Scott de Bruin of Mayura Station at Millicent is a cut above when it comes to farming
DINERS the world over can’t get enough of the de Bruin family’s award-winning Wagyu, writes JAMES WAGSTAFF
THIS is not your run-of-the-mill beef farm.
Spread over 3000ha near Millicent, on the South Australian Limestone Coast, Mayura Station is a multifaceted operation that not only breeds, feeds and markets its award-winning Wagyu beef — it serves it up at its own on-farm restaurant.
In fewer than 20 years, the de Bruin family has turned a casual conversation about the benefits of eating Wagyu beef into a multi-million dollar vertically integrated farming operation.
Such is the demand for Mayura product, diners in some of the nation’s top restaurants pay more than $1000/kg for it, and the farm is in the third year of a five-year expansion plan that will lead to production being doubled.
Mayura runs 7000 full-blood Wagyu cattle, turning off more than 100 steers and heifers monthly to produce 30 tonnes of retail beef.
While most is exported to the lucrative Asian market, with Hong Kong, China and Singapore the major destinations,
Mayura also graces the menus of some of Australia’s best restaurants, including Koko’s and Philippe Mouchel in Melbourne.
Scott de Bruin said while Wagyu cattle were only introduced to the property in the 1990s, the station itself was steeped in history.
It was selected in 1845 as one of South Australia’s first pastoral leases, with surveyors seeing the potential of the region that has since been ranked No.1 in the nation for primary production and is home to a number of agricultural pursuits such as forestry, viticulture, dairy, grazing and fishing.
CARVE UP
LIKE many original large holdings, Mayura was carved up and sold off over the years.
After Scott’s parents married in the early 1970s, they bought a small slice of the former station on which they grew treelings for forestry (Scott’s father, Adrian de Bruin, founded Auspine, which had amassed more than 40,000ha of tree plantations by the time it was sold to Tasmanian forestry giant Gunns in 2007).
Over time the de Bruins continued to buy more neighbouring land and in the mid-1980s secured the original Mayura homestead block.
The family has added more land since in an effort to restore the station to its former glory.
The de Bruins’ love affair with Wagyu cattle began in the 1990s when Adrian’s work took him overseas.
“Each time he’d travel to Japan he’d try Wagyu and he’d come back and say, ‘the meat is just amazing’,” Scott said.
Jack and Pip Rasenberg, managers on the de Bruin property at the time, added their input, having worked with Japanese-owned feedlots.
“They always used to say to us, ‘if you ever get the opportunity you should try and get some Wagyu genetics into your operations,” Scott said.
“They heard of some Wagyu cattle leaving Japan and they told Dad, and he just jumped at the opportunity.”
Twenty-five females arrived from Japan, via the US, in January 1998, in one of the first shipments of full-blood Wagyu cattle to Australia.
Along with four bulls purchased in 1999, these formed the foundation of Mayura, which is now the nation’s largest privately owned full-blood Wagyu herd.
“The only full-blood Wagyu herd of similar scale and size is AACo’s, and it’s a listed entity on the Australian stock exchange,” Scott said.
YES SIRE
MAYURA runs 2600 full-blood Wagyu breeding cows, mostly joined by artificial insemination, with 150 bulls on hand for back up.
“Each year about 90 per cent of our cows get AI’d,” Scott said.
The remaining 10 per cent who might have “calved late or so forth that do not fall back into that synchronisation program” are naturally mated.
“We get about 65-70 per cent conception on the AI, depending on the year, and then mop up with the bulls.”
While Mayura does buy some outside genetics, it breeds most bulls itself.
Its 2005 bull Mayura Itoshigenmi Jnr, an industry leader “for almost every trait” including marbling and eye muscle area, was “still by far outperforming any genetics that we are able to buy”, Scott said.
At the Australian Wagyu Association’s annual conference in May, a package of 10 semen straws from Itoshigenami Jnr sold for a whopping $30,500, or $3050 a straw.
Mayura has two calvings, running from the end of February to June and from late August to early December, to ensure consistent supply year round.
When they are born, the calves receive an electronic ear tag which records their birth date, sex, birthweight and mother (“by knowing the mother we know the father”).
Cattle are weighed every two months with all information assessed against its carcass performance at slaughter “so we can see which joinings worked really well, which sires are performing well, which cows are performing well or, alternatively, which bulls and sires are performing badly and need to be culled”.
RANGE ROVER
THE calves are yard weaned at six months and enter what Scott refers to as a 300-day background “range-feeding” program, introduced in 2009.
“Full-blood Wagyus are not fantastic paddock performers. If you just left them out in the paddock, their weight gains would be very low, so I developed a program where we are actually supplementary feeding these cattle out in the paddock,” he said.
“So they get (6-8kg per head of) feed delivered to them every day, which is mainly a silage-based ration with some grains. We do that from six months all the way through to between 16 and 18 months, depending on the cattle.
“They certainly do a lot better through this production system. (And) weaning our cows from our calves early ... gives us extra capacity to be able to run more breeding cattle.”
