“Mum and Dad sort of said to us early on, like, 'you can come back here'. It was never a case of our parents being like ‘No, there's no career in ag’.
They're like 'there's so much career in ag and you're more than welcome to come back here, we'll be here, there'll be work here, there'll be a business here for you to take over and run. But you've got to do something else as well in case it all falls over.’
“So whether that be a teaching degree and accounting degree learning to fly or doing a trade or something, if for some horrible reason, everything does go wrong within your agricultural business or something breaks down later in life, you've always got a job you can fall back on.”
It’s a pretty safe assumption to say that the Penfold clan are a tight bunch. In this episode we hear from Molly and Bonnie Penfold about their journey and the story of Four Daughters.
Some of their earliest childhood memories are of the four of them bush bashing their way through the paddocks on the way to school, even on one occasion getting stuck for several hours when the Toyota Tarago overheated.
When it comes to what’s important to the Penfold’s, farming is definitely right up the top of the list. When we asked the question of Bonnie whether it was farming or teaching that was her primary passion, her answer speaks for itself.
"Farming, definitely. To start with, I always said that I wanted to teach kids and feed cows. And that was sort of my goal. And that's always what I've said I've wanted to do, whether that's just seeing your parents do those sorts of things in life and wanting to do that as well."
The Penfold sisters are from a multigenerational farming family, the four daughters today work closely alongside their parents everyday.
Hailing from Meandarra in Central Queensland, their town and rural community has faced its environmental challenges over recent years, keeping the Penfold’s on their toes and constantly looking at ways to adapt, along came the opportunity to export beef to China.
“We wanted to call it four sisters or something like that. And so then we went with four sisters, and it was already taken in China. So we ended up with Four Daughters”.
Today, Four Daughters Beef sends beef around the world, while a big part of their business has been through the growth of their infamous pink boxes supplying beef to the domestic market.
There’s no shortage of stories, whether it’s acquiring customers while parking the truck near dog parks or engaging with customers through their social media accounts.