Bruce Cheung addressing the WagyuEdge 2025 conference in Perth.

IT was the sight of a black swan floating serenely on the Indian Ocean that helped Bruce Cheung make up his mind that the Pilbara was the right place to build a pioneering high-value Wagyu production enterprise.

The Singaporean businessman, who had amassed a fortune in the duty-free sector, was 90 days into an epic drive around Australia looking for the perfect place to start a new farming venture when he spotted the swan off the remote West Australian coast.

The deeply personal story of why he was there in the first place was the subject of a captivating hour-long presentation Bruce gave to the recent WagyuEdge 2025 conference in Perth, the first time the event has been held in WA.

Childhood dream

“My childhood dream is something I’d like to share with you,” Mr Cheung told the 500 or so Wagyu producers and industry service providers filling the room.

As a young Singaporean growing up in Hong Kong where his family had bought into a Department Store, Bruce said he was rewarded for good grades with a trip to a Japanese restaurant.

On experiencing Sukiyaki for the first time, he said “that thin sliced meat melted in my mouth, and I remember that.”

“I didn’t get good grades all the time, so I wish one day I would be able to eat it daily or get my family and my kids to eat it all the time. But that dream was a childhood dream, very unrealistic.”

Crises collide

Bruce, who went on to co-found the globally successful China International Duty Free (CIDF), which has more than 100 locations through airports, cruise ships and airlines, said the Global Financial Crisis in the late 2000s was another turning point in his decision to invest in agriculture.

The GFC created a food security shock for Singapore, prompting the Government create a “30 by 30” plan, encouraging Singaporeans to invest in food production initiatives that would help the country produce 30 percent of its nutritional needs locally by 2030.

“During that period of time, I was suffering from a mid-life crisis,” Bruce explained.

“So I had done a long time in the past industry that I was involved in, which is a duty-free supplier and it started to get a bit boring, so I said, okay, I am going to try something that is a little bit more challenging.

“Oh boy, my gosh, I didn’t know what I got into.”

An epic journey of discovery

Noting the need for more high-value protein to supply the ballooning middle classes in Asia, Africa and America, Bruce made a decision to buy a farm in Australia, drawn by its close proximity to Singapore.

“And of course I am very naive. I have never farmed a day in my life. I thought, wow, how do you go about doing this?”

So he flew to Sydney, hired a car and began driving, first all the way north to Cairns, then west to Darwin and across to Broome, before finally heading south, inspecting properties for sale all the along the way.

By the time he got to Darwin, after 45 days of travel, he had a stark realisation.

“When I got to Darwin, I learned something. I had realised by then that this continent is a desert.

“I realised I would need to find some way to make the carrying capacity go up.

“So instead of looking for farmland, from that very moment on from Darwin, I changed my focus, and from that time on, I am just looking for projects with water.”

Hence, on day 90, he found himself on the Pilbara Coast looking out over the ocean.

“Halfway through coming down south to Perth, I stopped in the middle of some of the most arid country. It is called Pardoo station.

“I went into there, really beautiful to look at – beaches, everything.

“But then I noticed a very strange phenomenon that day.

“There was a black swan. In the middle of the Indian ocean. What is going on with this swan? Isn’t it afraid of sharks?”

He was surprised: “the bird is so relaxed”.

“And I started thinking, how could a swan swim in that type of water? I’m curious.

“I went back to the room, and I started googling. And I just find out that actually, swans live in brackish or fresh water.

“So what is that bird doing out there?”

Sweet water

He found out that the area in aboriginal terms is referred to as “sweet water”.  Sailors could put a bucket down and take fresh water on board without having to come onshore.

“I said, what does that mean? Something is happening underneath there. That is an interesting event for me.”

As it turned out he learned that Pardoo Station, while in an arid zone, sits atop the West Canning Basin, one of Australia’s largest freshwater aquifers.

“If you drill a hole, water will come up 30 metres, 8 to 10 stories high, you don’t have to pump. And the water quality is quite good, absolutely drinkable,” he said.

“So I decided, why don’t I give it a go?

“So I bought the station. I decided to drought proof it and I dream of doing a little bit of Wagyu there.”

He added with a wide grin that, “like a typical Singaporean buying property, I overpaid”.

“We overpay minimum 50 percent. Because we have a long term view we always in the end average it out, right.”

A desert transformation

Much has happened since that transformational “Black Swan event”.

Pardoo Station and the Pardoo Wagyu business it supports now encompasses seven stations, including 20 pivots watering more than 1000ha of irrigated crops, primarily maize, barley, sorghum and panic grass, Rhodes grass and cow pea.

