Current market conditions, both here and over on the east coast, have been the topic of conversation among sheep producers for a while now, with the oversupply causing an issue for the processing sector which has been under pressure for a long time.
It is no secret that sourcing staff and finding housing for staff, coupled with storage capacity have been major contributing factors to the situation, but processors have been working on solutions to these issues, while still working within the constraints.
WAMMCO chairman Craig Heggaton said they were working at their absolute capacity at present and if it were possible would do more.
"We are currently doing record kills," Mr Heggaton said.
"We are also moving all of our products and we could move even more, if we could kill more.
"Unfortunately we are stretched to our absolute limit at the moment.
"We are fully staffed and we cannot physically get any more throughput."
The kill space and storage issues are ones WAMMCO has planned on alleviating for sometime and has been working on increasing its capacity in the future.
Mr Heggaton said they had already had expansion plans in place for sometime and the surveys had been finalised ready for the next steps to take place.
"We have just signed off on the expansion plan for our plant," he said.
"This could potentially give us another 500,000 head capacity annually."
He said this would be a welcome relief for sheep producers with speculation of the excess sheep at present being about 500,000-600,000 head.
WAMMCO is confident it will be able to move the larger volumes within its already established markets.
"We supply all around the world, but our key markets are both North America, which includes the US and Canada, and China.
"As I said earlier we could easily move more product if we had more and we will once this project is complete."
While there are no exact dates set yet, Mr Heggaton said they would break ground on the expansion next year and were confident in a 12 to 18 month completion time.
"Ideally we would love it to be complete by next spring," he said.
"But hopefully it will be around the end of next year."
