A western Victorian beef stud is finding success in an unusual field

While Michael Hastings imported Canadian Speckle Park cattle genetics for his Whiteline stud he has also brought ostrich bloodlines from southern Africa.

Mr Hastings, who runs Hastings Ostrich Farms, believes the big bird can play a significant role in diversifying the operations of producers around Geelong and into western Victoria.

"Beef is always a passion, but our other core business is ostriches," Mr Hastings said.

"We are interested in producing a high-quality product.

"The Speckles produce very high-quality meat; ostrich also is also a very high-quality meat.

"It's very lean, high in iron, low in cholesterol and very tender."

Mr Hastings runs about 2500 birds on about 100-120 hectares.

During Beef Week, Mr Hastings displayed pure Speckle Park heifers and cows, a breed of cattle from the Canadian province of Saskatchewan.

But the first thing visitors would have seen, when they arrived at the stud, were his ostriches.

In 1989 Mr Hastings said he realised the farm wasn't big enough to be profitable as a broadacre operation, so he turned to ostriches.

He started out with just eight chicks.

Since then the farm has been running African Black, Australian Black, Zimbabwe Blue and Kenyan Red ostrich breeds.

"We realised we could produce a lot of birds, in a small area," Mr Hastings said.

"A breeding unit might use one acre of land to produce 25 progeny, benchmarking that with beef, that's like producing 25 steers from one acre.

"That allowed us to get very productive."

He said he started thinking about growing ostriches when he was at university.

"We have been performance recording for 30 years - we record every single bird and every single egg."

As a result, he said Hastings Ostriches had a strong international reputation for both meat and genetics.

'We've just done a large shipment of genetic material to the Vietnamese government, for their breeding program," Mr Hastings said.

Vietnam is one of 25 countries that take the genetic material, while meat goes to Japan, America and Canada and leather to Italy, Mexico and South Korea.

Mr Hastings said some products were also sold through the farm shop, in Winchelsea.

The farm is both Australian Quarantine & Inspection Service and EU accredited.

"We actually need more growers, to grow birds out for us," Mr Hasting said.

Australia once had thousands of growers, but outbreaks of the Newcastle disease virus, and other poultry infections, meant export markets shut down.

"Markets shut down for three or four months at a time, naturally that meant a lot of people went out of the industry," Mr Hastings said.

"That's probably one of the biggest challenges, once they leave the industry, they don't come back.."

Mr Hastings said while ostriches had been in Australia since the 1860's, with some released into the Flinders Ranges, in SA, he imported his genetic material from overseas.

"Birds were first imported to Australia back in 1860 - in the feather boom, they were farmed for their feathers."

Ostriches breed through the summer months.

"This area has been very, very good for us - we have found our birds have outproduced birds in other parts of the country, or even internationally," he said.

"It's either our genetics, or the climate."