Alexander &Baldwin Inc. announced Tuesday that it is moving ahead with a long-range plan to establish a cattle ranch on Maui after shutting down Hawaii’s last sugar cane plantation there in December.

A&B said it recently doubled the size of its experimental grazing herd to 300 from 150 animals after positive results, and aims to expand the operation where cattle graze on grasses and legumes to 3,500 animals on 4,000 acres by 2021.

The company has named the operation Kulolio Ranch, which will produce grass-fed beef for local slaughter under the Maui Cattle Co. brand, which was established in 2002 and includes six other cattle ranches. Under the arrangement, Maui Cattle will own the cattle that A&B will manage and raise on its land.

A&B said it is installing more than 18 miles of perimeter fencing needed to create irrigated and unirrigated pastures on which cattle can rotate within paddocks that allow the ground cover to regenerate. By the end of this year, the company aims to have 900 animals on the ranch.

Part of the Kulolio Ranch operation will allow other Maui ranches to graze their animals on A&B’s former sugar land and avoid sending their cattle to the mainland to fatten them up on feed in a final stage known as “finishing.”

Chris Benjamin, A&B president and CEO, said in a statement, “By raising grass-fed cattle on Maui, we believe we can increase and stabilize the supply of local beef and help increase consumer demand for local, fresh food products.”

At full scale, Kulolio Ranch would be one of the biggest by herd size but not by land area compared with other Maui Cattle ranches. The organization’s largest ranch is Haleakala Ranch with more than 4,000 animals on more than 30,000 acres. Ulupala­kua Ranch has about 2,300 cattle on 20,000 acres.

Smaller Maui Cattle members include Hana Ranch with 2,000 animals on 4,000 acres, and Nobriga Ranch with a herd of around 70 animals but also a feedlot for about 1,000 animals.

A&B began its ranching experiment in February 2016, a month after announcing it would cease sugar production at its subsidiary Hawaiian Commercial &Sugar Co. at the end of last year.

Jacob Tavares, an HC&S employee who is heading up the ranching effort, said last year that a key to the operation was irrigating some pastures to sustain animals during times of drought. “We just came out of a 13-year drought a few years ago, and it was devastating to the ranchers on Haleakala,” he said in an interview in September. “Drought is always the biggest concern of ranchers.”

HC&S grew sugar cane on about 36,000 acres, and A&B is working to establish other diversified agriculture businesses on the balance of those lands, including energy crops and food crops. The company produced a land plan in early 2016 indicating a variety of potential uses including a dairy farm on 4,000 acres, an agricultural park for small farm tenants on 1,000 acres, mango and avocado orchards on 3,000 acres, animal feed crops on 4,500 acres, coffee and cacao on 900 acres, pongamia orchards on 2,500 acres and energy crops on 8,600 acres. That plan also indicated livestock on about 9,200 acres.

The company, which has been testing a variety of energy crops, said Tuesday that it is trying to establish diversified ag uses on 8,000 to 10,000 acres this year and that the envisioned 4,000-acre ranch is a good start.

“This is a strong start, yet there’s much more progress on the horizon,” Benjamin said. “Establishing viable agriculture on these Central Maui lands will not be easy, but we are committed to being good stewards of these lands and working with the county, state, and other partners in the community to improve food security in Hawaii and make diversified agriculture on Maui a success.”