawa and sells frozen organic beef cuts to the Jakarta market, purchases all beef produced by participating farmers at premium rates–10 percent above trader value–if it meets their market specifications of weight for age. This scheme ensures that the farmers get premium prices for producing high quality, traceable cattle, while giving them access to markets and pricing transparency.
Muhammad Abrori, the director of PT Dharma Raya, has a specific goal in mind: to make organic beef produced by these farmers in Sumbawa the most sought-after beef in Indonesia, akin to Kobe beef in Japan. If this project is successful, and a similar scheme is expanded to many more cattle farmers in Indonesia resulting in greater domestic supply of beef and thus cheaper prices, then perhaps one day, Ibu Imah will be able to cook the family’s favourite beef rendang as often as she likes.