Mayura runs a continual pasture improvement program, sowing 150ha of new pasture — “some years up to 250ha” — a year.
Paddocks are split into 10-15ha cells that each host about 70 cattle. Half the cells are empty at any one time, allowing the pastures (mostly ryegrass with sub clover) and ground to recover. Scott said the time cattle spent in one particular cell varied according to the time of year.
The property, which boasts soils ranging from deep heavy peat and rendzinas to heavy loams and black clay over a limestone base, receives an average 720mm of rain a year.
Mayura employs 17 staff, which Scott said were integral to the success of the business.
GRAIN PAIN
HAVING been caught out by high grain prices in the past — “when I first started feedlotting, wheat was about $150 a tonne and within 18 months it spiked and I was paying $450 … it just kills you” — Mayura has an annual cropping program of 1200ha of wheat, broadbeans, oats, maize and ryegrass and clover silage.
Everything, apart from the broadbeans, which are sold as a cash crop, go into Mayura’s feeding program so the business is about 70 per cent self sufficient.
“Some years your cost of production on grains is not a lot cheaper than what it would be to buy the feed, other years you’re substantially in front. However, we can grow the silage and hay very economically. This year will probably be one of those years where it might have been cheaper just to buy the grain,” Scott said.
After about 300 days on feed in the paddock, the best performing cattle enter Mayura’s state-of-the-art undercover finishing barn, complete with sawdust floors and a fully automated feed delivery system, built in 2006.
Scott said while the cattle could be undercover or outside, they preferred the protection the barn offered in winter and the shade it offered in summer “so they’re pretty much there all the time”.
The barn is licensed to hold 500 cattle but Scott hopes to increase the overall capacity to about 2000 head as part of Mayura’s expansion plans.
In the barn, the cattle are sorted into pens according to their age and weight and fed about 8.2kg of dry matter a day for another 300 days. There are three wheat-based rations also containing corn, meal, bran and other byproducts including chocolate.
The first ration, Scott said, was “very much about growing the cattle, growing the frame, growing the muscle”, the next “very much about marbling” and the last ration “all about the flavour”. Cattle are fed morning and night to mimic natural grazing.
CHOC HIGH
CHOCOLATE was introduced to the rations after Scott could not readily access one ingredient designed to increase marbling in the beef.
When he switched back to the ingredient, there was an almost immediate backlash from consumers.
“Within six weeks our customers in Singapore and Hong Kong were on the phone and said, ‘what have you done to your product? It doesn’t taste the same anymore’. People’s palates were refined enough to notice the difference, which was wonderful feedback for us.”
The Mayura cattle are slaughtered at G&K O’Connor abattoir at Pakenham in a monthly kill of about 100 head: 70 for the long-fed Mayura brands and 30 for Mayura’s Limestone Ridge brand — “a free range, grain-assisted full-blood Wagyu product”.
The long-fed cattle produce an average 430kg carcass, with the Limestone Ridge cattle dressing out at about 350kg.
Scott said the cattle marbled well, with an average AUSMEAT score of “a shade under eight” on a scale of one (for least marbling) to nine.
The Mayura brand comprises three labels: the entry level Gold label (“which is what we mainly sell here in Australia”), Platinum (“middle range, marble score eight and nine, which is mainly sold into Asia”) and Signature (“top end product, which pretty much goes into China and Hong Kong … where you see the very expensive pricing”).
About 70 per cent of product is exported, with Hong Kong the biggest single market, followed by China (where Mayura beef retails in supermarkets for about $670/kg), Singapore, Dubai, the Philippines and Taiwan.
One of Mayura’s biggest export supporters is chef Umberto Bombana, who operates four Bombana Otto E Mezzo 8½ restaurants throughout Asia, including one in Hong Kong that has the honour of being the only Italian restaurant outside Italy awarded a maximum three stars by culinary bible the Michelin Guide.
Bombana restaurants in Macau and Shanghai are rated two-star by Michelin while a second in Hong Kong has one Michelin star.
Melbourne is Mayura’s largest market domestically.
TASTE FOR IT
In 2010, Mayura opened The Tasting Room — essentially a cellar door-style restaurant aimed at showcasing its wares to the public — on the farm.
With seating for about 35 people, the restaurant is booked out most weekends and diners spend an average $150 to be shown how to prepare, cook and savour the flavours of Mayura Wagyu by head chef Mark Wright.
It was named best steak restaurant at the 2014 South Australian Restaurant and Catering Awards. Mayura is no stranger to industry accolades, having won numerous delicious produce awards (including being a state winner this year), the 2004 South Australian Meat Exports Award and gold medals in the Australian Wagyu Association’s branded beef awards in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015.
Scott said plans to double Mayura’s output over the next two years, taking production to 60 tonnes of retail beef a month, was to meet growing Asian demand for its product.
“We are starting to see the numbers come through,” he said.
“It is interesting because if you want to grow your herd you’ve got to keep your females so you’re greatly reducing what you can turn into market.
“So we’ve got to a point now where we’ve said, ‘right, that’s enough breeders we want to run’ and so now all those cattle will come through the system.”
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