What's changed for women in farming?

The Advocate, May 30, 2013

Last night I was part of a panel discussion in Devonport organised by the National Trust. It's been 70 years since Dame Enid Lyons was elected to federal parliament and became the first woman in the House of Representatives. We were asked to reflect on the progress, or lack of progress, in our own professions.

I’ve been thinking about the grandmother I never met, Bessie Wood, who had three children and a husband with itchy feet.

Around 70 years ago the family were living on a farm at Forth, and while I don’t really know what they farmed – I assume they had a mixture of beef cattle, potatoes, and a milking cow – there are three things I remember Dad telling me about that time:

• His mother would make the bread using home-made potato yeast. She’d cook in a Peter’s Oven and judge the temperature by putting her hand in (if the hairs sizzled it was too hot…)
• The family had home-cured bacon, made in a wooden box full of salt, and the meat had to be turned and turned through the process
• And when the men were in the bush working and it was time for lunch, Grandmother would use a bugle to summon them back to the house

70 years later, I’m trying to keep my sourdough bread starter alive, we turn about 20 pork legs into ham a week, and I have been known to get out my tenor horn and play reveille at lunchtime when we’ve got visitors out on the farm.

So have we progressed? That’s the big question. And I think it’s a difficult question to answer in my area of farming, because the family farm is a complex workplace where roles are blurred and sometimes not even defined. Respect is often gained in small circles, but sometimes with no public or broader recognition.

I suspect that a lot women farmers do the same sorts of jobs they did 70 years ago: a mixture of outside and manual work, looking after finances and correspondence, trying to save money while other family members are trying to spend it, and I reckon the majority are still doing more than 50 per cent of the housework and cooking.

The difference might be, that instead of growing only fresh spuds and milk we’ve got opportunities now to produce gourmet potatoes for the Sydney markets, and milk powder for the Chinese middle-class. We’ve got a world to sell to – and we can do it all online if we want. So the opportunities for women to do interesting, rewarding work in agriculture have grown along with our markets and technology.

We have some fantastic examples of women farmers in northern Tasmania. I’m lucky that I get to see some of them regularly at farmers’ markets and foodie groups we’re part of. These are my inspiration:

• Emma-Lynne Pinner who’s a dairy farmer at Brittons Swamp, but also runs Pure Sense and a growing number of other businesses. I think she told me she does 5 business activity statements each quarter.
• Andy Jackman from Red Cow Dairies at Oldina, who used to be in the police force, became a dairy farmer and is now a cheese-maker
• Leonie Hiscutt who has a cropping farm at Howth, who got into tourism, was very involved in the local chamber of commerce, and now is in the Legislative Council.
• Marilyn Brack, an ex-teacher, who produces goats’ milk, cheese, and yoghurt at Mathom Farm at Gunns Plains
• Then there’s garlic grower Rosie Mackinnon, Melina Parker managing a vegetable farm Don, Lesley Frampton on a dairy farm at Gawler, Carol O’Neil with her olive oil….

The list goes on and on and on, and there are so many others who haven’t had their faces in the Tas Country or The Advocate, who are making good returns for their businesses, raising children, and participating in their communities.

I think it’s important that we do continue to try and get our heads in the newspaper, even if we might feel embarrassed, and as though we’re self-promoting. It’s about changing the stereotype in the wider community. Within farming circles there is a great appreciation of women’s role. A dairy farmer told me that his wife’s role of mending socks and feeding the family was just as important as the other farm jobs, because you can’t work with blisters on an empty stomach. I get a bit irritated when customers at the farmers' markets ask me where I get the meat from that I’m selling. I have to try and convince them that it’s from my farm, and I’m a pig farmer, don’t I look like one?!

As a rural reporter, I went along to a lot of male-dominated boring industry meetings that were not inspiring, and were very negative. I can see why women aren’t involved: because they’ve got heaps better things to do. But I think that when the time is right, and a woman in farming has experiences to share and can prioritise these meetings, I think some of us – if we’ve got the right skills – need to go through the pain of sitting at a board table or in a price negotiation meeting, so that the debate is a bit more balanced. We might actually hear farmers being positive about the future of agriculture.

Dreams becoming a (slightly daunting) reality

If we’d won $100,000 in the lottery the feeling would be very different.

We’ve received a Federal Government grant, and while we’re elated and buoyed, there is a great sense of obligation.

As the apple farmer at the market told me, we’d better spend his tax dollars well.

The other thing is we’ve got to come up with matching funds.

A couple of months ago Guy spent a week writing a massive application for a T-QUAL grant. The grants are competitive and merit-based, and aim to boost the tourism industry in Australia.

As the post office staff starting locking the doors late one afternoon, we pushed 16,000 words into a post bag.

We’ve always wanted to move into farm tourism – and when 650 people turned up for our open day in April, we knew there was real demand.

We can all see the growing interest in real food, cooking, farmers’ markets, ethical production…. but research is showing people also want hands-on farm experiences, so they can get back to the roots of what they’re eating.

And that’s fantastic – because 85 per cent of Australians live in urbanised areas, and are so disconnected from farming.

Farm tourism is a big thing in Europe, the UK, and New Zealand, but it still hasn’t really caught on in Australia.

I imagine it might be because of lack of labour on farms, and lack of farmers’ confidence to market and promote what they do.

But if farmers want to keep their families and businesses going, they’ve got to diversify their incomes.

In Tasmania, 70 per cent of farmers have to work off-farm. From our experience, that’s really hard: you become torn between two jobs; you wish you were at home; and you become resentful.

