THINGS are moving quickly for Jack Burton and his partners.
Not long after buying the Gingin abattoir and with construction about to ramp up on his Broome abattoir, Mr Burton is already exporting beef to Vietnam.
He has processed about 2000 cattle to go into Vietnam in the last six months.
These were processed at Western Meat Packers and sent to a government-owned supermarket chain.
"Our direct competition is Indian Buffalo meat," Mr Burton said.
"We are probably double the retail value and it is an unsophisticated customer but they see an Australian sticker and that sells the product.
"Vietnam consumers will pay a 100 per cent premium because of that sticker.
"I wouldn't have thought that would happen, I thought we would have to fight our competition on quality or on price but they see that Australian sticker and they want that beef."
For Mr Burton this is the start of what he hopes is a revolution for WA farmers.
"I think we are coming in to one of our most exciting times in agriculture and everything I am doing is trying to be a part of that," he said.
"There is a food boom coming and we want a piece of the action.
"The biggest thing that we came to realise in our business is - do we produce food?
"Of course we produce food but let me tell you for the last 20 years of my life in the cattle industry nothing has gone over the front grid of my property on a truck that you could actually eat as it went over the grid.
"And up until recently, if you asked me who my customers are I could only name four when I have an animal that goes off my place in a truck.
"So I thought, maybe instead of putting that animal on a truck, we put it in a box and potentially reach millions of customers and that is what started this."
Mr Burton said another reason for taking control of his product was the issues with live export.
"I went to the Kimberley in 1992 and not long after live export came along and it was the saviour of the Kimberley and over the next nine to 10 years live export boomed," he said.
"From 2000 to 2004 if you put 1000 cattle in the yard, you could get 1000 cattle on the boat and we were running a lot of rough cattle at the time.
"It didn't matter how much horn they had, how old they were or how rough they were.
"If they could walk onto the truck to get them over the weighbridge they went and we were getting $2/kg for steers in 2001.
"We were lucky we were in the right spot at the right time and we started to expand.
"And I, like a lot of people, thought live export was the way to go.
"It was pretty obvious, as there were 250 million people you could throw a rock on from Broome and they all needed a feed. It doesn't get any better than that.
"Then over the next five years the rot set in.
"I call it death by a thousand cuts.
"Out of those 1000 cattle we put on the boat in 2001 we were now getting told what could or couldn't go.
"You can't have more than 50cm of horn, so we lost 50 cattle, then it was you can't have more than 12cm of horn, so there goes another 50.
"You can't have big animals, you have to reduce the density.
"The animal welfare groups wanted us to change the way we did things and the countries we were exporting to then started to use this to drop the price.
"So out of those 1000 cattle we put on a boat in 2001, we would be lucky to put 300 on now.
"That meant we had 700 cattle we needed to find a home for out of 1000.
"It got to the point where you would have 300 prime heifers and Indonesian buyers would come out and draft off 80 to take and leave you with 220.
"So with this going on and less and less cattle being accepted, we thought if this is extrapolated out over another decade and we take another couple of hits, we are in a situation with live export where we can't pay the bills.
"It may come to the point where people won't do live export and the animal welfare people will probably think they have won, that they have minimised the live export trade.
"But they want to have a good hard look at what they are creating because all of the countries we supply aren't going to stop eating cattle or sheep.
"So these animal welfare activists are going to stop the best producers in the world being able to supply these countries.
"And there is going to be a lot of blood on their hands in the next couple of decades.
"We need Australia in the trade because if we aren't there these importing countries are going to get them from places that don't give a rat's about animal welfare."