Emma Black has always been drawn to helping livestock producers improve their operations, but not in her wildest dreams did she think it would lead her to becoming the co-founder of an ag-tech startup.
“There’s no doubt that Black Box would not exist if it weren’t for the Zanda McDonald Award,” says the Queensland-based livestock scientist – and first ever Zanda McDonald Award winner – of the cloud-based software business she co-founded in 2019 with fellow award winner Shannon Speight (nee Landmark).
The seeds for Emma’s unexpected career catapult were sown when she was an extension officer with Queensland’s Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, where her remit was to work with beef cattle producers in the north of the state to improve their productivity, profitability and sustainability.
“I was visiting properties across a really large region, working with various businesses to step through new farming strategies,” says Emma, who grew up on her family’s remote sheep station 140 km west of Longreach in Queensland, before studying livestock science at the University of New England.
“You really had to be able to listen and understand their business and learn to work with all different types of people, and it exposed me to every aspect of the beef industry, right across the supply chain. I loved being a sounding board, helping them make better decisions. For a young person in the industry, it was an incredible opportunity.”
As she deepened her industry knowledge, Emma had also noticed that for many of the farmers she got to know, their efforts to improve operations were hampered by a lack of data to inform their decisions, unlike businesses in many other industries.
“A lot of the farmers wanted to change things, but we couldn’t get a good understanding of where to focus improvements because, without any baselines, we didn’t know how it was going already. It certainly exposed me to a lot of the issues with data collection.”
It was a problem Emma was able to dig a little deeper into when, in 2015, the hard-working then 27-year-old was successfully nominated for the Zanda McDonald Award in its first year – an opportunity she says opened unexpected doors. “The most invaluable part of being chosen was meeting this incredibly influential group of people who were very giving of their time, and willing to share information to help me,” says Emma, who continues her close involvement with the Zanda McDonald Award as a board member and mentor.
“They opened my eyes to how things were done in other parts of the ag industry, and helped me refine my objectives and where I could take my career. I still build off that network – they’re all still great friends and mentors.”
The award put wind under Emma’s career wings, but its amplifying magic was yet to come.
Four years on, when invited to help judge the 2019 award, Emma met that year’s winner, Shannon Speight, who was also working in the northern beef industry and was similarly interested in tackling the inefficiencies in the industry’s use of data. The pair instantly clicked.
The more they talked about their theories, they began to sketch out the idea for what would become Black Box Co – a cloud-based software solution that ingests raw production data from across the beef supply chain and makes prediction and forecasting straightforward for producers.
“We knew we were onto something,” says Emma, who became the startup’s chief operating officer and Shannon its chief executive officer. “We knew producers wanted it and that we’d have financial support – and we knew all that purely because we had access to that incredible network of experienced producers across the Zanda community who were quite happy to take a phone-call from a couple of young sheilas with a random idea and talk it through.”
Both left their jobs in 2020 to throw themselves full time into developing Black Box, which soon gained a fast-growing customer base nationwide. By the end of 2023, it was tracking more than 4 million cattle and 64 million data points – including “crush side” statistics like each animal’s weight, pregnancy status, breed and date of birth; along with feedlot performance and carcass data – enabling producers to interpret and act on trends and lost opportunities identified in the data.
"The unique thing is how we display the data,” Emma says. “It’s all in visual dashboards, not just an excel spreadsheet with a heap of numbers, which means farmers can easily interpret and pinpoint how to improve their productivity.” Like any startup, it has not been all smooth sailing. “We’ve had to do quite a bit of education, particularly as we’ve got our feedlot feedback system up and running,” she says.
“It’s been about getting people to shift their mindset around data and what’s important to share to improve the industry as a whole. We know that if we can get feedlot data back to the producers, there’s a flow on effect across the industry because you’ll then get more consistent lines of higher quality cattle coming back up the supply chain.”
As they’ve been nurturing their startup, the co-founders – who describe their relationship as “like a second marriage” – have also been raising their own babies.
“When we started Black Box, we both had newborns,” Emma says. “Now, between us, we have five little boys under the age of six. It’s been incredible to be able to support each other through that while also building our business together.
“We are incredibly close, but we have very different leadership styles, we don’t always agree but we respect each other’s views, we just complement each other, and that makes it work. We wouldn’t have got through it without each other, or without the Zanda community behind us.”
Emma works from her 170-acre property near Queensland’s Kingaroy, around 200km north-west of Brisbane, where she lives with her husband, two young boys, and a small herd of cattle and sheep. While it is “just enough” to enable her family to live the farm life while still managing work full time, she dreams of one day living off the land.
“I will always be involved in my industry. I love it, and I think I’m in a unique position where I’ve got such a thorough knowledge of the whole supply chain,” she says. “But my goal is to hopefully one day have a lot larger farm that we could make a living off.”
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