‘Let go of the supermarket’: Hervey Range’s Pure Produce starts beef to your door service

Freezers across Townsville are filling up with Hervey Range beef thanks to a new paddock-to-plate farm. But the biggest challenge, has been convincing people to let go of the supermarkets.

Pure Produce owners Lauren and Luke St George with their children, Fletcher, 10, Campbell, 17, and Penny, 13, pictured on their regenerative farm. Picture: Shae Beplate.

When it comes to selling paddock-to-plate, the hardest part is convincing people to stop going to the supermarket.

Hervey Range cattle farmer Luke St. George is steadily building up a customer base in Townsville for his premium beef delivery service ‘Pure Produce’, but it’s a big sell for some people.

“The interest in what we’re doing is really high,” Mr St. George said.

“But trying to convince people to buy bulk and have a small deep freezer, rather than going into the shops every week, is a hurdle.”

Mr St. George said people are used to ducking into the shops for what they need, and are reluctant to switch to bulk buying.

Pure Produce farmer Luke St. George with his son, Campbell. The family took their beef to Townsville's EcoFiesta in June.

“But once we’ve convinced someone to give us a go, they always end up saying ‘actually, this is way more convenient’ because they realise it’s easier to just grab a pack from the freezer in the morning and defrost it for dinner, rather than constantly being in the store,” he said.

“If you knew what actually went into that supermarket beef, you would be disgusted.”

The St. George family’s connection to agriculture is a unique one.

Luke and his wife Lauren are engineers by trade, but always had a passion for agriculture and ended up purchasing a run-down Lancewood Station on the Burdekin River outside Charters Towers when they were just 28 years old.

Over 10 years, they built it into a well-oiled hay and beef property, but their eyes were also opened to the amount of chemicals used in modern agriculture.

“When you’re farming the way everyone teaches you to farm, we found the more you put on, the more you had to keep putting on,” Mr St. George said.

“The soil was just degrading.”

Pure Produce farmer Luke St. George with his son, Campbell. The family took their beef to Townsville's EcoFiesta in June.

The big eye-opener was when he stopped to admire a lush field of sorghum on the Atherton Tablelands, only to find it completely dead a few weeks later.

“I asked the farmer ‘did you spray this with Roundup or something, what happened?’ and he said ‘yep, exactly’.”

It turned out, the farmer had sprayed his entire crop so the plants would die in unison and the grain could dry out and be harvested easier.

“I’m no greenie, but that didn’t seem right,” Mr St. George said.

“I started looking into it … we’re paying chemical companies hundreds and thousands of dollars just to pump nasty stuff into our food.”

According to the Grains Research and Development Corporation a ‘spray-out’ or ‘knock down’ of sorghum with glyphosate (Roundup) pre-harvest is common in QLD and NSW, and in a 2017 report the GRDC said the practice is particularly useful for farmers when the crop is lush and overgrown after a wet summer.

Pure Produce owners Lauren and Luke St George with their children, Fletcher, 10, Campbell, 17, and Penny, 13, pictured on their regenerative farm. Picture: Shae Beplate.

Armed with a new outlook, the St. George family moved their beef operation to Townsville in 2019 and began chipping away at a radical idea – a property at the base of Hervey Range, drought proofed with pivot irrigation, run on regenerative principals and home to 500-head of tropical Angus cattle.

The cattle are born on the farm, raised on grass, butchered in the families processing facility and sold directly to the public who can order either an eighth, quarter, half or whole animal – 10kg and 20kg packs are also available.

Those curious about prices should know an eighth of a beast (30-40kg) will set you back about $600 while a whole animal (240-320kg) can be $5000.

To put that in perspective, the average Aussie eats 23.7kg of beef per year.

“Once we have enough orders on the website to kill two animals, we start filling those orders,” Mr St. George said.

“The cattle are raised here on the farm and we treat them really well, until it’s time for them to go through that one bad day.”

Pure Produce also offers customisable orders, where you can request rare cuts and parts alongside the normal steaks, mince and sausages.

Originally published as ‘Let go of the supermarket’: Hervey Range’s Pure Produce starts beef to your door service