Asian consumers have a huge appetite for it. Private equity funds find it irresistible. And billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates is investigating how it can help feed the world's poor. Australian beef has never been so popular or in such demand.
The 33-year-old Canadian is one of a growing number of foreigners lured into this traditional business, which is enjoying an investment boom. More than A$2bn ($1.48bn) has been channelled into the industry in the past two years in a modern-day "gold rush" for a sector that had struggled for two decades.
Wylarah is owned by Australian Agricultural Company (AACo), one of the country's oldest businesses and its largest beef producer. It is at the centre of a major restructuring of the industry driven by technology and the opening up of markets across Asia.
Among those attracted to Australia's cattle boom are foreign private equity groups, with Guy Hands' Terra Firma and Joe Lewis's Tavistock Group joining a stampede of domestic and Chinese investors buying up farms. Analysts say the investment is needed to increase efficiency, build resilience to environmental risks such as drought, and boost production. They point to competition from South American producers, which have negotiated market-access deals in Asia and the US.
However, the surge in private and particularly overseas investment into a sector dominated by family farms risks prompting a political backlash. It has become a source of friction where the need for investment and the drive for new markets rubs up against a fear of the foreign.
"If [China] bought that much land in England there would be a riot," Barnaby Joyce, Australia's agriculture minister, told the Financial Times last year when asked about the proposed takeover of S Kidman & Co - a beef producer with landholdings covering an area larger than Ireland - by Chinese investors.
"We remain the most liberal country on earth in allowing foreigners to invest but we don't do it without the qualification that we have the right to say 'no'."
The battle for control of Kidman , fought between Chinese groups and Australian investors, exposed a lot of those tensions - most explicitly, public concern about the scale of foreign investment in a sector that controls vast tracts of land.
In April Canberra blocked Chinese conglomerate Shanghai Pengxin from buying Kidman, citing the "national interest". When local investors later emerged with a bid to challenge a second group of Chinese investors, prominent politicians led a public campaign urging the government to support the 100 per cent local bid.
"I smell a rat in the way they [the local investors] are being blocked from participating in this bid," said Bob Katter, an independent Queensland MP.
In December, the Australian Outback Beef consortium, led by Gina Rinehart, Australia's richest woman, finally won approval to buy Kidman for A$386.5m . The resources tycoon controls two-thirds of the business consortium while the remaining third is owned by Shanghai CRED Real Estate, a Chinese group founded by Gui Goujie.
"There is a perception that all the prime agricultural land is being snapped up by foreigners, particularly with the influx of investment funds out of China," says Albert Wong, director of US-based Boomerang Capital, which has advised Chinese investors. "Teaming up with local investors on bids for sensitive agricultural assets is a much more palatable model in terms of public perception and gaining approvals."
Terra Firma bought a 90 per cent stake in Australia's second biggest beef producer, Consolidated Pastoral Company, for A$425m in 2009. It now owns 95 per cent. Mr Lewis has increased his stake in AACo to 38 per cent from 32 per cent over the past 18 months via Tavistock, his private investment vehicle. Australian billionaires Andrew Forrest and Gerry Harvey have also amassed significant cattle holdings as they seek to capitalise on Asia's dining boom.
In the five years to the end of 2016 total imports of beef and veal to China jumped almost tenfold to 825,000 tonnes a year, which made it the world's second largest importer of red meat after the US, according to US agriculture department statistics. Beef, previously nicknamed "millionaires' meat" in China, is becoming more mainstream although the annual consumption rate of 5.5kg of beef per person is still more than six times lower than in the US.
"The Australian agricultural sector was on its knees for two decades and there was not a farmers' son or daughter that would say with any confidence they wanted to go into farming - we risked losing the next generation," says Mr Forrest, who made his fortune selling iron ore to China and has invested A$150m in meat businesses. "When China entered the fray it boosted demand [for beef] throughout Asia and made the farming sector much healthier."
The cattle sector had been hit hard by depressed land values caused by the global financial crisis. A severe drought in cattle areas and a surge in the value of the Australian dollar, which peaked at US$1.10 in 2011, also hurt farmers. By 2013 rural debt levels had doubled in a decade to A$64.5bn, according to the Reserve Bank of Australia.
