At Lucies Farm we’ve raised pedigree Highland Cattle since 1992.  Our “shop window” was the various agricultural shows held throughout the U.K. each summer.  We’d enter our best cattle, win prizes (if we were fortunate), and meet others who were interested in purchasing Highland Cattle.  Many purchasers simply wanted a group of two or three attractive cows to graze in a small paddock --- large, living lawn ornaments.

BSE, cattle passports, foot-and-mouth, bovine TB, and other problems made it impractical for individuals to purchase a few cows, and we watched our prospective customers vanish.  But our herd didn’t know this, and the numbers kept increasing.

Highland cattle mature slowly, resulting in marbled beef.   But this slow process means the cattle are still relatively light at 30 months --- the oldest age that beef can be put into the food chain.  In the UK, all cattle over 30 months are burned, with the government paying some small compensation for doing so.  Highland cattle also have horns, and the decreasing number of abbatoirs in the country meant we had to take our cattle relatively long distances to find folks willing to handle what are called “horned beasts.”

We found that if we tried to sell our animals to beef farmers, they’d pay us less than the “burn value,” hold the animal until the 30 month mark, and then put it through the system.  We were raising beautiful, pedigreed animals to be burned at the taxpayers’ expense.

In the midst of this depressing time came all of the news stories about the Old Homestead Steak House in New York City, and their $41 Kobe Beef Hamburger.  I’m from Honolulu and was familiar with Kobe beef, but only because of the large Japanese community (local and tourist) in Hawaii.  To me, Kobe Beef came thinly sliced and raw, and you shooshed it in your shabu shabu.  But here was a completely different use for this premium beef.

There is a tremendous shortage of factual information about Kobe beef.  Even the name is a bit of a conundrum, since the beef doesn’t come from Kobe.  We set out to learn all that we could.  We visited the Oriental Collection at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, ordered out-of-print books, and tracked down a retired university professor in Australia.  We contacted every stock photograph agency in Japan to locate pictures of farmers raising Kobe beef without success.  In the end, we hired a photographer in Tokyo, Kjeld Duits, to visit the countryside and take the photographs in this article.

We have been raising our cattle --- purebred Highland and, more recently, purebred Aberdeen Angus --- in the “Kobe fashion” since January 2003.  During this time the cherry red beef has caused wizened meat cutters, folks who have seen it all, to gaze in amazement.  Like the Japanese, we treat our cattle like royalty, and they repay us with magnificent tender beef.