KEL SHARMAN, a Tasmanian beef farmer, was astonished to find out that meat from a beast he sold for about $5 a kilogram last month was on sale at a Surry Hills butchery this week for $69.
"You're joking," Mr Sharman said. "I'm in the wrong line of business."
In theory, every piece of meat sold in Australia can now be identified and traced to its source paddock via the bar code on its packaging.
In practice, it is extremely difficult to do because of the complex, often disjointed relationship between the shop and the farm, abattoir, transport, storage and distribution companies. Many retailers are unable to say where their produce comes from on a given day.
But the Herald has traced the origin and carbon footprint of a basket of groceries, using methods and data from the CSIRO and the federal Department of Climate Change.
Even though most of the items were grown and processed in Australia, the most conservative estimates say the food travelled almost twice the circumference of the earth by road and ship before it reached the supermarket shelf.
After being fattened for more than a year in a paddock near the Tasmanian village of Sassafrass, Mr Sharman's beast was herded into a truck and taken about 160 kilometres west to an abattoir at Smithton. The best fillets were carved from its carcass in a boning room and loaded on to a refrigerated lorry bound for Burnie, 90 kilometres to the east.
From there the meat travelled to Port Melbourne in a sealed container, where it was loaded on to another truck and dispatched up the Hume Highway for a journey of at least 880 kilometres. On reaching the distributor Andrews Meat at Dulwich Hill, the beef was transferred to a smaller van and delivered to Hudsons Meats at Surry Hills where it was on sale for $69 a kilogram.
Based on the vehicle fuel types and average trucking speeds, the half a kilogram of beef generated about 460 grams, or almost its own weight, in carbon dioxide emissions along the way.
This amount of greenhouse gas is much lower than that generated by most commercial meat, mainly because the cattle were grass fed.
The figure does not include energy used to refrigerate and store the meat while it aged, nor the much larger amounts of energy consumed and emitted by the beast when it was being fattened for slaughter.
Mr Sharman's steak can be traced via the National Livestock Identification System, under which a microchip is attached to the ear of every calf destined for slaughter. The system tracks individual beasts as they are moved, an extensive accounting exercise but one that makes the industry more accountable to its customers. "There is no doubt it has made it more difficult for us but I think it is something the public is asking for now," Mr Sharman said. "Ten years ago it was a lot simpler with a lot less paperwork."
Mr Sharman's distributor, Greenham Tasmania, said it wanted to make its meat easy to trace because transparency gave it credibility in the eyes of its overseas customers.
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