South Galway Station

Raising cattle in channel country means embracing life—and futility—on a desert floodplain.

The southwest corner of Queensland has always been a land of feast and famine. A notoriously inhospitable stretch of rust colored sand dunes and scrubby brush that is also revered as some of the finest cattle fattening land anywhere. This is Channel Country, one of the last free-flowing desert river systems in the world and a key grazing area for many Westholme cattle, especially those in our F1 (Cross) program. 100,000 square miles of semi-arid habitat located primarily within Queensland and touching into Northern Territory, South Australia, and New South Wales.

It is a land braided with streams, creeks, and channels (hence the name) and dotted with watering holes and wetlands that support a host of wildlife including endemic and endangered species. In many ways South Galway is a metaphor for how we do things. For every season filled with growths of native plants and grasses, there may be two more defined by dry spells and tough conditions. This adversity not only forces Westholme to be more thoughtful with their resources but also produces Wagyu beef with a depth of flavour borne out of these varying conditions.

Channel Country is defined by three major river systems; the Cooper Creek, Diamintina, and Georgina, boundaried to the north by those river catchments and feeding into Lake Eyre to the south. Together these rivers form a hundreds-mile long network of creeks, rivers, and rivulets. But these rivers only flow when it rains. It’s a semi-desert landscape seamed with sweeping sand hills and an alluvial floodplain nearly 40km wide in places. Here droughts can last years and leave little but sand running between your fingers.

This is the home territory of South Galway station, a place ideally suited to fatten cows on flood-borne vegetation and one that puts our Nature-Led philosophy to the test. Farmers have been running sheep and cattle here since the 1870’s and have been at the mercy of mother nature ever since. A famous four-year drought beginning in 1897 destroyed nearly all of the existing herds and only then, as landowners were defeated and walking off their land, did rains finally fall in 1901.

This isn’t great cattle country because of its droughts and desert-like conditions though. This is also flood out country. When it rains the large water catchment areas 400km north of South Galway - the Thompson River, the Barcoo, Sheep Creek, etc - start to send water south. Dusty, dry riverbeds start to run towards Windorah—a town of 104 permanent residents in the Shire of Barcoo, Queensland—near the top of the Cooper Plains.

According to Sam Graham, Westholme’s longest serving employee of the Strategy and Enablement team—and former station manager—South Galway is a place unlike many others in Australia. The first thing he mentioned about South Galway, a place revered for diverse cattle forage was, “it doesn't actually have to rain at South Galway for them to have a season. What happens is that when the rainfall and the monsoon kicks in, these creek systems all start to feed into the system. And it can take anywhere from two to three to four weeks for that water to slowly make its way down the Cooper till it gets to South Galway. And then when it gets to South Galway, they've actually all joined into this one area which is the Cooper Creek, and that's on South Galway Station itself, near the little township called Windora.”

For Westholme, being Nature-Led means listening to the land and letting it dictate your approach to raise cattle. And in semi-arid places like South Galway if it doesn’t rain then we can’t have “a season” or put more simply, cattle can’t graze here. There won’t be much to eat and the cattle and the land will suffer.

But when it rains, it pours.

Flood Out Country 

“At the start of a wet season in November or December  these creeks start to run. You're driving along and you find a creek where the water's starting to make its very first run through the system. Rolling along over dry earth. And just, it’s hard to describe. The smells, the sounds, the water as it's filling every crack, every hole, everything. The frogs start to make noises. It comes to life. It’s a reminder that the land supports the supply chain.” 

 If you’re a grazer—like the nine to ten thousand cattle typically at South Galway at any given time—foraging for food is just what you do. Cattle will go out of their way to eat the tastiest plants first before making their way towards the staple plants in their diet. And the channel country is renowned for it’s huge array of annuals (plants that need to re-seed every year). This annual forage is rich in protein and incredibly diverse—dozens of legumes, wild herbs, and various plants—forming part of the terroir that gives their Westholme Wagyu distinct tasting notes drawn from the land itself. Contrasted with the perennial native grasses that make up the bulk of their diet, the plants around this area are “basically ice cream for cattle,” according to Sam.  

 “In that flood out country you get a lot of these what we call annual grasses. As they grow they set a seed on the grass and then the seed falls off, it falls into the soil and it sits there again for the next flood that comes through.” Many of these annuals aren’t even grasses at all but legumes and herbs that have tremendous flavour and nutritional value. “There's one there called Verbine that the cattlemen and cattlewomen call Thomson River Lucerne. It’s a wild legume that the cattle love. There’s peach vine. There's clover in wintertime that will grow. There's a wild sorghum, which is totally wild.”