An aerial view of Pardoo pivots. Picture: Pardoo Wagyu

The herd today stands at 20,000 Wagyu breeders (10,000 purebred, 9500 crossbred and 500 full blood breeders (F1-F2)). The enterprise has its own dedicated genetic development facility for the production of semen and bulls in the Perth Hills, along with an AI Centre at the Pilbara pivot precinct.

Pardoo Wagyu has also been named by the WA Government as a Project of State Significance. With shared investment totalling $200 million so far, the target is to grow to a herd of 100,000 Wagyu breeders by 2031.

Expertise shared

As a pioneering enterprise in a remote region of WA there was no clear manual on how to proceed. Bruce acknowledged the help he has received along the way from leading experts including WA Wagyu industry leader Peter Gilmour; the Hughes family who have proven the ability of Wagyu cattle to succeed in northern Australia; southern Wagyu producer David Blackmore and Japanese Wagyu guru, the late Shogo Takeda from Hokkaido, Japan.

“I feel that part of my major success is because of how ignorant I am,” Bruce told the audience with a smile.

“It is like you go out on the side of the highway and you see this little kid riding a bicycle, and eventually some guy is going to stop and help you, and that is what happened.

“I had along the way many, many people who would come and give me a hand, for no financial reasons, no reasons, right, they just say, wow, this guy is going to fall off a cliff, let’s do at least a little bit of a good Samaritan act and give him a hand.

“And I am really grateful for all of them.”

‘Very close to where we want to be’

Despite playing down his own knowledge Bruce has developed unique expertise in rangeland Wagyu production. With trial and error he has refined the Pardoo Wagyu production model over the past decade to now being “very close to where we want to be.”

He described the model today as being based on a 1200-day cycle. “Now we artificially inseminate our cattle up in the north, probably we are one of the few in the north who AI, just because we have the pivot area and we can basically manage them over that period of time.

Image: Pardoo Wagyu

“And that is probably is the quickest way for me to get the proper genetics into the young cattle and go on from there, and that part of it is very important.

“Also we ensure that during the third trimester out in the rangeland the breeders have absolutely the best amount of supplementation if the season requires it.”

Additionally they have created the Takeda Genetic Centre in the Perth Hills running 500 breeders to support the semen and follow-up bull needs for the northern breeding herds.

Bruce has also focused heavily on what Pardoo has, rather than what it does not have, in order to create a unique eating quality attribute in the marketplace.

He backgrounds Wagyu cattle for 200 days on grass. Taste testing results with the University of Queensland have demonstrated that Pardoo Wagyu has a point of difference.

“We found that we are quite different from most other Wagyu from Australia.”

Value brand

Beef from Pardoo Wagyu now sells into 13 countries. Despite being a self-declared “purist”, Bruce has also taken heed of the advice of distributors and expanded into F1 and F2 programs to meet market demand for more affordable Wagyu.

“It is not something I really love to do, but along the way I figure since I am going to do it, I am going do it the best I can.

“And eventually, bit by bit, I start eating it, and now my son asks me to give him that, instead of my main purebred. So that got me a little baffled.”

Marble Score

Expanding on the point, he raised a question: Is the Australian wagyu industry on the right path by seeking ever higher marbling scores?

“Are we all as a group missing the point here? Our marbling is getting fantastic. Is there where we are going? Is this where we need to go? Is it because the Americans are chasing us that we need to run as fast as we can?

“Now in Southeast Asia, you know, A5 is everywhere. They’re knocking us back everywhere. And the price we don’t believe.”

In their own case, Pardoo, after first prioritising breeding cattle with the maternal abilities to handle the rangeland environment, has now reached an average marbling score in the low to mid 8 range.

“We feel that probably somewhere in the 8-9 range is where the new market cap is – it is my silly opinion, I can see guys over there giving me this stare, that I can feel the heat.

“But in my opinion that probably is where I see the gap is, because if the Japanese are going to come down at us with their price, that space is getting narrow.”

Blueprint for pastoral Wagyu production

Today Pardoo Wagyu stands as a blueprint for premium beef production in remote northern Australia.

The company’s website says that the broader regional project is expected to create up to 1900 full-time jobs and justify a northern abattoir and feeding and cold storage facilities, with multipliers amounting to an estimated $3 billion of economic contribution to the WA economy.

Just as he benefitted from others openly sharing advice, Mr Cheung is enthusiastically sharing the Pardoo story and encouraging others to come north and raise wagyu in north western Australia.

“You just have to follow the Nike way – just do it,” he said.