A renowned former Northern Territory cattleman has opened his own butcher shop in a bid to have more control over the quality of the end product.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Listen Duration: 10 minutes 38 seconds 10 m Rob Cook talks about using barley sprouts to finish his cattle off before butchering. Download 4.9 MB

Rob Cook and his wife Sarah moved to Bundaberg, Queensland, two years ago to trial new farm systems that allowed him to keep working with cattle despite being paralysed in a helicopter crash in 2008.

Mr Cook said his method of finishing his Brangus cattle on barley sprouts created an opportunity to pursue control his supply chain.

"We were trying to get fat cattle all year round and what we basically found was once we started sending cattle off to be MSA-graded [Meat Standards Australia eating quality], we were breeding pretty phenomenal cattle," he said.

"And the way we were fattening and finishing them we had a product where we weren't really tapping in to the full value of it.

"So then we started looking at the retail side of it.

"A freehold shop come onto the market and so we started looking more seriously at it."

To help out in the shop Mr Cook roped in a mate of more than 20 years, Shane 'Maddog' Simpson.

Mr Simpson was one of the most decorated rodeo protection sportsmen in the history of Australian bull riding before retiring from the PBR [Professional Bull Riders] in 2014.

He said he took a look at the shop while on holiday visiting the Cooks.

"Rob calls me about two or three months later and says I think I'm going to buy that butcher shop, what do you think?" Mr Simpson said.

"I said to him 'Rob, what do you know about butchering?' and he said 'About as much as you, but with our two heads we could probably make a go of it'.

"I'm not a butcher by trade but I worked on the land for the first 12 years of my working life and part of that involved going out to the paddock and shooting a beast and doing a killer and cutting it up and taking it back to the station.

"I was overwhelmed that Rob said to me 'Would you like to come down and we'll start this business' and I said yeah."

The shop exclusively uses beef and lamb bred and fattened on barley sprouts at Mr Cook's 1,400-hectare property Tandara, near Agnes Water.

It sources pork and chicken from around the district.

Business model pays dividends

Mr Simpson said despite neither of the men being butchers, the approach was paying dividends.

"We had a customer come through a couple of days ago that lives in Brisbane and bought a whole rump," he said.

"This morning I had a phone call from his wife saying that rump … it was absolutely amazing and we're going to use you guys as our supplier now.

"People that live four or five hours away are saying that and even the feedback from the local people here has been phenomenal.

"We're very passionate about putting a product out there that people, when they eat it, it means something to them."

Mr Cook has introduced new technology at the farm that allows him to operate gates and crushes, and he has continued that approach with voice activated point of sale systems in the shop.

"Something that we're working on now is being able to give that lifetime traceability right through from where the animal is born to every time it gets a supplement to when it's fattened to when it's slaughtered right through to when it's a steak on the plate," he said.

"I've got some smart people in the background working on some QR [quick response] codes so that we can use out smart phones to identify exactly what animal that steak came from.

"Technology's definitely going to be a big part in the future of our butcher shop."

While it was not unheard of for butchers to run their own cattle, using barley sprouts to fatten and taking complete control of the supply line was more unusual.

Mr Cook said it was more about controlling quality than price.

"We're in talks at the moment putting in our own processing plant so therefore we won't have any outside influence on our product whatsoever," he said.

"When we're breeding for a purpose and we can follow that and monitor that and fine tune that right through to when our consumers are enjoying dinner with their family, well that's basically what it all comes down to."