Reigning Farmer of the Year Argyle Prestige Meats launches Eight Mile brand into Coles supermarkets

IT’S been a big few months for Lachie and Andrina Graham.

Lachie & Andrina Graham - Argyle Prestige Meats at Harden NSW.

IT HAS been a big few months for ­Lachie and Andrina Graham.

Between teaming up with one of Australia’s biggest agribusinesses to grow their Argyle Prestige Meats paddock-to-plate venture, relocating it, negotiating a deal to supply the nation’s biggest supermarket chain and taking on the lucrative export world, there’s been little downtime for The Weekly Times Coles 2013 Farmer of the Year winners.

Especially once you factor in the arrival of their first child, Spencer.

When The Weekly Times first met the Grahams in March last year, their Argyle Prestige Meats business, centred on their 4050ha family farm near Harden in southern NSW, was processing 25-30 cattle and 150-200 lambs a week.

The venture was by no means small, nor its outlook restricted: it was growing at an annual rate of 600 per cent, supplying almost 80 mostly-independent sup­ermarkets and employing 20 staff, as Lachie, the farmer, and Andrina, with a background in business development, sought to control every facet of the supply chain.

But even they admit to being blown away by its more recent growth.

Argyle meat now graces the shelves of more than 200 supermarkets, they have more than 60 staff on their books and throughput has increased more than 10-fold.

This month they will launch their Eight Mile by Argyle brand on to Coles’ shelves and grand plans exist to take on the world one export market at a time.

Lachie said the ability to take the business to the next level had been greatly boosted by a 50-50 joint venture with the Manildra Group, one of Australia’s biggest wheat processors.

Manildra, which previously ran a 2500-head fattening and trading operation on a 1012ha farm adjacent to its starch, gluten and ethanol plant at Nowra, on the NSW South Coast, approached the Grahams with the joint venture proposal last winter.

Lachie said the company had “read about us value adding and moving up the supply chain, as opposed to backgrounding for some of the bigger feedlots” and was keen to make use of the former Dairy Farmers Co-operative milk factory at Nowra, which it owned.

Lachie said the facility was “perfect for our boning room and retail-ready plant ... It’s a lot better suited than where we were at Harden. It is on a level floor, it has rail access, it is close to port, close to services”.

By December, the deal had been inked, and the Grahams set about relocating their business from Harden, 250km to the east at Nowra.

Cattle and lambs are still processed at the GM Scott abattoir in Cootamundra (which Manildra purchased in June).

The Nowra farm has allowed the business to increase throughput and its 1000mm rainfall acts as a “risk mitigation” tool should the season bite at Harden.

“The biggest challenge with producing a grass-fed product is consistency,” Lachie said.

“At Harden, we’ve always had a challenge because you’ll get 40 deg­rees (celcius) in summer and we’ve got more reliance on our summer pastures than we do in winter.

“If you have a really hot summer and no rain, you end up running your stock on dry grass and stubble, and it can affect the quality.”

The factory was transformed into a state-of-the-art boning and retail ready facility with the potential to process 35 beef bodies an hour in an eight-hour shift, and a few hundred lambs a day, with a view to increasing to a double shift if required.

“Being a smaller plant, focusing on prime animals and high-end retail, we wanted to make it seriously one of a kind,” Lachie said.

Having inspected boning facilities overseas, Lachie opted for the fully-automated Marel system from Iceland, which boasts data capture, yield management and traceability features, inputting information from a kill-floor tag on carcasses when they arrive at the boning room.

“(That information is followed) all the way to the bagging area, where a barcode insert is spat out and packed with the meat, we send it to say the (United) States.

“In 90 or 100 days we might get a call from a customer, if there is an issue, and we can scan the barcode and say Josh boned it, it was off my farm, it was a 14-month black heifer that we bred, lifetime traceable, hormone free and grass-fed,” Lachie said.

An ERP software system was also built into the plant, allowing retailers to log in with their requirements remotely, streamlining the process and enabling Argyle to cut and pack to order.

The Argyle brand is supplied by the Graham farm at Harden, the Manildra farm at Nowra, “extended family — brothers’ farms, cousin’s farms” and a few suppliers whose herds are based on Argyle genetics.

Eight Mile by Argyle is a premium, hormone-free, grass-fed brand exclusive to Coles.

It will initially be available in metropolitan Sydney and an area encompassing Goulburn, the NSW South Coast and the Australian Capital Territory, but Lachie has hopes for it spreading across borders.

There are also plans to launch Eight Mile — named because the Nowra farm is a mile from Nowra’s Seven Mile Beach — into Taiwan with a view to pushing into China.

Lachie’s brother and business partner, Bryce, has spent two years developing Argyle’s export arm and recently moved with his family to Hong Kong to spearhead its growth in Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan and Korea, as well as the Middle East, the US and Europe.

Lachie said it was just as important for the business to support export customers as those domestically.

“The two markets work well together,” he said.