On a sprawling property in outback Australia, Nick Deshon and his team are drafting rangeland goats. The goats are a motley, multicoloured lot; some have beards, others sport mohawks or woolly mops, long hair or short. There are curved horns, tufty tails and soft eyes.
But this motley crew – born wild then rounded up – has helped make Australia the largest exporter of goat meat in the world.
Deshon and his sons, Tom, Harry and Jack, work on their 24,000 hectare (59,300 acre) property between Cumborah and Lightning Ridge in northern New South Wales. They have been operating a goat depot since 2003, sourcing small numbers of feral goats from pastoralists from Moree to Gilgandra and collating them for transport to the abattoir in Bourke, where up to 3,500 can be processed daily.
In the heady days of 2021, goat prices at the abattoir peaked at $10/kg carcass weight, before plummeting to $2.40 at the end of 2023. “When there’s no price, no one chases the goats,” Deshon says. “At the end of 2023 there was not much coming in the gate, and we didn’t have a lot of feed.
“Then it started raining and the price went up to $3.20 and people started chasing them again. Now we’re back in the game, the feed is unreal, and the goats are pumping on weight.”
Feral goats are found all over Australia, but western NSW is where they are most prevalent, with the last count, in 2020, estimating a population of 4.9 million. According to Meat and Livestock Australia 2,364,307 goats, worth $235m, were slaughtered in 2023.
That’s only 0.4% of global production, and domestically, the market is small. Just 9% of Australian goat meat is consumed onshore. The rest is exported: Australia produces 35% of all goat meat exports, and accounts for 44% of the global export value of goat meat. Most is exported as frozen whole carcasses.
The biggest market is the United States, accounting for an average 60% volume share over the past five years. Goat, an affordable meat that has a low fat content, high iron levels, and no religious restrictions, is popular in Hispanic and Muslim communities.
Feral rangeland goats still make up the bulk of the market in Australia, through goat depots. Goat depots are collection points that allows operators like Deshon to bypass Australia’s livestock tracing system and tagging requirements, provided the goat goes directly from the property of capture to a goat depot to an abattoir.
But farmed production systems are on the rise, encouraged by the NSW government, which recently invested $1.2m into the industry through its Going Ahead with Goats project.
“Our goat producers in western NSW are at the forefront of the goat industry and the NSW government is supporting them with a number of resources so goat producers and stakeholders can take their goat business and the industry to the next level,” the NSW agriculture minister, Tara Moriarty, says.
But the Invasive Species Council has warned against increasing goat production, estimating that feral goats cause losses to livestock farming of $25m a year.
“Goats are one of the worst invasive species because they stop regeneration of bushland, they overgraze [vegetation], they outcompete native animals and they erode soils and stream banks,” the Invasive Species Council’s advocacy director, Jack Gough, says.
“They have been recognised under federal environment law as a direct threat to species on the brink of extinction and one of the emerging threats is the reduction of carbon storage due to their eating of woody vegetation.”
Kieran Smith is the goat adviser with NSW Local Land Services, the body responsible for the administration of the Going Ahead with Goats project. He says the damage caused by feral goats is not specific to goats – it would be a problem with any uncontrolled herbaceous animal.
“We work with landholders to manage total grazing pressure, which considers the number of domestic, native and pest species, to produce positive outcomes for the landscape,” Smith says.
Goats are well adapted to arid and semi-arid environments meaning farming requires little to no chemical inputs.
“They can also control weeds in the landscape and their production has considerable economic value for western NSW communities, not just the landholders but flow on effects from truck drivers to abattoir workers,” Smith says.
The main barriers to commercialisation of goats have been the lack of suitable infrastructure and the seasonal variation of the wild goat population. The Going Ahead with Goats program aims to upskill producers to improve productivity and profitability and research the development of sustainable genetic improvements, especially the introduction of Boer and Kalahari goats.
But Deshon is happy to remain harvesting the feral population. “Farmed goats need to be ear-tagged but if goats go straight to the abattoir you don’t need to tag,” he says. “In a busy year I’ve processed up to 10,000 goats and tagging all of them would be a nightmare, plus there are safety issues handling the big billies. Ours is a low-cost operation and you can still make a bob out of it when the prices are low.”
