He will study how business sustainability can be achieved within the varying climate and market forces of North West Queensland. This will include investigating future global and domestic beef markets and, in particular, will focus on understanding the changing and evolving global consumption of red meat.

Mr Burnett’s family run a 9000 head beef cattle enterprise, turning over 2000 head per year. He is particularly interested in identifying what markets will open for his expanding beef cattle enterprise over the next five to ten years.

“Key problems we face are linked to trying to produce the best product we can, under highly variable climate conditions, that will suit our markets year in, year out,” he said.

“Our business, along with many others in Northern Australia, is heavily reliant on the live export market and I believe we should be aiming for diversification.

“The beef industry is increasingly characterised by market changes, like China opening up for chilled beef and South East Asia fluctuating in the quantity and size of live export animals they require.

“So our short term plan is to keep our business horizontally integrated in the beef production chain but expansion is essential to its future viability.”

Colin will seek to understand changing business requirements by visiting a number of both customer and competitor nations. These include investigating live export in South East Asia, examining the growing market for Australian chilled beef in China and visiting South America to attempt to determine what impact modernisation and development will have on its capacity to supply beef to the global market. He will also study how different businesses across a range of countries manage climate variability.