DAIRY CHAMPION
Ngāi Tahu farm manager and Dairy Women’s Network member Ash-Leigh Campbell is the 2020 Fonterra Dairy Woman of the Year. Photo by Tony Benny
How a car started a farming journey By Tony Benny
The 2020 Fonterra Dairy Woman of the Year had a shaky start to her first full-time job as a dairy farmer, but has stood firm to build an outstanding career.
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hen she took an afterschool job relief milking, Ash-Leigh Campbell’s only interest in dairy farming was to earn enough money to run the car her parents had given her. But less than 15 years later, she’s been named Fonterra Dairy Woman of the Year, the youngest ever recipient of the award. Campbell is technical farm manager for Ngāi Tahu Farming, assisting with the oversight and performance of 8000 cows on eight dairy farms and five support units, at Te Whenua Hou (Eyrewell Forest), North Canterbury. “The role has grown and expanded as I’ve grown and expanded in the past four
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years, and I feel it’s constantly evolving. It has been a really exciting journey,” 30-year-old Campbell says. Growing up on a lifestyle block at Greenpark near Lincoln, she had a pony and a pet lamb, but the closest she came to cows was on the town supplytype farms scattered around the district. When she was 16, her parents gave her a car. “But there was a catch to it. They said, ‘If you want to drive it, you’ll need to pay for fuel, registration, WOF and tyres’,” she says. “I didn’t want to be a supermarket check-out chick like a few of my friends were doing for something like $6 an hour back then and there was a job advertised
in the high school newspaper for a relief milker three days a week.” When she turned up for the interview, farm owners Darryl and Sue Petheram, confused by her name Ash-Leigh, were expecting a boy. “They were like, ‘We’ve never had a female before’,” she recalls. But they showed her how to put the cups on in the 24-a-side herring bone shed where they milked their 200 pedigree Holstein Friesians, and then she washed down the yard. “Darryl said, ‘We won’t be offended if you don’t want to come back, we completely understand’,” she says. “I said it was fine and I’ll be back tomorrow.”
DAIRY FARMER
November 2020
