Some Big Money Brooding In The Mississippi Bayous

06/06/1997 

Eric Ellis reports from Brookhaven, Mississippi on another lost export opportunity for Australia

BROOKHAVEN, "Mizzippah," is not the place one expects to find yet another lost Australian export opportunity.

It is kind of fundamentalist God fearin' Deep South town where good ole boys drop' "doughnuts" in their "pick-up trucks" and where there are still some white folks to be found who don't like what they refer to as "neegrahs in the congregation". It wasn't far from Brookhaven where Martin Luther King did some of his best work. But if you brave the rednecks, the Ford Broncos, the steamy Mississippi mist and the 'gators that creep up from "Loozziana" through the swampy bayou, there's a good chance you'll bump into an emu.

An American emu. And one that is part of an emerging meat, oil and feathers market conservatively estimated at $US500 million and growing.

Emus may be native to Australia but to the Mississippi Emu Association that's where the connection just about ends.

"We got our breeder birds from a fella in Texas. But they're running wild over there," says MEA member and Brookhaven grower James Gatlin, who runs about 70 birds on the Happy Hollows Emu Farm outside town.

"I know they came from Australia because I did some research but I've met fellas who've raised emus and just assumed they came from America."

Gatlin was one of a 100-odd local growers - Earl, Mary-Lou, Carroll and Thomas-Anne among them - who gathered recently in Brookhaven's Abundant Life Church hall to hear Johnny Johnson Jnr of the neighbouring Alabama Emu Association proselytise about what he sees as the buoyant future of the US emu industry.

"Emus are the animal that's gonna change the face of agriculture in this country," Johnson announced, with a zeal that Jimmies Swaggart and Bakker would be proud of.

From his own base in Eva, Alabama, Johnson claims to be the biggest emu farmer in the US, running some 7,000 birds of varying ages in a sophisticated $US3 million breeding operation that he hopes will soon net him and his fellow travellers big money.

Across the road, work is under way - the walls are up - on a $US2 million government-approved facility where Johnson plans to "process" 3,000 birds a day to meet already-signed contracts from national meat wholesalers in Atlanta and Detroit.

But with a surfeit of growers and an absence of processors, a lot of people are depending on Johnson, like the growers around Brookhaven.

If Johnson can't get his abattoir up soon, many of the two million-odd emus in the US could face an increasingly common fate - killed and dumped or set free in the Texas desert because growers can't afford to look after them waiting for plants like Johnson's planned operation to come onstream.

Emus in the US have an investment history that the directors of Canada's Bre-X Mining, and its suffering shareholders, would recognise. In 1993, pairs of breeder birds were fetching between $US35,000 and $US40,000 - Johnson knows some that changed hands for $US70,000 - the market spurred on by publicity about the emu's supposed health benefits: its low-cholesterol meat and enriching body oils.

As everyone dived in, the market glutted. Today, the same birds would be worth anything from $US1,000 to $US3,000.

"Ah'll be honest with ya," says Johnson, "It's not all been smooth sailin' in our industry. We've had our rogues and we've had our ups and downs but all those get-rich-quick fellas, well, they've just about all got out."

Johnson reckons the market has evened out and a new critical mass of discerning consumers is developing. Emu has begun to appear in trendy New York and LA restaurants with a similar faddishness that surrounds it in Australia.

Johnson started his campaign with the grumpy cook at the local Wagon Wheel diner in Eva.

"It's a dollar more for an emu burger but the locals like it real good."

But emu meat is only half the story. Recent press reports have trumpeted the medicinal qualities of emu oil in well-known branded cosmetics, such as Donna Karan and Estee Lauder.

It has also popped up in shower gel and sports liniment. NFL and NBA players use it, albeit unwittingly.

And, says the MEA, the oily feathers have application in dust- sensitive work environments, such as the high-tech industry.

Emus are grown in 40 of the 49 continental United States but are overwhelmingly centred on the warmer southern States: Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.

Some 36 States have emu member associations and next month in St Louis, the umbrella American Emu Association will have its annual convention, where 2,000 of its 10,000 members will gather, nary an Australian among them.