Proud Coaster takes helm at Feds
New Federated Farmers president Katie Milne wants to break down the rural/urban divide, writes Tony Benny.
New Federated Farmers president Katie Milne is a proud West Coaster, the fifth generation of her family to call the rain-soaked region home.
‘‘Mum’s from down at Mahitahi at Bruce Bay [South Westland] and the family still farm there. I’m related to basically all of South Westland,’’ Milne says.
Her father was an accountant from Canterbury but he became a Coaster when he met his future wife. ‘‘He fell in love with the coast and he decided if he couldn’t take the coast girl out of the coast, he’d come over here.’’
While her father carried on his career as an accountant and ended up as managing director of Westpower, the West Coast electricity network, her mother wanted to be a farmer and when Milne was a child the family bought a sheep and beef farm at Aratika, on the other side of Lake Brunner from where she now lives.
One of three children, Milne fondly remembers school holidays with her grandparents in South Westland. ’’School holidays until late teenage time were all down there, running up and down riverbeds, with horses and dogs and stockwhips.’’
When she met Lake Brunner dairy farmer Ian Whitmore, Milne moved from sheep and beef and into dairy farming and in 1988 the couple went sharemilking but had what she calls ‘‘a bit of turbulent time on the farm’’. That was an El Nino year and instead of the usual three and a half metres of annual rainfall on their farm at Rotomanu, which backs on to the Southern Alps, they had six metres. ’’Times were interesting, put it that way. The rain actually defeated us and we thought, ‘This is just ridiculous, this is too tough’. Part of the defeat was when you saw your three or four-months-old calves and they’ve got no fur round their feet and the fur’s coming off their back.’’
She and Whitmore finished the season but then left for Canada, where he’d previously been on an agricultural exchange, with their two-year-old daughter Andy. Annual rainfall there was just 280mm a year. Tired of the hassle of renewing visas, they decided to come home and in 1992 they bought the Whitmore family farm where they now run 220 jersey cows.
‘‘Next year the farm will have been bought and sold through his family for 100 years. I always make that point because town people always assume that farms are inherited.’’
The Resource Management Act came into force the year before they bought the farm and, concerned how this would impact on their business, Milne went along to a Federated Farmers meeting in the hope of finding out how the act would work. ’’The RMA’s supposed to be a dynamic document that enables development but we needed to find out what it meant because it wasn’t clear you’d still be allowed to dig a drain on your farm. Did you have to go and get a permit for that? Being a wet, West Coast farm, we needed to know how to manage water basically.’’ There weren’t many 22-year-old woman members of Feds then, though Milne’s mother had been provincial president in the past.
‘‘I went to the meeting so I could understand the RMA and there were some great, inspirational leaders. They did look at me a bit sideways but they welcomed me and encouraged me to stay involved.’’ Milne worked her way up through the ranks and when she was about 30 was elected West Coast dairy chairwoman. ’’With plan changes and stuff coming through, they needed people to get involved who were going to be farming with that in the future, not guys who were about to retire. It’s critical that young people do get into Feds and have their say because the rules and regulations are going to be setting the tone for your future farming.’’
Meanwhile on the farm, there have been two more El Ninos since Milne and Whitmore took over, one in 1998 and another last year, both with double the normal rainfall, but now they know how to handle them. She continued her rise in Federated Farmers, becoming West Coast provincial president and then being elected to the national board. In 2015 Milne was named New Zealand Dairy Woman of the Year and her prize was a year-long Fonterra-sponsored scholarship to the Women in Leadership programme. Milne was the only farmer among the 38 women on the course and spent three or four days a month in Auckland last year. The other women were mostly from Auckland and Wellington.
‘‘They used to laugh a bit because each time I spoke I had an analogy, a farm story would be slid in there to make a point, and they loved it. They’d say, ‘It’s so interesting, I didn’t know that about farming, is that what really happens?’ After a while some of them would say, ‘Why aren’t you talking for farmers?.’’
As the course neared the end, the calls from other participants for Milne to take a role as a spokesperson for farming grew. Then farmers joined in, some saying they wanted a choice at election time. But standing against vice-president and heir-apparent Anders Crofoot wasn’t an easy choice for Milne. ’’Anders is a great guy. He’s given a heap to Feds and been very productive and great in those relationships behind doors on different issues, some of the real tough issues like climate change. But when more and more people said, ‘Why don’t you think about it? Maybe we want a different style’. I thought, ‘OK, I’ll give you some choice’.’’ She became the first woman to be elected president of Federated Farmers in its 118-year history.
Milne believes she can connect with a wider range of people outside farming. She believes bridging the growing divide between urban and rural New Zealander is essential.
‘‘Some of the campaigns the likes of Fish and Game and now Greenpeace have run, they certainly have portrayed farming in a way that if you knew nothing about it, you might think that is absolutely what it’s about. I think trying to reconnect with urban people about what actually farming is on the ground is vitally important. Being able to remind them that we produce food that feeds them and also that we export food for other families around the world and therefore we’re providing a huge amount of income to New Zealand is part of it, but it’s also just showing basic day-to-day stuff on-farm and putting it in plain language.’’