There's a hum at Peter Treasure's eastern Victorian farm as a large truck backs its way toward a small processing building.

Kevin, a local driver from Gordyn Abattoirs, is delivering a load of beef raised on the surrounding paddocks, moving it down a specially designed railway that snakes into a small cool room.

At the same time Campbell, a young but fully-qualified butcher, is carrying dry-aged beef out of the cool room and into a neighbouring fluorescent-lit space, before carving down the meat into smaller portions. Listen Duration: 4 minutes 15 seconds 4 m 15 s Listen Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Dry-aging, butchering and processing beef on Peter Treasure's farm. ( Jeremy Story Carter ) Download 996.5 KB

Farmer Peter Treasure flits about, helping to cart the beef, checking weights, then vacuum-sealing and labelling the final portioned meat to send to chefs, butchers and various other marketplaces.

It seems like a lot of work for a time-poor cattle farmer, but the entire process forms part of an attempt to reassert control over the cattle supply chain.



"We can still take our product and put it into the Livestock Exchange, and that's an important part of the business model, but we can actually carry the product right through to the consumer," said Mr Treasure.

"There is something very special about being able to do that."

For the fourth-generation farmer, processing carcasses once they have returned from the abattoir also allows him to constantly re-evaluate his own on-farm practices and tailor his beef to better suit each of his customers.

"We can make changes in our cattle production just by looking at the carcasses that come through, so we can get a better idea of the product we're producing," he said.

"That allows us to change our production techniques to give the best we can."

Before the beef is portioned to order, it is dry-aged for weeks in a specially modified cool room that uses UV lighting, moderated air flow and of all things, Himalayan rock salt.

"It has those natural preservation properties to be able to give us the result that we need, which is to slow down the bacteria growth in the whole room," he said.

"There’s nothing new about what we’re using, it’s about the way we use it."

A prized herd of Murray Grey cattle in Victoria's east. ( Jeremy Story Carter )

Standing in a paddock of his prized herd of grass-fed Murray Grey cattle in Wuk Wuk in the state's Gippsland region, Mr Treasure hopes his approach can serve as an example that helps breathe innovation into the premium beef industry.

"It’s the whole aspect of being seen to be doing something in agriculture on small acreage... [to show] that there is some direction for the beef industry in small allotments in south-east Australia," he said.

"If we don’t do that, then we won’t have an industry. We won’t have something in the south-east of Australia that we can call a high, premium product."