American Kobe-style beef replaces the real thing

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The glossy black cows and calves grazing on Yamamoto's gently rolling hills look like any other beef cows. It's hard to tell the full-blood Wagyu cattle apart from Angus cows that Yamamoto uses for crossbreeding.

He started with a small herd, 88 cows and 10 bulls, bought from a Japanese rancher. The rancher, Shogo Takeda, had flown them to the U.S. so he could sell embryos and calves more easily to Australia, another country where Kobe-style beef is flourishing.

Yamamoto wound up buying the entire herd in 1999; Takeda still advises him and visits his ranch, which is about 55 miles southeast of Dallas.

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Yamamoto, a Japanese American, is not a typical rancher. He's a professional bass fisherman with a thriving custom lure business. He drives around his ranches with a chihuahua nestled in his lap.

While cattlemen can be private about their operations, Yamamoto chats freely — confiding, for example, that the whole thing began because he was looking for a property tax break that comes with grazing livestock or planting trees.

"Once I got into it and learned all the aspects — the health as well as the good taste, I was hooked," Yamamoto said.

Healthy beef? Healthy fatty beef? Absolutely, Yamamoto says — he helped fund research that backs up his claim. A Texas A&M University researcher, Stephen Smith, concluded that compared to American beef, Wagyu beef is much higher in unsaturated fat. It has high levels of oleic acid, the fatty acid in olive and canola oils that has been shown to lower bad LDL cholesterol.

"The health aspect of this animal is what should be the standard for the U.S. cattle herd," Yamamoto said. "If I can put these bulls on any breed and decrease the saturated fat, that would be the standard."

Another selling point for Kobe-style beef is that it's often raised without hormones or antibiotics.

Still, some ranchers think indulgence is the biggest selling point.

"Most Americans live with a cloud; they all know what is right and the way they should live their lives," said R.L. Freeborn, president of Oregon-based Kobe Beef America. "This is a fine dining experience. Something like a fine steak is really, really a joy to eat."

The U.S. banned Japanese beef after mad cow disease was discovered there in 2001. Officials ended the ban earlier this month, after Japan ended its own embargo on American beef.

However, the Japanese won't be sampling American Kobe-style beef, because it takes longer to raise than the 21-month age limit Japan has imposed on beef it imports from the United States.

There are no such limits on imports of Japanese Kobe beef. Still, U.S. ranchers have spent four years getting a foothold on the market.

"Just as California wines have taken off, I think you have very good cattlemen here in the U.S. that know how to raise cattle," Schneller said.

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