Kings on the lamb

The Longreach couple have been operating Silverwood Organics since 2000 and have won a swag of awards since then – finalists in the ABC Delicious awards in 2010, 2011 and 2012, light lamb category prizes at the Ekka in 2010 and 2011, and the AgForce Sheepmeat Producers of the Year from 2010-2013 – but are not resting on their laurels.

Earlier this year they travelled to the Middle East with MLA as part of their AgForce prize from last year and found the price point for their Dorper lamb wasn’t yet worth pursuing.

“They eat lamb like we imagine people eat goat – cut up with the bone in,” Maree explained.

“Western food is just becoming part of their diet, and they are five to eight years behind Australia in their organic demand, just as we are five to eight years behind UK trends.”

The trip gave them a great opportunity to watch Australian sheep coming off a boat and to talk to locals, who said the time for organic sheepmeat from Australia was not yet at hand.

“They already had other meat from Australia and weren’t able to get rid of it all to the western people there,” said Maree.

“Supermarkets were full of Australian beef and lamb, but next to New Zealand, Canadian and Welsh product – there’s lots of competition and it’s all labelled country of origin.”

They also witnessed the traditional method of obtaining meat – selecting a live sheep from a pen, putting it in a trolley and taking it across to an abattoir nearby for slaughter.

The Kings have returned to Longreach determined to grow their domestic boxed meat market, traditionally centred on a Brisbane-Noosa-Coolangatta-Toowoomba circle.

The expansion of processing facilities at the Longreach Pastoral College gives them good local control and they hope to be able to expand their online sales, targeting a pallet, or 35-40 lambs every fortnight.

About 15 to 20 per cent of their lambs are currently sold online but they hope to expand that to 40 per cent.

“The more online sales we make the better off we’ll be,” Maree said, citing a need to cut the middle man out of the process.

One of the avenues they are exploring is the central coast market, currently serviced mainly by lamb from Victoria.

Although they have airfreighted lamb to Gladstone, Rockhampton, Bundaberg and Cairns, Andrew and Maree hope their membership of the Relish Capricorn food group will give them access to the home delivery market in the region.

The stumbling block is the lack of options for transport between Longreach and Rockhampton, as most cold trucks turn their fridges off for their return journey east.

“The alternative is to truck our lamb to Brisbane and up to Rocky,” Maree said.

She hopes their fresh product will be the selling point that turns the tide.

“We’re probably as local a lamb product as you’ll get in that part of the world,” she said.

Another market being explored is the Pregnancy and Baby expo, where expecting mums begin thinking seriously about what they are eating, a trend that carries on to feeding their children.

Although the Kings had a reasonable season in 2013 – 400mm of rain in small falls – they had to cart water for three or four months but were able to get by without supplementing.

“Some of our animals were still fat enough to kill at the end of it all – that says a lot for Dorpers,” Andrew said.

The drought saw the couple shed the last of their cattle by the end of the year and they say they won’t be replacing them, concentrating on their Dorpers instead.

They’ve come a long way since the day Andrew was looking in a Brisbane butcher shop window and saw lamb cutlet chops for sale at $59/kg and decided to cut out the middleman, but they still describe the business as a work in progress.