Wagyu Beef · Peace Country, Alberta

Some dinners you remember for years.

We raise Wagyu slowly, on northern grass, on our family's land. What shows up at your door isn't just beef. It's the reason nobody leaves the table early.

Shop the cuts → Meet the family

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Raised on our farmBorn, grown and finished on one family's land, never a feedlot we've never seen.

Marbled the slow wayWagyu genetics plus an unhurried finish. There is no shortcut to that grain.

Cut to orderButchered, wrapped and flash-frozen in small batches, not warehoused for months.

You know the farmerEvery box comes from a farm you can name, in a place you can find on a map.

Why it tastes like that

It isn't a trick. It's time, grass and a long northern summer.

Most beef is built to move fast. Ours isn't. Up here the days stretch past sixteen hours in June, the grass comes in thick and sweet, and the cattle take their time on it. That patience is the whole product.

01

The long light

Peace Country summers run late into the evening. Pasture grows fast and stays sweet, and the herd grazes long after the sun would have set further south.

02

An unhurried finish

We don't push weight. The cattle finish on their own clock, which is the only way to lay down marbling that fine and that even through the muscle.

03

One family, start to finish

Same people at calving, same people at loading, same people answering the phone when you call. Nothing changes hands in the dark.

The marbling

Look at it before you cook it.

That web running through the muscle is intramuscular fat, and it melts at close to body temperature. It's why a Wagyu steak doesn't need a sauce, a rub, or an apology, and why people who say they don't really like steak tend to go quiet halfway through one.

How to cook it →

Fresh cut · ribeye

Start here

The ones people order twice.

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Peace Country, Alberta

Raised where the days are long and nobody's in a hurry.

Four hundred kilometres north of Edmonton, the growing season is short and bright and the winters are honest. It's a hard place to farm and a very good place to raise cattle slowly.

See the farm →

The Hodgsons

Three generations, one gate.

Duey and Anne started it. Jacob and Sara, Eli and Kianna, Hannah and Paul carry it now, plus a running count of grandchildren who are mostly useful at fencing time.

We're not a brand that bought a herd. We're a family that raised one, and then had to figure out the website part afterward.

Read our story →

Don't overthink it

Salt. Heat. Rest. That's the recipe.

Wagyu punishes fussing. Get the pan properly hot, keep it simple, pull it earlier than you think, and let it sit. Everything else is just confidence.

The full method →

Stay in the loop

We butcher in batches. They go fast.

One email when a new batch is cut, one when something's nearly gone, and the occasional thing worth cooking on a Sunday. Nothing else.

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The Shop

Every cut, from the farm gate to yours.

Butchered in small batches and flash-frozen at peak. If something's sold out, it means the batch is genuinely gone, not sitting in a warehouse somewhere.

Fill the freezer

Quarter, half, or whole.

The best price per pound we offer, and the closest thing to how our own family eats. You choose the cutting instructions; we handle the rest and have it ready frozen and boxed.

Enquire about bulk →

Curated boxes

Someone else did the choosing.

Built by the people who cut it, for the way people actually cook. Good place to start, better place to gift from.

Our story

We didn't set out to sell beef.

We set out to raise it properly. Selling it directly to you was just what happened once we realised how much gets lost between a good animal and a grocery store shelf.

The place

Four hundred kilometres north of anywhere busy.

The Peace Country is the top edge of where farming works in Alberta. Short season, long days, cold that means it. Grass grows here like it's making up for lost time, and the cattle that graze it get the benefit.

There's no romance in a 38 below morning checking heifers. But there's a reason we haven't left.

How we got here

The short version.

Then

Duey & Anne start the farm

A commercial herd, a quarter section, and the usual amount of optimism. Placeholder: replace with your real founding year and the story you'd tell at a kitchen table.

Later

The first Wagyu genetics arrive

A deliberate bet that doing one thing exceptionally would beat doing the ordinary thing at scale. Replace with the real year and where the genetics came from.

Since

The next generation takes it on

Jacob & Sara, Eli & Kianna, Hannah & Paul. Three households, one operation, and a lot of shared equipment.

