Spring Beef: Nive Beef jerky diversification option a success

They’re now making a small loss on each beast they put towards packets of their four varieties of dried flavoured beef.

It’s a situation they take with a grain of salt, so to speak – as Doug says, cattle prices will fluctuate and they always have their primary business, growing grassfed beef, to go back to.

“You turn one tap off and another one on, where it suits your market,” he said. “We're growing this business in behind the other one while prices are good.”

He emphasises the pleasure he feels at having branched out with a value-adding option, with the memory of the live export shutdown, the market saturation and cow prices that plummeted from $800 to $100.

“It really hurt us, especially when you think you've got X amount of dollars worth of cow and the banks are looking for that money, and then you don't do anything and an outside influence comes along and wipes the bottom line,” Doug said. “That was a pretty hard year, so we ended up contracting to try and keep the place going.”

It was when the radio broke on the grader that Doug was left with his thoughts and had his lightbulb moment.

“At the end of the day, we were thinking, how could we make money out of cattle but not go directly to a butcher, and have a shelf-stable product instead of fresh meat that only lasts for 10 days.

“The other thing was, if you have a drought and you can't finish that beast to a certain fat coverage, then you either feed it and that costs you more, or the butcher goes, not good enough, and you've lost that market.

“We went the jerky option because it's a shelf-stable product for 12 months and we get, to a point, to ask what sort of price range we get for it.”

The result has been the Nive Beef Jerky label.

In Rachelle’s words, Doug has a touch of the Masterchef genius about him – he likes to experiment with food and was making homemade jerky that friends were raving about.

“When they were asking, can I buy a kilo of that, we thought, maybe we're onto something here with the flavour, that it was so good.

“That got us thinking, maybe we could make this commercially.”

The original flavour was derived from Doug’s grandmother’s roast beef gravy recipe – “we all have a variation” is all he will divulge – but Nive Beef Jerky has now added Hot and Spicy (the addition of chili), Heated Garlic (a hint of chili with a garlic aroma), and Thai Fusion (red curry, lemongrass and coriander).

The base for the taste comes from the Cameron’s core breeder herd of 1000 head, using Brahman cows that they put Angus bulls over for a first cross article, which is then crossed with Charolais to produce terminal heifers and heavy feeder steers, ideally turning them off at 500kg to feedlots.

“For us, black was going to make a fairly good line of cattle, and the Charolais was to put some bulk muscle on,” Doug explained. “After that you can't get any more hybrid vigour.”

They began their cross-breeding program in 2009, four years after they came to live at Nive Downs, and had bred their first Charolais offspring by the end of 2011.

Doug and Rachelle are 10 months into a three-year control mating program – prior to that they were in a family partnership that owned country at Roma and Quilpie as well, and the country at all three locations required different management strategies.

Nive Downs itself is split into two blocks – Old Coolabri has 11,500 acres and the home block is 22,500 acres, divided by a neighbour but being run as one.

The cattle have a mix of black soil downs country, red loam with buffel grass and sandy river country to run on, and the Camerons hope to get their calves on the ground by Christmas and have them all weaned by May.

Most of their Angus bloodlines are from Carabah Angus, while Riverglen is where they source their Charolais genetics.

It’s a grass-fed story that stands them in good stead when they attend trade shows and food festivals, where consumers are actively seeking a more natural product.

Doug regularly answers questions about how many square metres his cattle get to stand in.

When he explains that they work on 20 acres a cow, it takes consumer respect to a whole new level.

“It stands alone because it's unique,” Doug said. “I do have bragging rights in that I know where that meat comes from and I know that process from the packet right back to the paddock.”

While there are plenty of competitors in the jerky market in Australia, there’s not many that promote the grassfed angle, nor the fact that no preservatives or fillers have been used in the marinades.

They use salt as their curing agent and no vegetable gum softening agents, claiming it’s the quality of the beef breeds used, the cuts selected – all the hindquarter cuts – and hand butchering that contribute to the unique product.

The rate of current demand sees them use one carcase every two to three weeks, processing four at a time through their local Augathella butcher, who cuts all the strips.

Out of a 500kg beast, Doug said 70kg is used for jerky, making around 600 packets, and the rest is sold as trim to other butchers, but there were plans in the pipeline to value add the forequarter with a beer stick-style product.

“It's going to be another shelf stable product, that can use a fattier cut of meat,” Doug said. “It’s literally another step in a process we’ve become very familiar with after three years.”

It was a steep learning curve for the couple, who said they had production skills, not manufacturing ones.

Including obtaining food safe accreditation, the process from a grand idea in the cabin of a grader to selling the first packet took a year.

Along the way they partnered with the Endeavour Foundation, who had a factory with a disused butcher shop, and a packaging plant, in Toowoomba.

“It involved a lot of phone calls but we entered into an agreement – I equipped it with an oven, mixers and dryers, so we cart our meat down, and they marinade it and cook it,” 

"They get the packing rights and they dispatch from there."

While Doug and Rachelle say they’ve received a lot of interest from Asia, they’re not export accredited and will bide their time until they feel the domestic business is “well-oiled enough” and with enough financial stability to pay for the next step.

”We’re trying to judge our time. When we want to go and do it, we want to do it properly,” Doug said. “We don't want to get caught and not be able to provide enough product overseas either.”

In the meantime, their dream is to supply their jerky to the Australian Army and a major airline.

The drought in western Queensland has to break before any of this can become a reality.

The Camerons know they’re not the worst affected, getting relief falls of rain just as desperation sets in, that has been seeing them through another few months at a time.

They’ve reduced numbers from 1300 breeders when they went into drought, to 930 head.

“And we haven't been able to keep our steers to that heavy feeder weight, we've had to let them go earlier. You do whatever you can do,” Doug said.

It’s a sentiment that has taken he and Rachelle so far on their jerky journey and it’s one they’re keen to keep travelling along.