Bec Lynd is a tree changer — a returnee to her home community in Tasmania's Derwent Valley — and for as long as she can remember, Bec Lynd had dreamed of being a farmer.
When she returned to the Derwent Valley eight years ago and found a parcel of land beside the Valley's upper reaches, Ms Lynd took her chance.
"As soon as I got out here, I fell in love with it and put an offer on it straight away," she said.
It was a fortuitous move for the aspiring farmer.
After setting up a home on her perfect piece of land, Bec Lynd also met her fiance Bec Tudor and together, the pair embarked on a farming dream.
"I've lived in Tasmania 15 years. I chose to come here because I love the environment," Ms Tudor said.
"Environment and animals have always been a passion for me — it's just that I haven't had as full an expression of that until living here on the farm with Bec."
Bec and Bec, as they're fondly known by locals, initially introduced Scottish Highland cattle to the property to help keep the pasture and forest scrub under control.
The surprisingly nimble animals thrived on the steep slopes.
"There's not many farmers that would look at this and think it was perfect beef country, because it's the side of a steep hill — 90 metres at the bottom and we're up over 400 metres above sea level at the top — [but] Scottish Highland cattle are perfectly suited to that," Ms Lynd said.
Slow food in its truest sense
From what began as just a couple of cows, Bec and Bec soon built a 100-strong herd. They started processing a handful just a couple of years ago.
"We work with the local abattoir to ensure they process our cattle last, just because they do take a little more time because of their horns.
"We really like to understand they're not rushed up the race; they can walk up there comfortably and calmly, so its a really good opportunity to work with a local business like that," Ms Lynd said.
It's slow food in the truest sense of the word — their meat takes longer to mature and they don't process any meat until the animal is about four years of age.
That's twice the age of most other beef breeds when they're sent to the abattoir.
"We believe they take on what the industry calls terroir, so they've become a bit of a product of their environment," Ms Lynd said.
"These guys, they're browsers not grazers — they eat bark off trees, weeds, all sorts of native pasture that other cattle wouldn't get the chance to eat, so they take on a real flavour of their environment."
They sell this rich, old-fashioned beef direct to the public and a few high-end restaurants.
Delicious meat 'tastes like butter'
Rodney Dunn and Ali Currey-Voumard are from the Derwent Valley's top restaurant The Agrarian Kitchen, named by the Good Food Guide as Australia's best regional restaurant.
For Mr Dunn, this Scottish Highland beef is a perfect fit for the restaurant.
"One, it's local; two, it's using an animal that has a long history and heritage, and using it in a sustainable way. In the end, it has to be delicious," he said.
And the steak from an eight-year-old steer does seem to win approval.
"It's so good. It's really about that fat — it tastes like butter," Ms Currey-Voumard said.
It's a good life in Tasmania's Derwent Valley for these well-looked-after Scottish Highland cattle, but in the end, it's still a reasonably short life.
Like all commercial beef operations, these appealing fluffy animals will still end up on a dinner plate.
"I didn't set out to breed cattle for beef, but I'm pretty passionate about making sure the cattle stay happy," Ms Lynd said.
"Therefore, I put them in a family unit and ended up with some offspring, and eventually we researched a market and found that we could make this a viable enterprise — which is what we've done."
Watch this story on a forthcoming episode of Landline at the new time of 12:30pm Sunday.
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