Cultivating Change : My Experience Growing up and Working on a Farm

In my opinion, loving the work isn’t quite good enough to gain respect on the farm. Being a woman in agriculture I felt (and I still do) that I had something to prove. I had entered an industry where woman are severely underrepresented and more often than not, face scepticism about their abilities. Showing an interest wouldn’t make people respect me, I needed to prove I could work just as well as the men. The sense of needing to work harder, to show I belonged, is something I’ve struggled with from the beginning. This struggle isn’t something unique to just me. In the UK, only 22% of farmers are women, which reflects the long-standing gender imbalance in agriculture.     Operating machinery, helping with livestock and managing heavy, physically demanding jobs came with an unspoken pressure. I felt my mistakes would be amplified – not because I was new, but because I was a woman. I didn’t want my mistakes to reflect my gender instead of just part of the learning process.  ...

Growing up on a family farm, agriculture has and will always be a constant presence in my life. From a young age I watched my older brother immerse himself in the farming way of life, spending countless hours with my dad, uncle and grandpa, learning the ropes. Meanwhile I would find myself watching from the sidelines, more of an observer rather than a participant. Truthfully farming didn’t interest me back then. I probably believed, like many young women growing up in an agricultural setting, that farming was a ‘mans world’. That unspoken message was clear and without realising I probably internalised that belief.     Throughout my childhood whilst my brother was actively involved, I only helped out during the school holidays with small tasks – rouging wild oats, picking tatties in the grading shed – but I never felt like I had a real place on the farm. The big jobs, the ones that seemed like they mattered to me, were reserved for the guys and I did not show any enthusiasm tow...