A farmer’s wife, not a farmer
Alrighty, so all of the emails I received after my last column encouraged me to follow up a number of suggestions to keep writing, and ta da, here we are.
For the rest of this dairy season I will endeavour to keep you all smiling with a few of the trials and tribulations that go on at our place so you know for sure that you are not alone out there plotting your significant other’s premature demise after drafting cows or a particular tough day on the farm together.
After that, my writing will be all about what these farmers’ lives entails after the farm sale.
For those of you who don’t know, I am a dairy farmer’s wife, mother, grandmother and a former hairdresser. I have a big heart, great work ethic and an innate ability to string several swear words together to form a sentence, a talent which I place firmly and squarely on my Irish father’s shoulders.
That last sentence has possibly already irked some of you because I dared to refer to myself as a farmer’s wife instead of a farmer.
Some opinions have been offered to me regarding the title I choose to give myself and I think it has something to do with the gender equality thing and how one is expected to refer to one’s self in life because apparently one must have a title.
When I’m speaking to a group I always introduce myself as a farmer’s wife, mother and grandmother who owns and farms our dairy business with my husband, Geoff, in Northland.
Women in particular have told me that I’m in actual fact a farmer, so why do I minimise myself by saying I’m just a farmers wife?
Two years ago, I worked on a building site helping to finish off a 50-bale rotary cowshed. From that experience, I can now load and disperse silicon from a caulking gun, use a 5-inch grinder, because the 9-inch was too heavy for me and fill the gaps in concrete tilter panels to 8 metres by operating a scissor lift.
I dug trenches by hand after measuring and getting the levels set up by myself, pushed wheelbarrow loads of dirt and did the finishing on all the weld joins that connected the yarding system. However, none of that makes me a cowshed builder, nor a builder of any sort, to be fair.
The same goes for my ability on farm, I can look after our farm by myself for days, milk our 210 cows, put up fences, feed calves and move young stock, but only if Geoff has fed out before he goes away because I won’t drive our tractor.
People have given me a hard time about not being able to drive the tractor and my reply is: ‘‘Well, Geoff can’t iron and fold the linen for the guest bed in our Airbnb so we are a pretty good pair.’’
And I didn’t say I can’t drive the tractor, I said I won’t drive it. There’s a difference and it’s purely because I can’t pull out and replace broken strainer posts by myself before the boss man gets home.
Our marriage, business and working relationship isn’t a competition, it’s a union that works like a well-oiled machine, most days anyway, because we both bring different strengths to the table.
The biggest compliment anyone has given me was the day they said, ‘‘you’re a very capable woman’’, and I guess that sums it up really. So with that said, the sun is shining and this capable woman, who is a farmer’s wife, has calf sheds to get sorted and washing to hang out.
Louise Giltrap is a Northland dairy farmer. She loves to hear from readers at ljgiltrap@xtra.co.nz.