My Friends Inspirational Farming Story
G'Day Folks,
I had coffee with a good friend last night. This woman is a very special person, what she has endured inspires me relentlessly. She believes farming was the reason she was put on this earth. Her connection with her cows can only be compared to a mothers connection with her children. This one page newsletter is nowhere near enough to cover even the briefest history of trials and tribulations in her life.
But what I want to share with you is just a small piece of her story, so that it may inspire you as it has inspired me. The end of the 2019 drought concluded with the most severe bushfires this country has ever experienced. Smoke trails so large and widespread, the plumes covering our vast dry country could be seen from outer space. Within this period lay the final moments that would have likely broken most of us regular folk.
In 2013 my friend and her partner fought their way into the dairy industry and after countless rejections, had finally secured a lease on a farm. They started their organic dairy operation in an environment of suspicion, ostracisation and trepidation. They were not only radically different, compared with the stereotype the industry was used to, but their ideas on how to do things further baffled the industry's norms. Usually just being an organic farmer is enough to garner some subtle (sometimes not so subtle) exclusion from most conventional farming communities. Adding even more suspicion to the pot, is the fact that my friend and her partner are both females (doing a man's job) and also lovers. If being a woman running their own dairy farm for the first time wasn't enough of a social hurdle, I don't believe being a couple would make that hurdle any smaller.
Having to choose between what money you kept for yourself to live on and what was left to buy feed for your cows to eat was a weekly juggle. Well before this point, most people sell their cattle for what they can, and the cows usually become ground meat. But when you care about them as if they were your children, this doesn't enter your thoughts for even the briefest of moments.
My mind immediately wanted to reassure her by reminding her what she had already accomplished, and that no rational human could possibly doubt themselves after not only enduring so much adversity but prevailing despite it. But then I paused, and what I realised in that moment, is that her story was one of the most beautiful tales one could speak of. Her life was a page turner like no other book I had read. It has a beautiful love story, plenty of loss, but even more beauty. It was then I realised that all of us are just characters in our own story and at the final chapter all we hope is that our story was a good one.
