A day at Yeeda
Host: Yeeda Pastoral Co.
Written by – Vicki Burton, Owner, Yeeda Pastoral Co.
Yeeda Station has great history, it was the first pastoral lease settled in the Kimberley in 1881.
Yeeda is approx. 1 million acres and has the mighty Fitzroy River running through it, so has great flood plain country. The homestead is 50km by road from Derby and 200km from Broome and sits on Yeeda Creek which flows off the Fitzroy River. It is a great fishing spot and many barramundi have been caught in the vicinity. There are also a lot of salt water crocodiles so keep an eye on your dog!
Juddy and Mel McDonald (with new baby boy Trent) live at Yeeda and Juddy manages the daily activities that are happening there. Stevo is the gardener and handy man and keeps the place looking schmick.
Yeeda Homestead.
Fitzroy River.
We are mustering at Yeeda this week. Jack flew off from Kilto to meet Juddy at the start of the muster point, one of the paddocks on Yeeda. Two choppers will be mustering this area.
This muster is a ‘tidy up’ from a previous muster so will not be that big in numbers.
We are mustering in a very remote area and it is too far and too hot to walk the cattle to our main set of working yards, Cockatoo Yards (It is late in the year and it is 44 degrees out there today).
So we are mustering to a set of portable yards that the guys set up a few days ago, once the cattle are in the yard they will be trucked to Cockatoo to be tagged and drafted and then trucked to Kilto to be held for sale.
Mustering.
Minna at muster.
So the muster went pretty well, yarded up mid-afternoon, got about 300 head in the yard. The choppers landed and we had a break. We drafted all the cows and calves off and let them go back out into the paddock. The rest of the cattle, steers, bulls, fat cows and heifers will be trucked back to Kilto. We decided to let the cattle cool down for the afternoon and start trucking first thing tomorrow morning.
Then we headed back to Willare Roadhouse; we are staying here for the night as it is closer to the yards than home! It is great staying at Willare, you get an air conditioned room, a great feed (that someone else cooks!) and the boys can have a beer.
Cattle in the yards.
First thing next morning we head out to the yard with the body truck and the road train, we have to load the cattle onto the body truck as the road train can’t get into the yard site. Once the cattle are on the body truck he drives to meet the road train and cross loads. We have to do this a quite a few times to get all the cattle out, as only about 15 head fit on the body truck at one time. Once the road train is fully loaded Danny takes them onto Cockatoo Yard. It is a long hot day. We head back to Kilto late arvo. There is more of the same tomorrow!
Trucking.
The fat cows and heifers that we mustered will be held on feed at Kilto until we have a full load ready to go south. These cattle are the meat for our shop! The cows and heifers will rest at our farm in Geraldton for a few weeks before being trucked to the abattoir in Gingin for slaughter. All our cattle are custom killed at the moment, until we have our abattoir built up here in the Kimberley.