Meet the French expat starting an escargot farm from scratch in West Vic

The rain that blankets the Otways might send most people running for shelter, but for Coralie Schaff it’s the type of weather that could offer a sustainable future for the next generation of Australian escargot producers.

A snail’s race: Drawing on childhood memories of collecting snails with her father in rural France, Schaff is building Otway Escargot from the ground up. She told the Brolga she hopes her small farm will make western Victoria a new frontier for a very niche industry.

🗣️ “We would cook them with my mum, so I'm a big escargot eater”, she said. “I love it, with the main recipe of garlic, butter and parsley”.

From France to the Otways: Schaff and her husband Duncan purchased their 50-hectare block of land at Beech Forest in 2021. 

🗣️ “We were thinking, what can we do with the block of land? Do we just keep our jobs and just try to make something work, or do we just use it for the cattle?” she said. “And then I was like, why not snails?”

Before committing to the venture, Schaff travelled back to France to visit several snail farms and completed specialist training with an Irish producer.

• One farm in particular demonstrated how snail farming could fit into a sustainable agricultural system.

• Using rabbits to clear the grass in the snail pens, the farm would host community lunches and dinners using their escargot and rabbit meat. 

• The farm also used fruit trees as wind shelter for the snails, which were also picked and included in the menu.

🗣️ “Everything fit together."

Untapped potential: Unlike Europe, Australia has virtually no established commercial breeding industry for edible snails.

• Snail farms in European countries can purchase baby snails in bags of 10,000 to kickstart their businesses. 

• In Australia, biosecurity restricts farmers from importing live snails, which means farmers must breed their own baby snails.

• Snail farms in Australia are few and far between, meaning purchasing infant snails from other farmers is no easy feat.

Starting from scratch: What does a woman determined to build her own farm of 30,000 snails do when the easy options are taken out of the equation? She goes hunting.

Growing up in the French countryside, Schaff would collect snails with her father and her dog in the fields near their house after it had rained - they called it snail hunting.

Schaff currently has fewer than 1,000 snails, but each one was collected from her property or from neighbours.

Though they may be in hibernation now, allowing Schaff to continue building the back end of her business, by spring the numbers will begin to increase as mating starts.

How do they mate? Snails are hermaphrodites, meaning they can be both male and female at once, and mate three times a year. It usually takes between 10 and 15 hours for snails to mate.

• Both snails can get pregnant, and typically lay between 50 and 150 eggs, hatching in two to four weeks. It then takes roughly 6 months for a snail to mature. 

• The snail eggs themselves are also edible and considered a delicacy.

• Over the coming months, Schaff plans to build dedicated breeding and purging facilities after breeding snails in a trial pen last year.

How are snails harvested? Snails are harvested once fully mature, before being purged, or starved, for up to 10 days to clean the insides.

They can then be frozen to be sold to restaurants, then thawed and boiled similar to crayfish, or pre-cooked then frozen for restaurants to re-heat.

What makes a good snail? The more mature and larger the snail, the more tender the meat.

🗣️ “The snail itself is really nutritious, it's full of iron, low carbs, no fats, and full of minerals,” Schaff said. “I had some snails that were not produced in France in a tin … it was chewy and rubbery, like really bad, it's like if you have a not-good piece of steak.”

Growing an industry: Long-term, Schaff has no ambition to build an empire, but hopes to supply local restaurants while encouraging more small-scale producers to enter the industry.

🗣️  “I really want to see the snail farming industry in Australia become a real farming opportunity in terms of selling. I'd like to see more of the French business model,” she explained. “In order to supply restaurants, if you want to supply a lot of restaurants, you have to have a lot of numbers, so you need to become a very, very big enterprise.”

🗣️  “I’d like to go back to this kind of agriculture where it was not one big farm, but like it used to be... lots of small farms who can supply the local markets. It creates jobs, it creates opportunities, and it's healthy food.”