Abstract

Executive summary: This report forms the first stage of a two-year project led by Edith Cowan University to identify and commercialise new market pathways for Australian sheep products and by-products. The project responds to a period of significant structural change within the industry, most notably the legislated phase-out of live sheep exports by sea by May 2028, which is reshaping market dynamics and supply chain configurations. As an initial global benchmark and review, this report examines international best practice and emerging opportunities to inform industry transition, with the broader project focused on supporting producers and processors to develop and test new business models through a dedicated incubator program. This report satisfies the first of four Milestones associated with the project and its deliverables.

The report positions the Australian sheep industry as a complex, interconnected ecosystem, in which producers, processors, exporters, service providers, and regulators are deeply interdependent, and where a change in any one pathway propagates across the whole system. It distinguishes between primary products (meat cuts), co-products (intentionally recovered during processing), by-products (recovered from streams that would otherwise have limited value), and waste, and notes that value and volume profiles shift across a sheep's lifecycle with a focus on a value-chain approach to maximise value extraction from whole-of-sheep and minimise waste. The Australian national context is then contrasted with the Western Australian (WA) context: nationally, the industry contributes around $8 billion AUD annually across a flock of 74.2 million sheep, while WA accounts for approximately 12.75 million sheep across roughly 4,300 mostly mixed sheep-cropping farms, is heavily Merino-dominated (84%), and faces disproportionately exposure to the live export phase-out.

A rapid integrative review of academic and grey literature published between 2016 and 2026, guided by PRISMA, was undertaken to benchmark global sheep industries against Australia’s across four attributes: industry size, export size, industry make-up, and export markets. Several countries were identified and profiled to surface comparable practices and novel pathways. From this review, three initial market-ready opportunities have been flagged for deeper investigation under Milestone 2. The report closes by situating these opportunities within a broader renewable circular bioeconomy framing, drawing comparative insights from Europe, Asia, North America, and South America, and setting the foundations for Milestone 2’s product identification and testing of these pathways with industry.

Keywords

Australian sheep industry, sheep production, sheep products, sheep by-products, livestock industry, agribusiness, agricultural economics, live sheep export phase-out, live export trade, market diversification, market pathways, supply chain resilience, value chain analysis

Document Type

Report

Date of Publication

2026

Type of File

PDF

Publisher

Edith Cowan University

School

School of Business and Law

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Copyright

@ Edith Cowan University

Content Type

Full object

First Page

1

Last Page

31

Recommended Citation

Smith, J., Sharafizad, F., Galvin, P., Farr-Wharton, B., Brown, K., Sharafizad, J., Redmond, J., Ludkins, N., & Farr-Wharton, G. (2026). Sheep Industry Pivot Project: Global comparative review. Edith Cowan University. https://doi.org/10.25958/4fw7-5m78

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Link to publisher version (DOI)

10.25958/4fw7-5m78