WOMEN IN AGRIBUSINESS
Best of both worlds By Cheyenne Nicholson
A Culverden farmer who enjoys the feeling of being feminine and pampered has a beauty business set among cows and paddocks.
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hen a Culverden dairy farmer was first starting her farming career, she was met with many challenges as she worked her way up the ladder. From paying off debt, navigating motherhood and the sometimes volatile dairy industry – she’s done it all. Now, she’s gearing up for her next challenge – starting a business from scratch. Eden Ritchie and her husband Salem are contract milkers on a 950-cow farm at Rotherham and on the side, she runs a beauty salon from her home while juggling study, the farm, family and clients. Growing up, her life wasn’t always easy. Family life was difficult at times and she bounced from school to school as the family moved around, experiencing a mix of town and farm along the way. It was a challenging time for a young Eden who had to figure out the path she wanted to take. “There were a lot of family conflicts, from my parents’ divorce to extended family issues. When I was younger I thought university might have been my path, but I quickly deduced that the classroom environment just didn’t work for me. I didn’t have a lot of stability in my life, and at 17 years old farming to me seemed like the epitome of stability and security,” Eden says. In 2014 she left her high school job as a checkout operator at New World Ngaruawahia to move to Dargaville to try dairy farming. She started calf rearing before shifting into relief milking and farm assistant work. To help educate herself further, she completed a year-long agricultural course through NorthTec. In hindsight, she says that Primary ITO might have been a better fit and had a broader offering, but at the time, she was just keen to soak up everything she could about the industry. And that she did. Come 2016 she started a position as a farm assistant on the 500-cow farm in Dargaville. In her
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Life is busy for Eden Ritchie who contract milks on a 950-cow farm at Culverden, as well as running a home-based beauty salon.
“I’ve always enjoyed beauty and the feeling of being feminine and pampered. It’s a nice switch from the feeling of masculinity that I feel on-farm.” third season on the farm and largely on a whim, she decided to enter the Dairy Industry Awards for Northland in the dairy trainee category. “I entered to benchmark myself against others in the industry and keep trying to hone my skills. My confidence is something I lacked at the time, so I didn’t think I’d have a chance of placing, let alone winning,” she says. In the first time in the history of the New Zealand Dairy Industry Awards, women took out the top three spots
for the dairy trainee category, with Eden grabbing top spot. It was a huge achievement so early on in her career and was the ticket to meeting her now husband. “For the National Awards programme we did a tour in Southland/Otago, and I sat next to a guy on the minibus everywhere we went on the study tour, and now we’re married and have two children.” Salem lived in Canterbury at the time. The two spent many hours messaging and hopping on flights to visit each other before she landed a job in Ashburton as a dairy assistant on an 800-cow farm. The job was a great step up for her and a chance for her to expand her farming knowledge. “I had wanted to leave Northland for a while and get a chance to experience different farm systems. The farm I worked on was for the Rylib Group, who were amazing to work for,” she says.
DAIRY FARMER
August 2022