Since then the Australian dollar has depreciated by more than 30 per cent and Chinese and US demand for beef has fuelled a recovery. Canberra has also signed free-trade deals across Asia, reducing tariffs on Australian beef exports in several markets.
These factors helped the country to briefly overtake India and Brazil as the world's biggest beef and cattle exporter in 2015. In the same year average cash income for beef farms increased by a third to A$162,000, according to government data. But more than 85 per cent of those farms are family businesses that struggle to raise funds to boost output as demand rises, or cope with severe droughts and other risks.
Analysts say this leaves them vulnerable to competition from larger producers. The threat was highlighted in a report from the Australian agriculture and water resources department in December, warning that greater market access for Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay could cut Australia's projected export growth of 20 per cent by 2030 in half.
The price for Australian beef remains at a near-record high of A$6.25 a kilogramme, almost three times what it was in 2013. Its smaller national herd, which numbers 26m compared with more than 200m in Brazil, also limits farmers' ability to ramp up exports .
In response, Australia's largest producers have begun targeting premium markets and boosting productivity.
AACo is restructuring its business to capture more value from the cattle it rears. It has bought feedlot operations that enable it to fatten its cattle before slaughter, opened its first beef processing facility in Darwin and launched Wylarah and Westholme, its luxury Wagyu beef brands, in Singapore.
"In the last few years we have begun diversifying," says Jason Strong, AACo managing director. "It is the premium end of the market we are most interested in and not necessarily just in Asia." In the 2014 financial year beef sales made up 59 per cent of total revenue for AACo. Last year it was 88 per cent.
The company has established a scientific advisory board, which runs DNA tests to improve breeding outcomes by measuring traits such as fertility, carcass quality and feed efficiency. It uses ultrasound scanners to measure levels of fat in the beef, and data mining software that records, monitors and tracks the movements and individual characteristics of each bull.
Bill Gates and experts from his philanthropic foundation visited Wylarah Farm last month to assess whether these technologies could be used to help feed the world's poor.
Consolidated Pastoral is also restructuring, forming new partnerships with abattoirs to provide continuous supply chains and setting a target for 20 per cent of its total sales to go to China.
"We are examining a range of opportunities to expand our business, including going direct or working with strategic partners," says Troy Setter, the company's chief executive.
He says Terra Firma's investment is an example of how a foreign-owned, Australian-managed organisation can improve productivity, and warns against protectionism.
"Family farms will always be extremely important within the local industry, but we can't expect Aussie farmers to keep increasing debt to develop the industry further," says Mr Setter. "Significant capital is required to deal with family succession and the investments required in infrastructure and technology in order to ensure Australia can take advantage of the available opportunities."
Tax office data show that 13.6 per cent of Australia's farmland is owned by overseas interests. British companies and individuals own 27.5m hectares, roughly half of that figure. Chinese interests own just under 1.5m hectares, equivalent to 0.5 per cent of the total.
Yet it is Chinese investors that have aroused the most concern within rural communities and among politicians, particularly from the National party - the junior partner in the governing coalition. In 2015 Canberra reduced the threshold at which purchases by foreign investors of farmland must be cleared by regulators from A$240m to A$15m.
New Hope Group, which is based in Sichuan province, is one Chinese investor that has courted local companies to help win approval for A$1bn in Australian investments since 2013. It recently set up a joint venture dairy company with a trio of Australian food groups.
"We are not unique but, this kind of partnership approach is a great way to build value," says Nick Dowling, New Hope Australia's chief executive. He cites the example of Kilcoy Pastoral Company, Australia's fourth biggest meat processor, in which New Hope acquired a majority stake in 2013. Since the deal KPC has invested heavily in machinery and built up its supply network with retailers such as McDonald's, Yum Brands and Shake Shack.
Many analysts warn that if Australia shuts the doors on such foreign investment, particularly from China, it risks missing an opportunity.
"Australia's agricultural industry is still in many ways a cottage industry with small, inefficient, family farms dominating the sector," says Matt Sherwood, head of investment strategy at Perpetual, one of Australia's largest wealth managers. "The danger is that growing political opposition to foreign investment in the farm sector will cause Australia to lose out to competitors in South America and elsewhere."
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