Fourth generation cattle farmer John Hammond explains why Tasmania's Robbins Island Wagyu is some of the best beef being produced in Australia.
TELL US ABOUT ROBBINS ISLAND?
Robbins Island is 25,000 acres or 100 square kilometres in size. It’s the largest privately owned island in Australia and has been in our family for 100 years come April 2016.
We started the Robbins Island Wagyu brand in 2011 and we run 2,000 wagyu cows on the island. We process about 1,000 head a year but we want to double that over the next five years.
WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO BREED WAGYU CATTLE?
My brothers and I started in the early 80s and we were just doing conventional, basically Angus cattle. It wasn’t until the early 90s that we got onto the idea of wagyu.
In agriculture, 99 percent of the industry is producing a commodity product into a commodity market, and we wanted to try and get out of that and produce – I wouldn’t say it’s a niche product – but something that is high quality but maybe a little bit harder to produce; something that keeps you in front of the pack a little bit. I guess we wanted to do something that was at the top end of the beef chain, so to speak. We didn’t want to be producing grinding beef for hamburgers.
John Hammond. Image: We were flying blind a little bit. But we knew that it was high quality and we knew it was the most expensive beef produced in the world, and that was enough to get us interested in at least having a go. And you see, we were young enough to have a go and if it didn’t work out we still had time to go and do something else.
HOW HAS DEMAND FOR WAGYU EVOLVED OVER THE YEARS?
It’s been pretty good to us. It’s had its ups and downs along the way as the industry has matured, but it’s on a firm footing now.
What happened was that in the early stages of wagyu being produced in Australia, while it was primarily all going to export, there was a little hiccup in the Japanese market; it might have been BJD (Bovine Johne’s disease) or Foot and Mouth – they had both of those issues at various stages – and then what happened was Japanese consumers had a bit of a knee-jerk reaction and said they weren’t going to eat beef for a little while. So all of a sudden wagyu beef became available in the domestic market. It was a silver lining in that it allowed chefs to use wagyu and put it on their menus and then establish relationships with the brands and producers. And then of course the export market came back and now we have both markets.
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WHAT MAKES THE ISLAND SO SUITABLE FOR BREEDING WAGYU?
The island is suited as a breeding enterprise. We’re right at sea level so it never gets too hot and never gets too cold. It does get a little bit windy at times but it’s a very temperate climate, so it’s very easy on the cattle. Rainfall is also quite reliable – we get about a metre a year, although the 2015 spring was the driest on record.
We’re also able to say that the island has the cleanest air in the world. We know that because it’s monitored at Cape Grim at a base line air pollution station which we can virtually see from Robbins Island; it’s only 30km away. That same air that blows over the station blows over us and when it’s blowing from the west it’s the cleanest air in the world, even cleaner than what they measure at Antarctica. So we’re pretty pleased about that.
Image: WHY HAS THE BRAND DECIDED TO MOVE AWAY FROM GRASS FEEDING THE CATTLE?
We’ve found that with this cattle and with the genetics they have, in order to get the full response from the genetics as far as the meat goes, you really need to give them a certain amount of energy in their diet. It’s OK to grow them on grass, which we do for the first half of their lives, but for the second half of their lives they go into the grow-out and fattening phase where they actually need to have more energy in each mouthful than what we can get out of pasture, and you can control that in a grain feeding situation.
We did have a period of time there for about three years where we did grass fatten, and you can produce quite a good product, but it takes longer; it probably takes an extra six months and you end up with a lighter carcass. Also, the marbelling doesn’t extend through into the back-end of the animal – into the rump – as well as it does if you finish on grain, where you tend to get that fat deposition right through nearly all of the muscle sets of the animal.
So it just gives us a little bit more consistency and also, given the year that we had last year, it would been very, very tough to fatten cattle [on grass]. [Finishing on grain] can add security into your brand because you know that you can turn cattle out every two weeks for slaughter – like we do – whereas if we had tried to grass fatten last year, we wouldn’t have been able to do it. Our product would have suffered. So it’s a combination of making sure you can deliver on a regular basis for your customers as well as keeping the quality as high as you can.
WHAT MAKES YOUR PRODUCT UNIQUE?
It’s a family brand. There’s no other producer supplying into our brand, other than our own operation, so while that can limit its scale, it gives the brand provenance because it only comes from Robbins Island. So I guess it’s about the provenance of being the only Tasmanian wagyu brand.
Also, our Wagyu are known as the “Swimming Wagyu”, because during the annual muster, our horsemen swim the cattle through the island's saltwater channels at low tide to move them between grazing area.
HAS TASMANIA’S REPUTATION AS A PRODUCER OF QUALITY FOOD AND BEVERAGES IMPROVED OVER RECENT YEARS?
Yes, no doubt. Tasmania has been receiving some really good media and some really good reviews from food writers. We’re pretty lucky for that.
There are quite a number of people out there trying to make a mark in the food producing scene as a [manufacturer] of a niche, high quality product. They’re not aiming for the bottom, but they’re trying to be a top shelf product, so there are a few things contributing to the demand for Tasmanian food products, and we’re doing our little bit to add to that.
Danielle Bowling visited Robbins Island as a guest of Brand Tasmania
