NEWS
Page 6, Southern Farmer
March 2017
It’s more than BY JARRAH LOH
jloh@ nemedia.com.au
BUCKING THE SYSTEM: As local farmer Ken Lang can attest to, fallow bucks can be a dangerous proposition during the rutting season.
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GAME meats have seen a renewed interest in a food fashion obsessed world, with chefs and consumers alike desperate to find that something different that stands out from the crowd. But 70-year-old Healesville farmer Ken Lang has seen the game trend come and go since first farming deer more than 30 years ago. “Now we see venison and wild boar and other game meats popping up all over the place and on television,” he says. But Mr Lang has already been through the boom and bust before. “There are only five per cent of the deer farmers left from the boom in the 1990s,” he says. The market at the time became flooded with local deer and more still were pouring in from New Zealand. Mr Lang knew he wouldn’t survive unless he diversified, so he jumped on the next boom on the horizon. “I could see emus coming, but I knew it wouldn’t last long because they’re just so easy to breed.” Almost overnight the farmed emu population went from zero to a million. Mr Lang was wise enough to know it wouldn’t last long and sold all his birds and incubators just months before the roof blew off the industry. “There are only two emu processors in all of Victoria now, and we still sell for one of them.” These days at Yarra Valley Game Meats, Mr Lang offers up a whole host of exotic animals, sourced from all over Australia for restaurants, hotels and other distributors. Wild boar, camel, wallaby, crocodile, pheasant, quail,
Healesville farmer Ken Lang has been on the game meat front line for more than 30 years. pigeon and buffalo are just to name a few. But it was deer that got him started all those years ago. “It was in 1978 that I bought this 60 acre block that I still run today,” he remembers. Back then, Mr Lang was a bricklayer by trade living in the north east Melbourne suburb of Warrandyte and he came upon the property at an unexpected time. “My mate had just bought a new .30-30 rifle and we thought we’d go out the back blocks of Healesville and let off a few rounds,” laughs Mr Lang. “We didn’t realise how noisy the thing was going to be. “So, we got out of there and went in to town to grab a bite to eat.” The two men browsed the windows of the local shops as they waited for their hamburgers and casually stopped to look at the local real estate, where the agent came out to greet them. “I’d thought about buying property in the past, more as a tax deduction, but he convinced me to come back one day and take a look around.” The agent showed him a few places, and as is often the case, Mr Lang fell in love with his future property at first sight. Once acquired, he immediately stocked it with Horned Herefords. “It wasn’t long until I realised you can’t make money with 60 acres worth of cattle,” says Mr Lang. He then had an opportunity to get in on an emerging 1980s market – deer. “I went out and bought 20 does and a couple of bucks and agisted them until I
could get my high fences up. “It grew bit by bit from there.” Mr Lang was only running fallow deer at the time, but eventually found another farmer that had some red deer, so they started a small business called Valley Venison. “We just took two animals, one red and one fallow, to Yarra Junction abattoir and they both sold straight away. “So we were up and racing.” Mr Lang began to ramp up his numbers, and in 1990 he came to a crossroads in his life. “I was going through a lot of personal things, and I wasn’t sure what to do with my job in the building industry and the farm and everything.” As fate would have it, he met a lady in a similar position and they connected. “She really encouraged me to give away my trade and focus on the farm. “Without her I wouldn’t have done it.” That lady turned out to be his future wife, Mary. Now working full time on the farm, he could see there were too many others in the marketplace and that he needed to branch out. But before he even diversified into emu, he started on kangaroos when a customer asked for them – though it proved to be a tricky proposition. At that stage it was still illegal to sell roo meat in Victoria, so he imported kangaroo tails from South Australia and “bent the rules a bit”. “We eventually got that changed – on a technicality I presented to them.
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