A draft proposal for a national management plan has argued a change in approach is needed to manage kangaroo numbers across the country.
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It comes as Victorian commercial harvesters say numbers are extremely high following the good season.
Grant Turner, Aussie Game Harvesting, travels across Victoria and into NSW as a commercial kangaroo and deer harvester.
Mr Turner works in conjunction with five other shooters to provide a free service to farmers.
He said areas such as Gippsland and the Otways had particular demand for harvesters.
"It's just incredible how many kangaroos are out there," he said.
"It sort of goes up and down - you find there's not enough work then obviously people are going to go and then there's not enough people when the times comes around."
Becoming a harvester involved a substantial amount of licensing, he said, including shooting courses and traveling to NSW to demonstrate proficiency in shooting, as well as meat handling, Prime Safe, and Game Management Authority accreditation.
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He said setting up equipment, including a trailer to cart the carcases, also cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Even so, he said there were more and more people choosing to take the course.
"I don't know how serious they are on shooting, it's a bit of a novelty with a lot of people to do it, but whether they actually take it up," he said.
He believed kangaroos could be managed sustainably through harvesters.
"They give farmers a permit to shoot X amount of roos and they just leave them in the paddock to rot and they don't get used - I think that's a real shame," he said.
"I think they should make it that if you've got to shoot them you've got to harvest them.
"The meat's fantastic... if you're going to kill them, you might as well use it."
It comes as a draft proposal found a national kangaroo management plan could encourage farmers to integrate sustainable kangaroo harvesting into traditional farming systems.
Unifying state and territory kangaroo plans under one system would produce better outcomes for both farmers and conservationists, according to representatives from the Australian National University and NSW Kangaroo Management Task Force.
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The proposal was put to Federal Agriculture Minister David Littleproud in a draft report, which argued managing kangaroos as pests was expensive, non-productive and had not achieved objectives of preventing drought-induced pasture degradation and wide-scale kangaroo starvation.
The proposal encouraged farmers to see kangaroos as a commodity that could be sustainably harvested.
"Kangaroos evolved with Australia's fluctuating climate and could be grazed in a complementary way with domestic stock, producing low carbon emission, healthy meat with low impact on soils and vegetation," the report stated.
Most of Australia's 40 million plus kangaroos are on pastoral land alongside domestic livestock.
Only a tiny proportion of the population is harvested commercially and the numbers is well below the annual quota.
At the moment, non-commercial culling results in millions of carcases being left to rot in the field with implications for both food waste and biosecurity.
Kangaroos Industry Association of Australia chief executive Dennis King said the boom-and-bust nature of kangaroo populations was a barrier to more farmers converting kangaroos into a valuable asset.
Populations explode in wet seasons, with mass die-offs during droughts.
The draft report argues a national kangaroo management plan would help stabilise the population.
Mr King said mass die-offs caused professional harvesters to leave the industry, making it difficult to fill the specialised roles once kangaroo numbers boomed.
There are about 3000 people in the kangaroo industry, including harvesters, processors and transporters.
Some processors have tried paying landholders per kangaroo shot on their land but so far it hasn't had much success, with most farmers claiming the amount - $5 per carcase - is not enough.
"It's a starting point, going forward if we can harvest at a consistent level with sustainable numbers, that could easily go up," Mr King said.
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