Mayura station: On-farm restaurant sets the de Bruin’s apart from the rest

THE de Bruin family’s Mayura Station is not your run-of-the-mill beef farm.

Taste sensation: Scott and Kristy de Bruin with children Hunter and Zara, at Mayura Station where they take their Wagyu cattle from the paddock to, among other places, the property’s on-farm restaurant.

THE de Bruin family’s Mayura Station is not your run-of-the-mill beef farm.

Spread over 3000 hectares near Millicent, in South Australia’s South East, the station not only breeds, feeds and markets its award-winning Wagyu beef — it serves it up at its own on-farm restaurant.

In less than 20 years, the de Bruins have turned a casual conversation about the benefits of eating Wagyu beef into a multi-million-dollar paddock-to-plate farming operation.

Today, with Scott and Kristy de Bruin at the helm, the demand for Mayura beef is such that diners in some of the world’s top restaurants pay more than $1000 a kilogram for it, and the farm is in the fourth year of a five-year expansion plan that will lead to production being doubled.

The de Bruins’ love affair with Wagyu cattle began in the 1990s when Scott’s father, Auspine founder Adrian de Bruin, travelled to Japan for work.

“Each time he’d travel to Japan he would try Wagyu and he’d come back and say, ‘The meat is just amazing’,” Scott said.

Managers on the de Bruin property at the time heard of some Wagyu cattle leaving Japan “and they told Dad, and he just jumped at the opportunity”.

Twenty-five cows arrived from Japan, via the US, in January 1998, in one of the first shipments of full-blood Wagyu cattle to Australia.

Today, Mayura is one of the nation’s largest privately owned full-blood Wagyu herd, with 7000 cattle.

The cattle are fed in the paddock for 300 days before moving to a state-of-the-art undercover finishing barn where they are fed for another 300 days wheat-based rations containing corn, meal, bran and by-products including chocolate.

About 110 steers and heifers are slaughtered a month, producing 30 tonnes of beef. About 70 per cent of the meat is exported, with Hong Kong the biggest single market, followed by China (where Mayura beef retails in supermarkets for about $670 a kilogram), Singapore, Dubai, the Philippines and Taiwan.

In 2010, Mayura opened The Tasting Room — essentially a cellar door-style restaurant aimed at showcasing its wares to the public — on the farm.

Proving you can have your steak and eat it, too.