Courtesy of Danielle Langloism, Wikipedia CCLAustralia eyes U.S. market for goat
The private-equity firm MG Capital has invested $12 million in a 600,000-acre goat farm that aims to ship meat from Australia to the growing U.S. market.
The acreage in Australia’s outback is populated with 50,000 feral goats, Peter Hannen, MG Capital’s chairman, said recently at the World Agri Invest Congress in London.
Australia exported 27,000 metric tons of goat meat last year and the United States is the world’s largest buyer, said Hannen, whose London-based company expects to make as much as 12-percent in return on its investment annually.
“Goats being goats, basically you have a low-cost enterprise in an arid land, and the world is becoming more arid,” Hannen told the Congress. “You have to keep probing at the frontiers.”
MG Capital first invested in Australian goat farming three years ago and still views it as a startup market, Hannen said, noting, “It’ll be five years before we know if there’ll be a goat industry.”
