The Birralee farm supplying Tasmania’s best kitchens

Bec Rundle remembers the exact moment she understood she was doing it wrong at Lone Goose Farm.

It was the first year. She and her husband, Paul Hallier, had loaded 3,000 muscovy duck eggs into an industrial incubator, done everything by the book, monitored the temperature, turned the eggs twice a day, candled them at 10 days and again at 25. When hatching day came, 250 ducklings emerged. The other 2,750 did not. Their “92% failure rate”.

Meanwhile, a single mother duck had been sitting quietly on a nest in the corner of the property, tending her clutch without any help at all. She hatched 45.

“A friend told us that incubating muscovy eggs is like practising the dark arts,” Rundle says, laughing at the memory. “We decided we should probably just let the mothers do it.”

That shift, from intervention to trust, from control to observation, turned out to be the philosophy that would define Lone Goose Farm. Six seasons on, the Birralee property produces around 550 muscovy ducks a year for some of Tasmania’s most celebrated restaurant kitchens, including Grain of the Silos and Josef Chromy in Launceston as well as FICO in Hobart and The Agrarian Kitchen in New Norfolk amongst others. Chefs who encounter the product tend not to let go of the supplier.

Rundle and Hallier are not native farmers. They met in Melbourne in 2010 and spent years in city life before something shifted. They considered other parts of Australia. They kept coming back to Tasmania, and eventually to a 58-acre property outside Birralee with well-established paddocks, a cluster of old sheds and a 120-year-old farmhouse that needed, as Rundle puts it, “making pretty again.”

They arrived in April 2019. By November, Rundle was telling her husband that if he wanted to be a duck farmer, he should probably get some ducks.

Pekins were the original plan, the breed that dominates commercial Australian duck production. But an early mix-up at Burnie’s Bunnings car park got them the wrong eggs, and in sorting out the confusion they found themselves testing several varieties side by side, assessing personality, flavour and how each breed moved across their particular land. The muscovies came out on top by a wide margin.

The breed is unusual in the Australian market. Where pekins are grown quickly and harvested at between six to eight weeks, muscovies take 20 weeks, and that time shows in the meat. It is darker and richer than most duck available in this country, with a better yield from the carcass, and it carries what Rundle simply calls “a proper ducky flavour.” When they began approaching Tasmanian restaurants, the response was immediate.

“They got very excited,” she says. “It is just not a protein you generally find here.”

The farm is deliberately small. Rundle and Hallier employ no staff. They handle every stage themselves, which means they are with their birds constantly, noticing things a larger operation might miss. Early duckling mortality, which hovered around three percent in the first years, has dropped to approximately 0.2 percent, a figure that reflects six seasons of close attention and small, compounding improvements. One of the key discoveries was keeping age groups tight: a two-week-old duckling is roughly five times the size of a day-old, and mixing them caused problems nobody had anticipated.

Birralee is at the end of the power line, Hallier notes, and outages are common. Running an incubator through a 24-hour blackout was, as he recalls, not a pleasant experience. Letting the mothers hatch their own eggs solved that problem too.

The muscovy mothers, it turns out, are extraordinary at hatching and terrible at keeping ducklings alive once they arrive. So the newborns are moved into converted stables fitted with heat plates that replicate the warmth of a brooding duck, sheltered from the ravens and goshawks and quolls that have learned the farm’s rhythms. The young birds also have access to an outside pen through a duck-sized door in the stable’s wall (a wise suggestion from a school visitor). After four to five weeks, the birds go onto pasture full time, strip-grazing the paddocks in rotation the same way cattle would. They stay there until 20 weeks, unhurried, building the muscle that gives the meat its character.

This season, Lone Goose Farm opened  to visitors. Farm tours ran three days a week from November, capped at 20 people, lasting an hour. Guests meet the breeding flock, handle day-old ducklings, walk the pasture and visit the farm’s small herd of Jersey cows before settling in at a picnic area by the dam with local produce and Tasmanian sparkling wine. The tours are expected to open again this coming November. It is, Rundle says, a way of sharing what they have built with a community that welcomed two mainlanders without question.

“There are so many small-scale farmers out here doing really special things,” Rundle says. “We’re just a tiny part of a big Tasmanian story. That’s enough for us.”