“Giving women more confidence”

Fiona SIMSON

Fiona Simson is carrying a cane. She’s recently had her foot reconstructed but it’s not slowing her down a bit. Blonde curls bouncing, chatting nineteen to the dozen, she sets a cracking pace to a cafe table and orders a flat white.

“You can’t be what you can’t see,” she insists, addressing the impact she’s had since her election as the first female President of the National Farmers’ Federation back in 2016. “I think it actually has given some women in regional areas more confidence, and I’m proud of that.”

The 55-year-old trailblazer and cattle and mixedcrop farmer from the Liverpool Plains in NSW is a passionate advocate for women in agriculture.

She is also passionate about opening up lines of communication between country and city folk.

“In the old days,” she says, “everyone knew someone in the bush. You might have gone to visit a relative in the holidays, swum in creeks, seen animals and had that connection between what you grow and what you eat. Now, with successive generations being born and raised in cities, we don’t have that. So farmers need to talk to consumers about what we do.”

To that end, Fiona once put out a media release saying she’d welcome visitors to her farm. It found its way to a vegan newsletter and she now receives “a squillion emails a day” from animal rights activists who want to take up her offer.

Fiona, her husband, Ed (it was love at first sight 30 years ago and they still plainly adore each other), and their son, Tom, 26, run the farm. Daughter Jemima, 29, works in health and safety in the coal industry. The drought has hit the family hard, though not as hard as some. They’ve cut back their herd and last year harvested roughly 10 per cent of a normal year’s crop. But Fiona admits that it’s not easy to know what normal is any more. “This is the worst drought we’ve had in the 90 years our family has been on the farm.”

Nonetheless, Fiona believes absolutely that Australian agriculture has a positive future.

“The most joyful times I have are out in the bush meeting farmers, seeing people who are passionate about what they do,” she says. “There are so many positive stories coming from the land, even today, and they far outweigh everything else.” Samantha Trenoweth