Brooke Barkla at the Berrimah Export Yards in Darwin. Feeder buffalo being prepared for live export. Wild caught feeder buffalo calm down very quickly, travel well on livestock vessels and perform almost as well as cattle in Asian feedlots.

TOWARDS the end of the Brucellosis and Tuberculosis Eradication Campaign (BTEC) in the early 1990s a small group of buffalo in Arnhem Land were identified as being free of disease.

This disease-free status was monitored and double checked exhaustively until the mid 1990s when an estimated 40,000 head of disease-free buffalo were left alone to re-populate.

Thirty years later the descendants of this buffalo herd are reproducing at an alarming rate with current population estimates between 200,000 and 300,000.

About 95 percent of these animals are located in Arnhem Land where road networks are unsealed and totally cut off behind monsoonal river systems for about six months of the year.

Herd numbers have now reached a point where they are resulting in serious environmental damage in some fragile ecosystems such as the Arafura Swamp.

The logical approach is to harvest these animals, however, finding profitable markets for these buffalo presents a challenge.

When a muster is run, all types of animals are captured and need to be removed. The largest males and females are well suited for slaughter at abattoirs. Medium sized males are suitable for live export as “feeders” to be fattened and subsequently slaughtered for meat in Asia. Young animals can be relocated behind wire then either kept as domesticated breeders or sold into the live export trade once they reach a suitable size.

The problem is that the cost of mounting a harvesting operation in Arnhem Land is extremely high. Mustering contractors need to negotiate contracts (Section 19 Land use agreements) with the Traditional Owners (TO’s), move large quantities of equipment into (and back out of) remote areas, make their own roads and sustain themselves far from home for months at a time.

The shortest freight from western Arnhem land to the only suitable abattoir at Batchelor is at least 400km while the locations of highest stock densities are more like 600km or 14 hours away over very poor roads.

An estimated cost for the capture and delivery of larger slaughter buffalo from Arnhem Land to the abattoir at Batchelor is about $400 per head. The royalty payments due to the TO’s is variable depending on the class of stock but averages about $150 per head.

The end result is that the harvester needs a minimum return of about $550 per head delivered to the Batchelor abattoirs just to break even. Given the limited demand for buffalo meat at the present time, this is more than the abattoir can pay in order for them to make a profit.

While the live export market for male buffalo is commercially viable, it is not feasible for the harvesters to only muster medium sized males suited for live export so they can only muster mixed groups of animals including all ages, sizes and sexes. If there is no profitable slaughter market for the larger bulls and cows that are not suitable for live export then the very expensive wild harvest process becomes unviable.

This was the case during 2024 when no significant wild harvest took place. As a result, these very fertile buffalo herds have grown even larger and the damage they are doing increases.

The only alternative to commercial harvest is shooting to waste. This has already been utilised in limited areas where the exploding numbers are already causing serious problems with Australian taxpayers footing the bill. Cost estimates for shooting to waste are in the order of $50 to $120 per head with funding from either the federal government or directly from indigenous ranger groups. When animals are shot to waste there is no royalty paid to the TO’s.

Using a back of the envelope calculation, a wild herd of say 250,000 buffalo will probably contain a conservative 30pc of productive females with a calving rate of at least 50pc. Using these low-end estimates, a herd of 250,000 will have 75,000 productive cows producing 37,000 new calves per year.

Without removal of females by harvest or shooting to waste, the herd will grow by roughly 40,000 the following year, 46,000 the year after and continue to grow exponentially. No action could see the herd reach in the order of 600,000 by 2030.

Assuming the natural increase in today’s herd is about 37,000 and a conservative cost to shoot to waste (using turbine helicopters) is $70 per head then the annual cost to prevent the herd from getting any larger is about $2.6 million. The shoot to waste cost required to achieve a meaningful reduction in the breeding herd might be in the order of $10 million per year. And this will need to be repeated annually for many years.

Obviously, commercial harvest with a combination of abattoir slaughter, live exports and pastoral management of young stock is the logical and cheapest solution. Except that it is currently not commercially viable but instead is a loss-making proposition for either the harvester or the abattoir or both.

Finding new markets

One option would be to divert some of the federal government funds that might otherwise have to been spent on shooting to waste and use it to find new markets for buffalo beef and potentially subsidise the costs of capture and delivery to make it worthwhile for commercial operations to begin and continue. I can hear the groans already. No way. But unless someone can miraculously come up with a sustainable commercial market for buffalo beef then the tax payer will be footing the massive shoot to waste bill well into the next decade.

There is also potential for an integrated buffalo management approach where target populations are set for different areas and a combination of harvesting and strategic lethal culling is implemented in a planned way. At the present time this is not possible under the current Section 19 land use agreement arrangements.

If commercial harvest is unviable with shooting to waste implemented over vast areas then the only beneficiary of the resulting environmental disaster is the feral pig population.

There is a small abattoir in western Arnhem Land at Oenpelli with large nearby aboriginal communities (Oenpelli, Maningrida and Ramingining with a collective population of about 4000) which could utilise some of these animals if throughput could be expanded.

There is a possibility that the managed removal of buffalo from the environment could become eligible for carbon credits or emerging “nature repair” and biodiversity markets which could then be used to offset harvesting costs but any agreement on these options will take several years at least so for the moment they only represent an optimistic possibility for the medium term.

Large numbers of wild ruminants scattered across the northern Australian coastline also represent an important biosecurity risk now that our neighbours to the north are infected with both Foot and Mouth Disease and Lumpy Skin Disease. Commercial harvest of the buffalo herd would be a significant benefit for exotic disease surveillance programs.

Perhaps there are other solutions that are not immediately obvious.

If anyone has any suggestions that might help to solve this problem then we need to hear about them as soon as possible. This is not a problem just for the residents of Arnhem Land and the Northern Territory buffalo industry but will impact every Australian taxpayer if not addressed quickly and efficiently.

• Ross Ainsworth is currently serving as the executive officer of the NT Buffalo Industry Council.