Women in gumboots

A farm in Ngatea has been passed through Arthur Jones’s family for over 100 years.

He has had employees come and go over the years, but one of his workers is the cream who has risen to the top.

She is also a woman.

Rose Hitchman has worked on the farm for about nine years. She is now the farm manager, with a vision of owning her own land in the future.   

It wasn’t a career that she just fell into: Hitchman, 29, wanted to be a farmer for as long as she could remember.

“My dad would do relief milking and I would go in and go with him,” Hitchman said.

“At primary school in our last year you’d have to say what you wanted to do when you left school and your teacher at the time would read it out.”

When it was her turn, all the males in the room laughed.

 “That made me more determined to prove them wrong and do it,” she said.

Even now, she is met with surprise when she tells people what she does for a living.

“They’re like ‘really, you’re doing that?’”

Despite being in the career she has always wanted, her position doesn’t come without its own set of challenges. Depending on the time of year, she can oversee up to four staff and it can be difficult to boss around men.

“Especially when they’re older than me, it’s a lot harder. They don’t want to be told what to do by a female, let alone one younger,” Hitchman said.

 “There are more females going into it,” she said. “Most of my friends, they’re working on the farm but usually their partners are too.”

Her partner is a builder, but they hope to own their own farm one day.

“We’ve been looking at trying buy a farm,” she said. “But our families don’t have farms for us to inherit, which makes it harder… It’s usually passed through to the family.”

Hitchman works 12 days on and two days off with days that start at four in the morning. On her days off she goes on hikes with her partner, plays hockey and is a part of the local fire brigade.

Jones remembers coming to the farm one morning and finding Hitchman already there, sitting with a sick cow.

“She goes ‘Oh, I actually fell asleep.’ She’d actually slept there all night, she slept all night next to the cow,” Jones said.

“She has a heart of gold.”

But she also possesses leaderships skills that are typically associated with males.

“She leads by example,” Jones said. “If there’s a hard job to be done she’ll be up the front doing it. She’ll be going, ‘well I’m happy to do it so you’ve got to do it.’”

“Long term I would like to see her own some land.”

He suspects that when male workers give her a tough time, it may be a case of sour grapes.

“There might be a little bit of jealousy on their part. Sometimes they get a bit narky but she handles that,” Jones said.  

“She just doesn’t take any nonsense.”

Jones said he would not hesitate to hire another woman for his farm. In fact, at one stage in the last year  he only had women working there.  

“Because it’s been a male dominated job for a long time, they try harder,” he said.

He finds them compassionate with the animals, reliable and hardworking.

“And they can do it. Simple as that,” he said.

Chief executive officer of Rural Women New Zealand (RWNZ), Penelope England, says more women are entering the trade by choice.

“I think it is fantastic,” England said.

“The women that work in rural are insanely incredible. They are resilient tough, intelligent, hard-working.”

However, England said it is important that there is support available to women working in farming.

“Rurally, people get quite isolated,” England said. “If you move to a rural area and don’t have children you have to work doubly hard.”

Recently, more attention has been dedicated to male farmers’ mental health, which England does see as necessary.

But she also sees a gaping hole when it comes to support for rural women, whether they are new to the industry or a long established “farmer’s wife”.

“I’m always like, but what about the caregivers? She’s doing the kids, running the business, all of the bookwork, supporting him. And if she falls into a heap people go ‘oh for god’s sake pick yourself up, what’s the matter with you?’”

“We also need to be talking about wellness for women and support for women,” she said.

England said women have a lot to bring to farming in New Zealand and that people should not spend so much time talking about the industry’s weaknesses.

“It’s discouraging people from going into the sector,” she said. “We need to be talking about the successes. A lot of the agriculture side of the sector is going through the roof.”

She said RWNZ look forward to seeing more women enter the industry whether out on the farm in their gumboots or in an office being “the brains behind the whole of the rural sector”.