Video: #OurClimateFuture - The Farmer
Canterbury farmer Ash-leigh says her industry has a number of challenges to address when it comes to climate change.
While she is looking at a number of solutions on farm to reduce their emissions, she also lays down the challenge to other communities - "get involved, look where you can make your small footprint, and it doesn't matter, every small footprint goes to making a bigger footprint".
Ash-Leigh wasn’t always a farmer. She grew up in the outskirts of Canterbury and stumbled into the industry milking cows a few times a week during high school.
“I think I wanted to be an air hostess when I was younger. It was quite funny, a lot of my girl mates ended up being nurses and teachers but I was the only one that was really outdoors and working in the environment. The year after high school I went to university but I also found that wasn’t really for me. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do after that, but I knew how to milk cows so I decided to go into dairy farming full-time. At that point in time, I had no suspicion whatsoever that you can make a career and become something amazing from that. From then it just snowballed really as there are so many opportunities in the dairy industry and organisations such as the Dairy Women’s Network, and Fonterra, that can provide career progression. I’ve been in this industry for 10 years now and I’ve held various roles – it just shows that there are heaps of opportunities if you want to take them up.”
In terms of her environment credentials, she says it was a process and it just kept snowballing to where she is now. Her environmental work, like for a lot of farmers, started around water quality, but merged into climate change.
“In the farming community, climate change wasn’t on our radar a couple of years ago and now it’s really a force factor we’re dealing with and looking forward at how we can mitigate and be part of solving the problem.”