PHOTOGRAPHY ALLIE LEE
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For entrepreneur Emma Black, choosing the right mentors made all the difference.
WORDS JESSICA HOWARD PHOTOGRAPHY ALLIE LEE
PHOTOGRAPHY ALLIE LEE
PHOTOGRAPHY ALLIE LEE
Seven-year-old Emma is drafting sheep with her dad — learning to spot a pregnant ewe, split it from those that aren’t, and count the pens. Her dad scribbles some numbers into a little red notebook with a pencil small enough to slot in its spine, before popping the whole thing into his top pocket.
“Dad had a unique way of teaching,” she recalls. “He wouldn’t tell you how to do it, he’d guide you, and let you make mistakes so you’d learn. That’s still how I learn.” Now 34, Emma runs her own company, but those days in the yards shaped her in more ways than one.
She went on to study for a Bachelor of Livestock Science at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, where she became interested in meat judging, winning a spot on the Australian national team to compete in the United States. “I learned, very early on, the value of networking,” she says. “People want to encourage young people and help them out, so you’ve got to have the confidence to make the introduction and keep the conversation going.”
Emma later took over the coaching role, and crossed paths with industry heavyweight David Foote, then CEO of meat processor Australian Country Choice (“a great mentor of mine; so good at challenging my thinking”). In 2015, Foote nominated her for the inaugural Zanda McDonald Award — and she won.
PHOTOGRAPHY ALLIE LEE
Horses in the paddock during the wet at photographer Allie Lee’s property in Brookfield, Queensland.
“It was completely overwhelming,” she says. “I went to the Platinum Primary Producer (PPP) conference where the award was announced and I thought: ‘What am I even doing here?’ There were all these incredible people, the leading people in agriculture across Australia and New Zealand. I was given a booklet with the names of 150 participants at the conference and told, ‘Pick three or four you want mentoring from’.”
In the next whirlwind year, Emma visited 24 people and organisations, but one stood out: accomplished businesswoman and Zanda McDonald’s wife, Julie. “She’s one of my most influential mentors — even now — but particularly when I was having kids,” Emma reveals. “I was thinking: ‘Oh, I’ve just won this award, been offered these amazing opportunities, then had a baby. How am I going to juggle all of this? But Julie told me: ‘Enjoy this time with your kids, the industry will wait for you’.”
Wait it did. Emma did her year of mentoring, had her baby Corey, who is now five, followed two years later by Harry, three — all while working as a Beef Extension Officer for the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries in north-west Queensland; at the coalface with more than 200 producers in the middle of a drought.
“It was a hard time because it was so dry and we spent most of our time trying to help people find feed and decide what cattle to sell,” she says. Everyone was in survival mode, but still, Emma could see opportunities to work smarter. “People were starting to collect data, but you basically had to have a degree or be very good at Excel to make sense of it.”
PHOTOGRAPHY ALLIE LEE
PHOTOGRAPHY ALLIE LEE
It was at a PPP conference in 2019, while on the judging panel for the Zanda Award Program, that Emma sat across the table from someone who’d change the course of her career again: the eventual co-winner of the award, veterinarian Shannon Speight. “I mentored her when she started the program. She was coordinating the Northern Genomics Project and preg-testing 40,000 heifers a year. She saw all this data collected, crush side, and was frustrated because no-one was doing anything with it.”
With Shannon’s big idea, Emma’s hands-on experience, and their joint belief in the power of data, they formed their company Black Box Co. Its cloud-based software collects huge volumes of data along the supply chain, from on-farm weights and foetal ages to carcass information, then uses machine learning to process and produce valuable insights — displayed on an easy-to-read dashboard. “It was purely through talking to our industry networks and mentors that we realised, yep, we’ve got something here,” Emma says. “Let’s take a leap and have a crack at it.”
She now works as Chief Operating Officer of Black Box Co from her 70 hectare farm at Kingaroy in the South Burnett region of Queensland, where she lives with her husband Mitch and two sons. Chief Executive Officer Shannon lives with her family at Ravenshoe in Far North Queensland, while their team of 10, including three full-time developers, is dotted around the country. “The industry leaders who mentored us told us: “You don’t need to know everything, but go and find the smartest team you can.”
Black Box Co is eons from the data collection and processing methods of Emma’s youth. Tablets and artificial intelligence have replaced her dad’s tiny red notebooks, but in many ways the circle of learning remains the same. Emma now mentors young agricultural leaders herself — one so far has ended up joining her staff: “I make time to do it because I know I can open up opportunities for others. It’s through mentoring and those networks that my career has gotten to where it is.”
Applications for the 2025 Zanda McDonald Award are open until 31 October 2024. Information about the application process can be found on the website.
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