Future of female farmers Support for farmers’ daughters
DAUGHTERS continue to be overlooked as future farmers in many family businesses.
And Australia’s farm sector was poorer for it, according to Nuffield scholar Katrina Sasse.
To turn the tide, she called on the community to offer “more support and encouragement to farming women”.
Farming parents should raise children “gender neutral” when it came to farming, and so they didn’t favour male farmers over female farmers, she said.
“Parents need to be aware they often create the stereotypes by putting the tractor in front of the boy and taking him out to the paddock, but not the girls. We need to raise the kids with the same socialisations and learning experiences.”
After working in agri-banking, Katrina now farms 8200ha at Morawa in Western Australia with her parents and sister.
Industry estimates are that fewer than 10 per cent of farm successors were women.
Her studies found young women successful in joining a family farming business often had carved out “separate roles, so there was no conflict of roles with the brothers”.
Katrina said daughters often brought back specialised skills that they’d be trained in, such as agronomy, marketing or soil health.
“There are ways for those roles to be incorporated. As an industry I don’t think we are fully open to doing that yet, but I think ‘yet’ is the key word there.”
Katrina said the female farmers she met during her Nuffield travels tended to be “driven”.
“But it is very hard if you don’t have open-minded parents.”