‘Invisible farmers’: the young women injecting new ideas into agriculture
April 27, 2017
Women have long played a silent role in agriculture in Australia – now a new generation of female farmers is stepping forward. Our new series, Future of farming, examines those focusing on sustainable agribusiness
Anika Molesworth is enjoying experimenting with drones on her family’s farm at Broken Hill but the sheep are not cooperating.
“The drones are not quite a toy but we are trying to work out how to make use of them,” she says. “So we are flying them out to the paddocks and checking where our sheep are and where the goats are.”
Disappointingly, the animals do not seem to regard the drones as alternative sheepdogs. “They haven’t been terribly obliging – yet,” says Molesworth, who is studying for her PhD in agriculture climate science.
The 29-year-old farmer looks forward to seeing continued improvements in technology, genetics, robotics, automation, which she says will make farming more efficient, easier and kinder on the natural environment.
A sustainable farming advocate and 2015 Australian young farmer of the year, Molesworth would like to combine her work on the family property, in western New South Wales, with a career as a consultant and educator in sustainable farming. Financially, the farm is just breaking even: “We farm it because we love it out there.”
Off-farm income (where people earn money in parallel careers) tends to be a feature of Australian farms – it helps families ride out the peaks and troughs of inclement weather and fluctuating demand for produce.
About 50% of women on farms in Australia are working off-farm to help provide for their families.
At the Molesworths’ 4,000-hectare property, four of the five family members earn money elsewhere. Anika’s two brothers have no plans to become farmers, she says. Her mother, Lindy (who runs the farm), is a geologist and a consultant to the National Parks and Wildlife Service and her father, Simon, has a distinguished history in environmental law and is a judge of the land and environment court of NSW.
Formerly Melbourne-based, the family bought the Broken Hill property in 2000 (when Anika was 12) at the start of a decade-long drought. “We were pitched headfirst into the challenges of drought,” she says.
“We had to completely destock, we watched the dams evaporate. It was a huge strain on land – you could see it suffering. It was a strain on the community of Broken Hill.”
Concerned about her future as a farmer, Molesworth set about learning as much as she could about climate science and sustainable farming. Her undergraduate degree in agribusiness was done by correspondence.
Women have always had a key role in farming but their contribution is hard to quantify because unpaid work is often not recognised. This lack of clarity is why women in agriculture are often called the “invisible farmers” or the “silent partners”.
Indeed a national three-year project titled The Invisible Farmer was launched this year by Museums Victoria and ABC Rural to draw attention to the contribution of Australian female farmers. Liza Dale-Hallett, the project’s lead curator says “We know that around 49% of real farm income in Australia is contributed by women. This figure includes a whole range of activities such as on-farm work, off-farm waged work and household, volunteer and community work, however unfortunately a lot of this work tends to go unnoticed, undocumented and uncelebrated in the public eye.”
Government research shows the proportion of women as paid workers in agriculture has increased from 15% to 32% over the past 15 years and they now make up 40% of agricultural business partners.
About 48% of real farm income in Australia is contributed by women and this figure includes on-farm work, off-farm waged work and household, volunteer and community work.
University enrolments indicate that women are taking a bigger role in the business of farming. Female students have slightly outnumbered males in tertiary agriculture courses since 2003.
Molesworth says young women are injecting new ideas and perspectives into the industry and points to her family enterprise, which has established several conservation areas and has introduced an African breed of sheep that does well in semi-arid environments.
“The younger generation are so much more aware of what is happening around the world. We do go travelling. We are studying with colleagues from all over the world and we are bringing those ideas to the farming landscape.”
Molesworth is spreading her enthusiasm for farming through Art4Agriculture’s Young Farming Champions – a program to provide youth “ambassadors” with communication, marketing and professional development skills.
Art4Agriculture was founded by Lynne Strong, a sixth-generation farmer who came back to the industry after 20 years as a pharmacist. Strong now co-owns and operates (with her husband, Michael, and son Nicholas) the Clover Hill Dairies at Jamberoo on the NSW south coast.
“I brought back the skills I had in pharmacy,” she says, adding that she provided business advice, marketing, liaison with farm consultants and managing people. “I certainly didn’t milk cows.”
Strong says her frustration with the farming sector’s lack of self-promotion led her to start Art4Agriculture, which uses art and multimedia to teach thousands of school students about the valuable role farmers play. Strong says young people tend to want to “do good” in their careers: “It is not all about the money.”
Katrina Sasse is a 29-year-old farmer who won a Nuffield scholarship to study how farmers’ daughters are making their way into family businesses.
Sasse, from Morawa in Western Australia, says women have traditionally been disadvantaged because of the tradition of sons inheriting farms.
“I am looking at ways of including daughters in the family farm – how we can include all siblings into the succession plan,” she says.
“There are a lot of stories where women feel discontented because they feel ignored or they have been pushed away and they don’t have any influence in the decision-making on the future of the family farm.”
About 10% of daughters are returning to the farm and this proportion is growing, she says. For some of the farming families, inclusion may mean looking at their daughters’ strengths and working out how to use them on the farm or in the community.
Sasse has a background in agribusiness banking and decided to come back home to work seasonally four years ago, then took on some of the management duties of the farm, which mostly grows wheat and canola.
She says she enjoys the process of using big data on the farm and finding efficiencies using technology. “I think I am more business-minded than the previous generation, whereas Dad has always had it in his head – it is a gut-feeling approach [for him].”
In her family, both her siblings are female and one of her sisters has bought an adjoining property.
Sasse says her biggest challenge is mechanical work: “My mind does not allow me to pick things apart, pull them back together and understand how they work.”
Coming from a remote area, she went to boarding school at the age of 13 and didn’t get the experience of helping her father out after school. Boys in boarding school often get the opportunity to learn mechanics and auto-electrics in the classroom, she says.
“Out our way, most farmers do absolutely everything,” she says. “The sons take over from their father and … they do so much.
“The variety of tasks are so broad, I know I am not going to be strong in everything. If I am going to continue into the future, maybe we have to spend more money on mechanical charges.”
