At Lemontree Feedlot on Queensland’s Darling Downs, three McNamee siblings are taking the reins of a family business built on calculated risks and a willingness to change course.
The sky is still pink with the remnants of night when pen riders saddle up and make the short walk from the stables into Lemontree Feedlot. Hugh and Pip McNamee are among a group that moves through the cattle, watching. “Up high here, you can get a gauge on the whole pen,” Hugh says. They’re reading the mob: anything that looks wrong is pulled out and treated straight away. “We’re looking to see if the cattle are performing well,” Pip says. New cattle are watched especially closely. “We really ride the pen hard for the first tendays,” she adds.
It’s an old-fashioned way of doing a very modern job. Lemontree is a 20,000-head feedlot specialising in Wagyu and Angus cattle on Queensland’s Darling Downs. “They’ll come in at a weight of about 400 kilos and then they’ll leave the feedlot weighing 850 kilos plus,” Hugh says. “Big boys when they’re leaving.”
The feedlot is a constant churn of cattle, trucks, tractors and feed mixers. Up at the commodity sheds, loaders move between piles of hay, silage, cottonseed and canola meal. Wheat and barley are milled into rations. On a busy day, Hugh says, the place is like “a mini city”.
While their father David remains director of Lemontree Pastoral, Hugh and his sisters Pip and Zan are the next generation of the family working in the business, and each have their distinct jobs. Zan is feedlot manager, Hugh works across operations and Pip in cattle and finance. Major decisions still tend to bring everyone back around the same table. There are disagreements—“the odd barney,” Hugh admits—but they grew up watching their father work alongside his own brothers, where an argument could be had and finished with just as quickly. “We can’t hold grudges,” Pip says. “We just don’t take things personally so we can get the job done.”
It helps explain a family business that has rarely followed a straight line. “My family is busy,” Zan says in a bit of an understatement. “We sort of jump from job to job and venture to venture. We all wear a lot of different hats.” She describes her grandfather as an entrepreneur prone to coming up with schemes and bringing his sons along for the ride. “We don’t knock anything until we’ve tried it,” she says. “We give everything a go.”
For a while that meant dairy farming. When feedlotting was in a lull, the McNamees built a dairy at Lemontree. Beginning in 2006, the operation eventually grew to around 2000 cows, milked three times a day under a football field-sized shed. The business did well until the big supermarkets starting selling one-dollar a litre milk, and the bottom fell out of the market. “That crucified us,” David McNamee says. “The more cows we milked, the more money we lost.”
By 2018 the family had stopped milking. But the huge dairy sheds remained and the McNamees found another use for them. Today, wagyus fill them—shaded with feed and water in front of them, protected from the summer heat and winter cold. When the markets change, the McNamees change with them. “My father was always ahead of the game with everything that he did,” David says. “That’s all we want to pass on.”
His pragmatism extends to the way the feedlot itself is run. With cattle on feed for hundreds of days and margins tightly managed, David has little appetite for speculation. “My late father told me that if you want to gamble, at least go to the races,” he says. “Within three minutes, you know whether you won or lost.”
At Lemontree, they don’t buy cattle to put on feed without knowing there’s a contract at the other end. The scale of the business today makes its beginnings seem improbable. Pip says her father and his brothers began by each putting $50 a week into a bank account. They traded cattle, reinvested what they made and slowly worked their way into property and, eventually, feedlotting. “Everything went back into the business,” she says.
That history is not lost on the next generation. But none of the three talks about succession as a burden. “Dad’s always made us feel like, ‘Don’t come home if you don’t want to,’” Pip says. Zan was first; Hugh and Pip followed when the time was right. “We jumped into it with both legs, both arms,” Pip says. “We’re all in it.”
There are already ideas about what might come next: breeding cattle, backgrounding, perhaps other parts of the beef supply chain. Zan describes the feedlot as the “backbone” that gives them the platform to try. The task isn’t just to hold on to what their grandfather,
father and uncles have built, but push it forward into something else and no one seems daunted by the challenge. “I’d say excited,” Hugh says, “definitely excited.”
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