Tenacity pays off for cattle farming widow
Taking good days with bad gets results
KAYLENE Wonka can laugh now when she thinks about her late husband’s probable reaction to her big win in the Meat and Livestock Australia Awards.
Mrs Wonka enjoyed a rare night off the farm at a gala presentation night in Gympie this week, picking up the MSA Excellence in Eating Quality Most Outstanding Beef Producer award for Queensland/Northern Territory.
It was a tough few years for the Chinchilla beef cattle producer after losing her husband Darryl in a workplace accident two years ago, but she thinks he would be smiling down on her now.
“My husband would’ve said ‘I trained her well’,” she laughed.
Despite the jokes, she said she came with her own cattle pedigree after growing up on a beef and dairy farm at Goomeri.
And when the devastating drought of 2006 hit their 259ha property hard, Mr Wonka had to go out and get a job, leaving the day-to-day running of their property, Blue Poles, to Mrs Wonka.
She rose to the challenge
so well he decided to keep his lucrative job, so when he tragically died, she had the know-how to keep on going.
It wasn’t easy to keep putting one foot in front of the next and she found some days hard to get through.
“It’s one day at a time,” she said.
“There are lots of down days so I talk to the kids on the phone.
“Talking to the cows is a big one too because they don’t
talk back.”
She said easy-handling cattle was one of the hallmarks out at Blue Poles, but there were plenty of other important factors such as genetics and nutrition that produced a well-rounded carcase.
A lot had changed since the couple started running Blue Poles together in 1988, but Mrs Wonka said the main reason behind the high-quality meat was herd improvement.
“Good seasons help too,” she said.
“We’ve only had just over 10 inches this year and the average is 24, so we’ve got 14 inches to get between the rest of September, October, November and December.
“I’ve had to downsize a little bit.
“I’ve been culling the older cows and bought in a lot of cotton seed to feed the cows out in the paddock and that’s a lot of extra work.”
She said there were many factors she looked at in producing meat of a high MSA standard, including fat depth, acquiring bulls with a medium birth weight that mature early, and turning them off while they still had milk teeth.
Paying attention to the feedback on the MSA kill sheet was also a vital element to keeping the standards high.
For more information on the MSA system, visit www.mla.com.au/msa