I was introduced to the Wagyu breed in 1993 by Heather Suares from Queensland. Heather was introduced to me by a well known Hereford breeder, Geoff Watson from Armidale. Heather had a Japanese business partner who owned three restaurants and planned to supply them with F1 Wagyu product. Virtually every angus breeder in the New England was approached by Heather enquiring if they would be willing to inseminate their angus heifers in a buyback scheme to sell the F1 progeny at a 60 cent premium over and above the price they would receive for their angus steer weaners. The premium applied for both steers and heifers.
I was the only angus breeder in district that took the bait, purely as a commercial decision at the time. However that first crop of F1 calves by American Purebred bulls, sourced by Wally Rea from the Overflow got me interested . Heather Suares took delivery of the F1 weaners as agreed despite her business partnership having collapsed. When Heather offered to supply semen (Michifuku and Haruki2) the next year we again inseminated our heifers but this time decided to market the progeny ourselves.
In 1997 we met with Mac Kimura from Nippon at the Whyalla feedlot near Texas Queensland. Together with Alex and Jody Hall from Wandoan, My brother Tim Rogers from One Tree Ebor discussed our projected supply of F1s for the following 5 years.
We came away with an agreement to supply Whyalla with mixed sex F1s at $3/kg live weight. At the time we were receiving $1.00 – $1.15 for our well bred angus steers so our deal with Whyalla was fantastic business for us at the time. We continued supplying Whyalla until an e coli outbreak in Japan in 2001 drastically reduced beef consumption for a period in Japan. We then started supplying F1s to the Japanese live export trade for the next 10 years with both steers and heifers.
In 2000 we bought a lovely property east of Guyra perched above Guy Fawkes National Park called Dyamberin. In 2005, as a part of our family succession planning and distribution, my son Lock jnr took over Dyamberin and a herd of Wattletop commercial cows that had been the base of our family’s very successful F1 wagyu enterprise. Lock jnr continued to run an outstanding F1 program while doing a superb job of developing Dyamberin.
After breeding F1 wagyus for 4 years , I bought a purebred heifer by Michifuku from Heather Suares in 1997 followed by a full blood heifer in 1998. This was to be my little core of cows to start breeding some bulls for our F1 program over angus cows.
After a distribution of 500 angus cows to Lock jnr in 2005 which left me short of commercial angus cows, I started to breed a few more full blood Wagyu which I had started in1999. In those earlier days of the Door Key herd, we generally focused on high content Tajima bulls which would be best suited to use over our Wattletop Angus cow herd. It wasn’t long before we developed a clientele of mainly F1 breeders that used Door Key bulls. In 2018 we sold 85 bulls reaching as far north as Cloncurry and south to the Upper Murray.