Now

Straight from our gate to your table

No auction barn, no middleman, no mystery. You order, we cut, it arrives.

The point of all of it

It was never really about the beef.

It's about the Friday your brother-in-law shows up and you've got something worth cooking. The birthday you didn't book a restaurant for. The ordinary Tuesday that turned out better than expected.

We raise the animal. You make the memory. That trade has worked out well for both of us so far.

Start with a box →

Chefs & Wholesale

Consistent supply from a herd you can actually visit.

For restaurants, butchers and retailers who'd rather name their farmer than their distributor. Whole carcass, primal, or a standing order of the cuts you actually move.

Request pricing → See the cuts

01

Whole & primal

Take the animal as it comes and break it your way. Best value, full control, and the cuts your competitors can't get.

02

Standing orders

Agree the cuts and cadence once and we'll hold them back for you each batch. No scrambling when the menu is already printed.

03

Named provenance

Put the farm on your menu and mean it. We'll give you the photography, the story and an open invitation to come see the herd.

Let's talk

Tell us what you need and we'll price it honestly.

We'd rather have a short conversation than send a generic sheet. Volume, cuts, frequency: start with whatever you know.

How to cook it

The fastest way to ruin a Wagyu steak is to try too hard.

This is not a recipe. It's four things to get right and a list of things to stop doing.

01

Thaw slowly

24 hours in the fridge. Then an hour on the counter so it isn't fighting the pan from cold.

02

Salt, nothing else

Coarse salt, both sides, right before it hits the heat. No oil, there's enough fat in there already.

03

Hot and short

Cast iron, screaming hot, two to three minutes a side. You want crust, not a slow render.

04

Rest, properly

Half as long as you cooked it, minimum. Cutting early is how all that fat ends up on the board.

Health Canada's safe internal temperatures

Whole beef cuts 63 °C (medium-rare), 71 °C medium, 77 °C well done. Ground beef must reach 71 °C, and that includes our Wagyu ground and burger patties, which are not a "cook it rare" product. Mechanically tenderized beef: 63 °C, turned at least twice.

Please don't

Four ways people waste a good steak.

Marinating it. You paid for the flavour. Don't cover it up.
Cooking past medium. Marbling buys you a buffer against overcooking. It protects juiciness, not flavour or tenderness. Use the insurance, don't spend it.
Adding oil to the pan. It'll smoke and it isn't needed.
Cutting it straight away. Wait. Go set the table.

Wagyu 101

Why one steak costs more than another.

A conventional steer is finished in about four to six months. Ours takes closer to two years. Almost everything else on this page follows from that one number.

Time on feed

The difference is patience.

Marbling is not something you can add at the end. It goes on slowly, over months, and there is no way to hurry it. That is the whole cost of Wagyu in one sentence.

Conventional beef120 to 180 days on feed

Wagyu300 to 650 days on feed

Typical industry ranges. Every extra day is feed, bedding, labour and risk carried by the farm before anything is sold.

The word

"Wagyu" just means Japanese cattle.

和牛. Wa, Japanese. Gyū, cattle. It is not a grade and it is not a quality mark. It refers to four cattle breeds formally recognised in Japan in 1944: Japanese Black, Japanese Brown, Japanese Shorthorn and Japanese Polled.

More than 90% of Japan's beef herd is Japanese Black, and that is the breed everyone actually means when they say Wagyu. It is the one that carries the marbling.

Almost every Wagyu animal outside Japan descends from fewer than 250 cattle exported between 1976 and the late 1990s. It is a very small gene pool, which is part of why these animals are expensive before anyone has fed them anything.

Japanese Black, fresh cut

The thing itself

Marbling is fat in a very specific place.

Beef carries fat in three places and only one of them is marbling. It is why a fatty looking steak is not necessarily a marbled one.

01

Subcutaneous

The fat cap, sitting under the hide on the outside of the muscle. You trim most of it off. It contributes almost nothing to how the steak eats.

