FUTURE IN FOCUS
Meet the Young Farmer of the Year, Emma Ayliffe.
EMMA AYLIFFE HAS ONLY HAD HER OWN FARM for four years, yet she has already won the Young Farmer of the Year Award. If you consider the 28-year-old’s short but glittering resume, though, which is bursting with boots-on-the-ground experience, the honour comes as no surprise. “We bought the farm in 2017, which was right at the start of the drought,” she says of the property in Lake Cargelligo, NSW, she owns with her partner, Craig Newham. “If only we’d known!”
In fact, Emma and Craig were perfectly positioned to see their 688-hectare farm, which they run as half fat lamb production and half dryland cropping, through the drought. After gaining her Masters of Science in agriculture in her home state of South Australia, Emma moved to Central West New South Wales to work as an agronomist at the Tandou cotton farm near Menindee.
She also worked for Elders before setting up an agronomy consulting business, Summit Ag, in 2016 with her business partner, Heath Mcwhirter. Despite all this real-world experience, the drought took a toll. “Craig and his family are all farmers, so they’d been through drought before and had a fair idea of what was coming,” says Emma. “But it’s always daunting when you’ve got to do it yourself, and it’s your overdraft getting bigger and bigger.”
She’s not one to give up easily, though. Growing up on sheep country in Coober Pedy, watching her parents manage farms, she always knew agriculture was in her future. “It was a wonderful learning experience,” Emma says of farming in drought, “and it really reiterated the importance of having a drought-management plan, as well as just being ready to battle through it.”
Planning and battling aren’t Emma’s only strategies for tackling some of farming’s knottier problems: she’s very aware of the benefits of learning from others’ experience. So aware, in fact, that a few years ago, she and business partner Heath launched a social media app for farmers called Yacker (as if running a farm, as well as a consultancy business wasn’t enough to keep her busy).
Yacker’s point of difference from other social media, however, is that it’s set up to facilitate in-depth phone conversations, not text messages. “The premise is that we know as advisers – and I know as a farmer – that the best conversations are always had if you can capture someone when they’re free to have a good chat,” Emma explains. “If someone’s driving to town or sitting in a tractor sowing, they have time to spare. They can’t reply to a Twitter thread, but they can have a really productive conversation where you can learn a lot. So the premise of Yacker was about: how do we find people outside our own circles to extend our knowledge base? And then how do we identify when they’re free to have those conversations? We want to share knowledge and move agriculture forward.”
They are big ambitions – but that’s Emma’s style. Winning the Young Farmer of the Year Award (co-hosted by ABC Rural and Kondinin Group) means a lot to her and her dreams for the future. “We got to go to Canberra and meet politicians, so you get to build those relationships and also build yourself a profile,” she says. “And you get a bit of a soapbox to start talking about the things that are important to you; that are critical for your industry.”
What are those things? “I can see the bigger cause around the concerns about food and fibre supply into the future, and ensuring that we’ve got land to pass on to the next generation is really critical,” Emma says.
She’s also happy to have observed, even within her relatively short time in the industry, a dramatic – and welcome – increase in female farmers.
But it’s the sheer joy Emma derives from farming that she’s most keen to convey. “I just have such a passion for the industry. I love what I do,” she says. “I think, in agriculture, we do a pretty rubbish job in selling ourselves. We’re quick to talk about what isn’t working – the drought, the mouse plague, the floods, the fires; and those are real issues that are affecting us and can’t be ignored – but for every one thing that’s going wrong, usually there’s 10 or 15 really exciting things happening in agriculture. And we’re quick to brush over that.
“But it’s so much fun being a farmer! The freedom, the flexibility, the challenge of no two years and no two days being the same. Agriculture is incredible in that you can craft your career and lifestyle around doing the things that you want to do, and build a business that really feeds your passion every day.”
For more information, visit summitag.com.au