Onlookers probably wonder why north-west Tasmanians haven’t embraced food tourism.

We grow and make so many products, and we have small farms with soils suited to niche production.

But we’ve been trying to compete on a global market with commodities – and we just can’t keep doing it.

We think food tourism is vital in building the brand of this region.

At the moment few tourists stop as they speed along the Bass highway heading for Strahan or Cradle Mountain.

We’ve got to give them a reason to stop – and not just one or two places offering good food and farm experiences.

We need a whole chain of businesses – farm stays, cooking schools, berry farms, wineries, cheese factories, restaurants using purely local ingredients – to make the trip worthwhile for visitors.

For our part, we’re planning a centre where visitors will learn about rare breeds; we’ll have a butchery and commercial kitchen; and there’ll be a focus on giving our visitors a full paddock-to-plate experience – gumboots included.

And for the full story on what we’re planning, you’ll just have to stay tuned...

Journalist packs in job to go pig farming

“Your dad would be proud you’ve become a farmer’s wife,” the man said in the post office.

The day had been going well: the weight of full-time work had been knocked from my shoulders, and I was enjoying pottering around town ticking off jobs.

But now my cheeks were hot.

I rocked forward on my toes and looked at him.

“We’re not married,” I said.

Generally, the reaction to me leaving the ABC to go farming has been encouraging.

Mum, obviously, was upset she wouldn’t be able to listen to me in the mornings anymore. I told her she could ring me from time to time, just to hear my voice.

Guy’s upset I can no longer be quietened with the volume control, or silenced with the snooze button.

I’ve noticed some discomfort in people when they ask about my plans for the future.

“So you’re going to be a farmer?” they’ll say.

“Just farming?”

And then I feel I have to justify it by telling them about the part time job I’ve picked up at the uni.

“Oh that’ll be interesting.” They look relieved.

No wonder farmers are becoming a rare breed, especially young ones.

It was a big decision for us when Guy decided to stop full-time work, but his heart and head was always with the pigs.

It was an even bigger move for me. I’d been a rural reporter with the ABC for six-and-a-half years. The pay and conditions were good, and the job itself was fantastic. I felt like I sort-of knew what I was doing each day.

I started there where I was 21, and until the last year or so I always thought of myself as ‘Eliza Wood from the ABC’, not just, ‘Eliza Wood’. My identity was completely wrapped around my job.

But you can only survive on adrenalin and mid-morning powernaps for so long. I was tired, and the personal compromises I made in order to work for the ABC had become too much, and I felt my real passion being quashed.

I can now put ‘pig farmer’ [pronounced pug FAAR-mer] on my business card – and proudly.

I have not stepped down the ladder to become a farmer’s partner*.

Dad would be proud of me – not because I’ve paired up with a good-looking bloke who loves animals as much as he did - but because I’m having a go at being Eliza Wood: pig farmer, writer, composter, supreme carrot grower– whoever I want to be.  

*(Guy, I really don’t like that term, can we fix that?)

The reality of farming

For the past 24 hours I’ve had my hand up a sow. She’s been in labour so long the piglets are dying inside her. My hands are raw and ripped from trying to drag out one of the piglets by its teeth – the only bit I can catch on to.

The sow’s on her first litter, so we call her a gilt, and the piglets are simply too big for her. She’s worn out from pushing and her muscles have seized up from the strain.

I pulled out the first piglet yesterday, it was breech, but livened up pretty quickly once it was out and rubbed with a bit of straw. I thought that once the first one was born the rest would follow easily. Sometimes you just need to clear the blockage.

But as the day progressed nothing else appeared. And then over a couple of hours we pulled out two dead piglets. They were huge. They could have been a few days old. Gilts typically have smaller litters, but ideally the piglets are small too.

Before bed last night we went out for a final time to see if anything else had shifted. Guy’s hands are too wide for a gilt, so it’s my job to go digging. I lay on the straw, pressed into the spilt birthing juices, breathing in the unique smell of a farrowing sow.

With my arm fully in, I could just wriggle my fingers to feel a snout. When I put my finger in its mouth it bit down hard. Piglets’ teeth are incredibly sharp. I could feel its tongue moving about.

Over an hour I drew the piglet back and forth through the sow’s cavity. Countless times I had it within a handspan of the exit, and then it would be sucked back in by powerful muscles. It fell back fully out of reach after 11pm and I was spent.

Inside I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror: puffy and red-eyed, snot bubbling at my nostrils, blood spattered on my face. I was exhausted. And I knew that the piglet that was struggling to be born would probably be dead by morning.

This is the worst part of farming. A town-living friend said to me once that farming just seems to be all about life and death. Every day we’re confronted with it. Yesterday we killed nine roosters for the freezer. A week ago a quoll took some of our chooks. In the same week two litters of healthy piglets were born. In a fortnight our sheep will start lambing.

Neither of us wanted to get up this morning to check the sow. The piglets would either be dead beside her, or there would be nothing, which meant they were dead inside.

There was nothing.

I can feel a dead piglet just past her hips. She can’t push it through the last narrow bit, and I’ve been trying all morning to catch hold of the piglet long enough to drag it through.

The vet says there’s nothing we can do but let the piglet decompose and pump the sow with antibiotics every 12 hours to keep her alive. We’ve no idea how many more piglets are inside.

Reality shook me as I strained one last time to reach the piglet. I touched its flaccid tongue hanging between its teeth, and its brother - the sole survivor - nuzzled my shoulder, looking for a teat. Farming really is about the cycle of life.