Meet Natalie Engel - Cattle farmer and agtech enthusiast

Published on
June 30, 2025

Meet Natalie Engel

Farming wasn’t in Natalie Engel’s blood. Her father was a chiropractor and her mum a food manufacturer, but Natalie spent her childhood on horseback, exploring their 10-acre block in the Northern Rivers. After school, she went to an ag college in Gatton which included a stint at Emerald Agriculture College. She went on to immerse herself in the industry, first working at a feedlot, then animal nutrition specialist Ridley, Elders, Suncorp and even a pet shop.

It was at ag college that she met Paul Whiteman, who introduced her to her now-husband Chris. Chris is a sixth-generation beef farmer, whose family has been in the Rolleston area since his grandfather secured a ballot block back in the 60s.

In the early days, Natalie and Chris worked on the farm as part of the family partnership, but in 2019 they went out on their own with their own farm. This was during a particularly tough drought that coincided with two kids at boarding school. With money being tight Chris took a job in the mines, where he still works DIDO (drive in, drive out) today. Since then, Natalie has run the farm, Sunlight Grazing, guiding it through the severe drought that, in her words, “broke a lot of families”. She de-stocked from 1,500 to 800 head of cattle and began the long process of rebuilding both herd and land health.

“The land here is flat with a lot of timber, heaps of wattle – the bain of my existence,” Natalie explains. “We have plenty of dams that aren’t full right now. Underground water is hard to find, and there’s no creeks running currently – but if we get enough rainfall they’ll run.”

Natalie describes her operation as “small and mighty”. She has actively adopted and advocated for agricultural technology on her property. Alongside Mobble she uses PairTree, CIBO Labs, Observant and Gallagher systems.

Her first exposure to agtech came during her feedlot days. “They were putting tags on everything that ran off the truck before it was compulsory.”

But she'd worked on properties previously where there was no record keeping at all. Conversations often went:

“So how do you record vaccinations?”
– “We write it in a book.”
– “Where’s the book?”
– “Dunno,
” was the response.

Natalie knew she'd runs things differently.

Discovering Mobble

“We had a farmhand working for us who wasn't real good with remembering things.” Natalie tried using lists, but there was no phone reception when the list updated. “We tried calendar reminders, but unless they accepted the invite they couldn’t see the reminder.” After some furious Googling, she discovered Mobble. “What the hell, we’ll try this,” she thought.

Natalie became one of Mobble’s earliest adopters – one of the first 50 farmers to use Mobble on their property. At that time, Mobble had no offline mode or mapping, just paddocks and numbers. Still, it was a vast improvement over the pen-and-paper chaos she’d inherited.

Before Mobble, stock breakdowns were just a guessing game. “I couldn’t remember exactly how many animals I had in each paddock. I tried to keep my numbers up to date in notebooks and  spreadsheets but it was not something I could access easily on my phone. My stock agent would call and say ‘Ok, this is the price. How many have you got to sell?’ and all I could respond with was, ‘Umm, I don’t know!’ Now I have a breakdown of exactly what’s in my paddocks and where everything is.”

Watching grass grow

Natalie explains, “We’re part of RCS (Resource Consulting Services). People call it rotational grazing or regenerative agriculture. Take your pick – we’ve been doing it for years. This region is very much about set stocking though. Cattle in every paddock.”

“When Mobble introduced the days grazed and rested feature, that was great.”

“I used to get phone calls from neighbours saying ‘Can I agist cattle in your paddock? You’ve got grass’. And I’d say ‘No, I’m leaving it empty.’ And their response would be ‘Why!?’”

“They didn’t understand. But that was the reason I had grass in there – because it was empty – and I was saving it so I could put the heifers in there.”

Over the years, Natalie has refined her breeding program and adopted intensive grazing rotations that allow paddocks to rest for up to six months. “We have grass growing in areas we’ve never had grass before,” she says. “It just takes a while – anywhere from two to five seasons. You get there, but it just takes a while.”

Getting the team on Mobble

Natalie is the only full-time person on the farm, bringing in contractors when needed. “And Chris – when he’s home - will give me a hand if I’ve broken something,” she laughs. “If we’re fencing, we’ll get a group of contractors in, or at branding time. Sometimes I’ll ring our youngest, Jesse, and say ‘Come home - I need you for two days’.”

For Natalie, Mobble has significantly improved communication with contractors. “The fact that I can share the map in Mobble with my chopper pilot is great. Prior to that, I’d give him directions and he’d go to the wrong paddock. That no longer happens.”

“When we have audits, I can just pull in all the information I need right there. If you don’t put good data into Mobble, you can’t get it out. Put good stuff in, get good stuff out,” is Natalie’s mantra.

Looking ahead

Natalie is passionate about smart, efficient, forward-thinking farming. She has always been an advocate for farmers spending less time in the office. Her plans include intensive exclusion fencing – she’s working on a 10-wire pig/dog exclusion fence – and she’s been experimenting with Bazadais bulls. “If I can get a more mature animal in less time, that’s amazing.”

She’s driven by curiosity and a commitment to continual improvement.

“We’re not supported by subsidies [unlike some other countries], so we have to be entrepreneurs on our own. Every time I go to a farmer’s place they’re like ‘I built this, and I built that’. That’s what I love about farming.”

Mobble fits right into that ethos – helping Natalie reduce paperwork, improve decision-making, and keep her cattle operation running smoothly, even when the going gets tough.

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