It was seven years ago that they decided to give the venture a go with the pair having the perfect backgrounds to take on the job.
Mr Roach and his wife Julie came to the business having always been involved with stock and farming, while Mr Wall had been in the meat business since leaving high school.
Mr Roach is the cattle buyer and buys young store cattle, which are then finished at two properties: “Hallerton” at Collie and “Old Station” at Quambone.
At nine to 10 months of age the cattle go direct to the Bunganbah abattoirs, between Coonabarabran and Binnaway, before being sold through the family’s butcher shops.
Mr Roach buys young calves at about six months of age with a weight of between 200 and 300 kilograms.
Generally the cattle are sourced through the Dubbo saleyards and some direct from farmers.
“We do prefer to buy straight off farm,” Mr Roach said.
“The main thing is the quality of the Angus calves that we actually look to buy; that’s where we come up with our end product.”
The younger cattle were grown out at the 800-hectare “Old Station”.
When the cattle are close to finishing they are moved to “Hallerton”, which is 1120ha.
In the past two months they have been buying 60 to 80 head of mostly Angus a fortnight to build up numbers, in anticipation of what they hope might be a “reasonably good” season.
“We’ve been stocking up fairly well at the moment,” Mr Roach said.
“Normally we buy store calves at about 200kg, which is probably the minimum weight we like to buy them in at.”
With the butcher shops going through 16 to 18 Angus bodies a week, Mr Roach said it was not viable to breed their own cattle because they could not maintain the consistent supply required by the shops.
Cattle are turned-off at nine to 10 months and they like the Angus because it can achieve a dressed weight of 190kg to 210kg at a relatively young age.
“The Angus seems to muscle up a little bit better than the other breeds,” Mr Roach said.
“It doesn’t put on too much fat and marbles quite well as it grows to the size we want to achieve.”
Most of their cattle are Angus heifers because Mr Roach said he found they finished better at a young age compared with the steers.
“Probably 95 per cent of what I buy is nice quality, nice-bodied Angus heifers,” Mr Roach said.
“We steer away from the steers because they tend to want to grow more than the heifers do.”
The men have found that by supplying their own meat to the butcher shops the quality is improved because the time stock were transported for are reduced.
“Occasionally we might have been running short (of meat) in the early days when we started the business,” Mr Roach said.
“We purchased some stock out of the saleyards.
“We noticed by the time they got transported to the yards, yarded the day before, handled in the yards and then they come to our farm or straight to the abattoirs, they were so stressed it wasn’t giving us the product we wanted.
“We do all our own transport, both live and refrigerated transport, and now they walk straight out of paddocks here into the yards and straight on our truck and its only an hour and a half and they’re at the abattoirs.”
From a butcher’s perspective, Mr Wall said the paddock-to-plate operation provided great control over product consistency.
Mr Wall is happy to leave the cattle side of things up to the expertise of his brother-in-law.
“I want a beast that is consistent in colour, taste and tenderness.
“What Jason has found gives me the best consistent quality and product, is the Angus.”