02

Intermuscular

Seam fat, running between whole muscles in the connective tissue. Useful in a slow braise, largely irrelevant to a steak.

03

Intramuscular

Fat deposited inside a single muscle, in the sheath between bundles of muscle fibres. This is marbling, and it is the only one that becomes flavour and juiciness on the plate.

The numbers, for scale

A good conventional steak carries roughly 4 to 8% intramuscular fat. Japanese Black beef has been measured averaging over 30%. That is not a small difference in degree. It is a different food.

Why the breed does it

Marbling in Japanese Black is strongly heritable, linked to a set of genes affecting fat synthesis rather than any single "marbling gene." Genetics load the dice. A long, slow finish is what actually puts the fat there.

The scale

Japan's Beef Marbling Standard, 1 to 12.

The most precise marbling scale in the world. Every carcass in Japan is scored against physical reference standards by a trained grader.

Quality Grade 1, 2

Grade 3

Grade 4

Quality Grade 5, all of it

Swatches are illustrative renderings of increasing intramuscular fat, not photographs of graded carcasses.

Why 12 points and not four

Most grading systems were built to sort commodity beef, so they stop caring once marbling gets high. The Japanese scale keeps going. Across the top band alone, from BMS 8 to BMS 12, the intramuscular fat roughly doubles.

What "A5" leaves out

A5 is the label everyone knows, but Quality Grade 5 covers everything from BMS 8 to BMS 12. A steak at the bottom of that band and one at the top are both sold as A5. The BMS number is the half that actually tells you something.

Four systems

We grade to the Japanese scale.

Not because it sounds better, but because it is the only one with enough resolution to describe what we raise. Canada Prime is a floor with no ceiling. A carcass that just clears it and a carcass marbled far beyond it receive the same three words.

So we give you a BMS number. It is a finer measurement, it is the standard the rest of the Wagyu world speaks, and it lets you compare what we sell against anything else you are considering.

Japan BMS	Japan grade	Australia AUS MEAT	USDA	Canada
1, 2	1, 2	0, 1	Standard	Canada A
3	3	1, 2	Select	Canada AA
4 to 6	3, 4	2 to 5	Choice	Canada AAA
7	4	5, 6	Prime (minimum)	Canada Prime
8, 9	5	6 to 8	Prime	Canada Prime
10 to 12	5	9 and above	beyond the graded range	Canada Prime

Read this table sceptically. No grading authority anywhere, Canadian, Japanese, American or Australian, publishes an official conversion between these systems. Each measures marbling differently, at different rib positions, against different reference standards. Reputable sources disagree by as much as two BMS points. Anyone showing you a precise conversion chart is showing you an opinion.

Things we won't tell you

What we deliberately don't claim.

Wagyu marketing has a folklore problem. Here is what we have left off this page on purpose, and why.

"It's the healthy red meat"

Wagyu fat is higher in monounsaturated fat than conventional beef. That part is real. But a Wagyu steak also carries more total fat and more saturated fat per serving, not less. We are not going to call a 25% fat steak a health food. It is a treat. Treat it like one.

"It melts at body temperature"

Measured melting points for Wagyu fat average around 36 °C against roughly 42 °C for conventional beef fat. Genuinely lower, and you can taste the difference. But the range between individual animals overlaps, and the "melts at 25 °C" figure that circulates online is not supported by any measurement we could find.

"Japan banned exports in 1997"

Repeated everywhere, sourced nowhere. Live exports tailed off in the late 1990s, and Japan legislated real protection for Wagyu genetics in 2020. Also: no beer, no massage, no classical music. The actual explanation, heritable marbling and a very long finish, is less romantic and more impressive.

See what we raise →

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Drop-off & pickup

Where to meet us.

We don't ship or deliver door to door yet. Instead, we bring orders to three drop-off points each week. Pick the one that suits you at checkout.

Keeping it frozen

Orders come to the drop-off frozen and packed. Bring a cooler if you have a drive ahead of you, and get it into your freezer the same day.

Order received

Thank you. It's on the list.

Your payment went through and your order is booked for drop-off. A receipt is on its way to your email.

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