The beef industry has been dealt a blow with Armidale’s Beef Co-operative Research Centre set to close its doors at the end of the month.
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The Beef CRC, which has been co-ordinating beef research projects for 21 years, has failed to obtain the funding that would allow it to keep running and will close on June 30.
CEO Dr Heather Burrow said the closure was not unexpected but it was a huge blow to the beef industry.
“If there was going to be a time when we had to close, now is exactly the worst time to close it down,” she said.
“We’re leading beef industry research across the world.”
Dr Burrow said cuts to CRC funding and the opening up of program s to arts, social sciences and humanities fields in 2009 had made it more difficult for the traditional CRCs to secure funding.
“It means the agricultural CRCs in particular are at risk because there are no alternative sources of funding,” she said.
“As soon as the government chose to open it up, we realised agricultural research was going to be in trouble.”
Dr Burrow said pressure for research funding to come from within the industry ignored the enormous economic benefits of the centre’s research.
“We’re not really sure why the industry should be expected to fund the research,” she said.
“Certainly they’re beneficiaries, but they’re not the major beneficiaries.”
Dr Burrow said even if the industry wanted to support the research, it wouldn’t be able to reach the required consensus from 70 per cent of beef producers quickly enough to save the Beef CRC.
“That’s an impossible dream,” she said.
The Beef CRC provided around eight local jobs and has financed a range of beef industry research projects, with current research covering topics including genomic sequence information, reducing methane emissions and creating a tick vaccine.
Dr Burrow said they were currently endeavouring to find new funding for these projects but were hopeful that partner organisations such as the Department of Primary Industries and universities would be able to continue work for a while without new funding.
“I think we’ll have a maximum of six months to find that funding,” she said.
“They can’t afford to keep funding that themselves.”
