This story came out in The Australian on Friday. I can’t find the link online so have posted the raw copy here.
When the cast of Hollywood tucked in to beef burgers after this years 77th Academy Awards, it was made from Blackmore Wagyu Beef. When the first Yarra Valley truffles arrived at the Botanical restaurant in Melbourne, chef Paul Wilson served it with Blackmore Wagyu Beef. And if you visit what Gourmet Traveller has rated as Australia’s top restaurant, Vue de Monde in Melbourne, you’ll be served the same brand of beef.
This prized meat is the culmination of a lifetimes work for fifth generation farmer David Blackmore.
He started his working life as a stock agent where he’d hoped to pinch one good idea from each farm he visited and return home. He says: “But I still haven’t got home to the family farm. And I won’t, it’s been sold.”
This led Blackmore to build his own business the clever way. He leased land and focused on genetics, commercialising cattle embryo transfer internationally.
But beef farming is tough. It’s a commoditised business and margins are thin.
In 1979 Blackmore was at the A&M University in Texas when he saw his first Wagyu – literally Japanese (Wa) cattle (gyu). He’d stumbled across a lucrative niche where he could set his prices.
The meat is prized by chefs the world over who pick it for the marbling – fine ribbons of monounsaturated fat (the good ones) that intertwine the muscles. In the west Angus cattle are the most tender. On a scale of one to nine, its marbling scores between two and five. Wagyu cattle on average will score four to six but the best carcasses will hit above nine.
The price differentials are a no brainer. As a carcass Angus might sell for $1,200. Wagyu for $5,000. At the butcher Angus beef costs about $35 a kilo. Wagyu is nearer to $150.
Blackmore started with 12 carcasses in 1996. “And we put the 12 on there to feed and we didn’t know we were going to pay for all their feeding. But 12 became 24, and 24 paid for 48, then 96 until the stage where we are now.”
His farm is at Alexandra in Victoria and he also leases 3,000 acres of land. He current holds 2,000 head of cattle. There are 200 full blood Wagyu, 800 surrogates and the remainder bulls and calves.
Now he is establishing himself as a virtual farmer. He says: “Everything we do now is outsourcing.”
“We believe in a year or two we will be breeding 5,000 calves where we supply the embryo to the farmer. We put in his cow and then we pay him to produce the calf.”
In Japan the sought Wagyu is the female’s meat, Matsukaza, costing up to $600 a kilogram.
The female has less muscle than the bull and the marbling is much finer and more evenly undispersed among the muscle.
Females, however, are almost too valuable to eat as they produce up to 50 embryos a year worth $2,000 each. A single bull produces enough for 300 inseminations, worth from $25 to $150 each, from each ejaculation. They can produce three to four times a week. Blackmore says: “There are plenty of bulls that have produced a million doses of semen.”
He sends 50 donor cows at a time to Total Genetics at Camperdown. The embryos are implanted in surrogates owned by contracted farmers. The beef are castrated the day they are born preventing development of course muscle. Blackmore takes delivery of the calf when it is one year old.
He sends them to a contracted feedlot for 600 days where they live undercover and pampered with a secret feed formula. The beef is then slaughtered, graded and exported.
Earlier this year Blackmore was invited by agribusiness specialist Rabo Bank to an executive development programme. He wondered why he was there. “There were people there with 85,000 acres of crop and mostly farms that had been handed down,” he says. The reason he was invited because he does things differently by outsourcing.
“A lot of these people keep he amounts of money tied up in their land. They are then forced to take what the market offer,” he says. In contrast, Blackmore is knocking back orders from leading hotel chains around the globe.
“I always say you have got to farm with your brain and not your heart,” he says.
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