Macquarie Wagyu plate to paddock approach pays off

BEEF FINALIST 2018: THERE’s certainly nothing bleak about Anthony and Chantal Winter’s approach to cattle breeding.

Marching on: Chantal and Anthony Winter, with their son Jacob, 15, at Leyburn in Queensland.

THERE’s certainly nothing bleak about Anthony and Chantal Winter’s approach to cattle breeding.

The pair, who manage the 8700-hectare Macquarie Wagyu operation at Leyburn in Queensland’s Southern Downs region, are enjoying tremendous success by practising their special form of reverse psychology.

Instead of looking at the business from the traditional paddock-to-plate perspective, the Winters do the opposite, with all breeding decisions centred on how a cow’s offspring, having been finished in an on-farm feedlot, ultimately stack up on the dinner plate.

“For us it is working back from the plate to the paddock,” says 44-year-old Chantal, who is a trailblazer herself having last year been elected the first female president of the Australian Wagyu Association.

“We turn it around so it is all about the consumers. If you haven’t got those consumers why are you doing what you do?”

As part of the unique system, the first three calves from each cow are finished through the feedlot with crucial carcass data from the abattoir used to determine its future breeding role within the herd, whether as a stud or commercial animal.

“We can plug every cow into a computer program and we can look at her bloodlines, DNA, how many carcasses she has produced and how good the carcasses have been,” says Anthony, 47.

It’s a no-nonsense approach that is paying off in spades. At the Australian Wagyu sale last year Macquarie sold a bull for $80,000 and two packages of 10 semen straws for an average of $70,000 a package.

Macquarie Wagyu now employs nine full-time staff, joins 650 full-blood Wagyu females a year and works on producing about 250 tonnes of retail Wagyu beef annually with an exceptional marble score of at least 7.5 out of 9.

Most is exported, with overseas customers particularly interested in the story attached to their meat.

And what a story the Winters have to tell.

FINALIST Beef Farmer of the Year 2018

MACQUARIE WAGYU, Anthony and Chantal Winter, Leyburn, QLD

ON FARM: ANTHONY AND CHANTAL WINTER