Bill French has been farming since before he could remember. “I’ve been on the land since I could walk,” he says. “It’s in the blood, I couldn’t do anything else.”
He’s a big bloke, the kind whose handshake leaves an impression. That handshake has become the symbol of Leelands Lamb, not as a branding gimmick, but because when Bill and Sue say they’ll do something, they do it.
Sue, on the other hand, grew up in Auckland, a world away from paddocks and sheep yards. She trained as a school dental nurse, met Bill in Feilding, and before she knew it, she was building a life in Southland. “She married a poor farmer, not a rich one,” Bill jokes. But if Sue misses city life, you wouldn’t know it. She’s as much a part of the land now as Bill, running a coffee business, handling the logistics, and making sure their lamb ends up on the plates of people who appreciate it.
Food is at the centre of everything they do. Not just farming it, but eating it. Talking about it. Making it easier for people to cook. Their daughter Kate owns The Batch in Invercargill, where you can find Leeland’s Lamb on the menu.
Bill and Sue had spent years watching New Zealand’s best lamb get shipped offshore while locals were left with whatever was left over. They got tired of it. So in 2007, they made a call. Cut out the middleman. Go straight to the people.
The first step? Packing up a chilly bin full of their best cuts and taking it straight to Queenstown’s Mediterranean Market (now Raeward Fresh). It was a risk, but the response was immediate. From there, they took the long road, hand-delivering to chefs, talking to home cooks, finding the right people who cared about lamb done properly.
These days, Leelands is stocked in a handful of top restaurants and retailers, but they still do it their way. No flash marketing campaigns. No gimmicks. Just good lamb, sold by the people who raised it.
Ask Bill what makes great lamb, it’s simple: it’s the land, the grass, and the way the animals are treated.
Their farm is ten minutes from the abattoir, which means the lamb isn’t stressed, doesn’t lose condition, and cooks up tender and clean. They hang it for five days, the way old-school homekill was always done. And come March, when entire males start producing testosterone that taints the flavour, they only use ewe lambs or castrated males, because good lamb shouldn’t smell like a woolshed when it hits the pan.
They know how people eat, too. Not everyone wants to deal with a whole leg of lamb on a weeknight, so they worked with butchers to break it down into cuts that make sense. Mini roasts, thick flank steaks, quick-cook cuts that fit the way people actually live.
For all the time spent in the paddock, the best part is still seeing what happens in the kitchen. Watching a chef take lamb belly, once considered a waste cut, and turn it into something incredible. Seeing someone take home a cut they wouldn’t have tried otherwise and turn it into their new favourite.
“We’ve done the hard yards,” Sue says. “But at the end of the day, it’s about the people eating it.”
And for Bill and Sue, that’s where the work pays off, at the table, plates full, stories flowing, doing what they do best. Eating. Talking. Making sure no one leaves hungry.
