Industry good – DairyNZ

More than 3500 dairy farmers already have Farm Environment Plans to identify farm environmental risks and solutions to improve water quality and reduce greenhouse gases.

Better is best

Dr Tim Mackle DairyNZ chief executive

This year will see most sectors facing significant change as we all look hard at how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Agriculture is very much part of the solution and as we respond to covid-19, a new government and tackling New Zealand’s future, the daily business of farming is shifting rapidly too.

Dairy farming accounts for 23% of NZ’s greenhouse gases and as we address climate change as a nation, we are tasked with producing our world-class milk while reducing footprint.

Internationally, we stack up well already. Kiwis are some of the most sustainable dairy producers in the world – the emissions created from every glass of NZ milk are less than half the global average. But we know we can be even better.

We need to sustain our success as other nations will catch up, so we must do even better to stay ahead of the game.

Right now, we are working on our primary sector climate change partnership, He Waka Eke Noa, which is an industry, government and iwi/Maori commitment to help farmers reduce emissions and build the framework to report and price agriculture emissions by 2025.

The Climate Change Commission assesses the primary sector’s progress against He Waka Eke Noa milestones, which supports our commitment to reduce emissions from farms. Significant research is being undertaken to support how we reduce emissions.

Already more than 3500 dairy farmers have Farm Environment Plans (FEPs), helping identify farm environmental risks and solutions to help water quality and reduce greenhouse gases.

Like many sectors, shifting day-today practices is a journey and it does involve incremental changes that help us maintain viable businesses, which spend locally and provide employment.

Adapting feed and crop use, fertiliser and effluent practices, fencing and planting waterways, and so on, will reduce farm footprint both individually and collectively across NZ.

The Zero Carbon Bill was the start of a new era for all New Zealanders.

For farmers, it means understanding the emissions produced from their farm and tailoring solutions to reduce that footprint.

“We need to sustain our success as other nations will catch up, so we must do even better to stay ahead of the game.”

Over 90% of dairy farmers will receive a farm emission report this year. Understanding the source of those emissions and how a farm compares to others is the first step in reducing a farm’s footprint.

As dairy farmers we are making great strides in reducing environmental impact and it’s crucial we acknowledge that, as we commit to even more in the next five years and beyond. n

Stephanie Matheson, her husband James and their nephew Bronson on the Southland farm they call home.

Becoming Steph 2.0

By Cheyenne Nicholson

A Southland dairy farmer is out to prove that you should never let someone stand in the way of your dreams – and never let your body stand in the way either.

When Stephanie Matheson jumps on the call for this interview, she’s fresh out of officiating a wedding ceremony and hot-footing it to Queenstown to tick a massive item off her list of goals – the Queenstown 10km. It sums up her life nicely. Always on the go, doing the things she loves and generally living her best life and inspiring others at the same time.

Stephanie, or Steph, lives in Southland with her husband James and their seven-year-old nephew Bronson, who they adopted when he was three years old. James manages a 700-cow farm and won Southland/Otago Dairy Manager of the year in 2019. And while Steph’s main jobs are off-farm, she is just as invested in the farm as James. She’s an accomplished marriage celebrant, social media manager, occasional farmhand and runs a successful social media page Project Steph 2.0.

“When I was a kid, I wanted to be an international superstar,” Steph says.

“I was really determined to be one too. I wanted to be the next Britney Spears. I did a lot of singing and dancing as a kid, was involved in all the local shows and took dance lessons. I jumped on anything I could to be in the limelight.”

When she hit high school, reality set in and she started finding the idea of someone from Balclutha, New Zealand, being the next Britney slightly unrealistic. Her love of performing persisted and she decided she wanted to go to university for performing arts.

“I was told that I was too big for that, that my body shape wasn’t suited to performing arts. So I was like okay, that’s the end of that unless I lose 50kg. I was gutted. I’d always looked the way I had and I didn’t see what that had to do with anything,” she says.

During this time she was working an after school job at a telecommunications store fixing broken phones and selling new ones.

After the study knockback, she decided to jump full-time into telecommunications and only left that line of work last year after 10 years. She’d grown tired of the corporate world and was keen to figure out a line of work that she loved and could fit around the rest of life.

She didn’t have to think for long to figure it out. After getting engaged on Christmas Eve in 2018 and going through the process of planning her wedding, she fell in love with the industry.

“I really enjoyed the whole wedding process and I was like, ‘actually, I don’t

“I wrote it one night when James was away doing tractor work. I was feeling frustrated at the lack of understanding from people who don’t understand how farming works.”

want to leave the industry now that I’m married’. So I thought about what I’m good at and the answer to that was public speaking, so it made sense to become a celebrant. If I were a good baker, I would’ve done wedding cakes,” she says.

She became a celebrant in January this year and officiated her first wedding in March. Covid-19 threw a spanner in the works with lockdown, but October marked the start of a new wedding season and she has been in her element.

Not one to rest on her laurels, she has two other jobs that keep her busy; she’s an office administrator for her parent’s agricultural business in Balclutha and runs a social media management company, Twilight Media.

“The social media side of things was really sparked when I was working on telecommunications. I watched smartphones burst onto the scene and spent a lot of time understanding everything about them.

“Then the Facebook app came out, so I guess my passion for social media came through the phone side of things,” she says.

As an avid social media user herself, she started helping out friends and family who had businesses and wanted help with their social media and it kept growing. Much of her personal social media use is through her page Project Steph 2.0.

Two years ago, she was at a particularly low point in her life. Unhappy in her fulltime job and feeling average about life and within herself, she felt she needed to do something to hold her accountable and help other people.

“I figured I wasn’t the only one feeling like that, so I started social media pages to chronicle my weight loss journey. It’s morphed into my life’s journey over time. I spoke to my husband about it, and he questioned if I really wanted to put everything – thoughts, feelings, photos – out there for the world to see. And I was like yeah, it scares me but I find it invigorating,” she says.

As a parent and living in the country, one of the things she quickly came to realise was the lack of “influencers” she could relate to.

“Everyone I was following lived in the city and had a gym two minutes away. I couldn’t relate to them. I started to analyse it from a personal and social media perspective. Why was I following these people, what was I learning from them? I got critical about what I wanted to fill my newsfeed with. I wanted my content to be realistic, relatable and authentic,” she says.

Her pages have gone bigger than she expected to, with over 1500 followers on both Instagram and Facebook, she’s cultivated an engaged and supportive following. Her page is filled with her everyday life, the good and the bad. Recently she penned a post called The Life of a Farmer’s Wife, which went viral

“I wrote it one night when James was away doing tractor work. I was feeling frustrated at the lack of understanding from people who don’t understand how farming works. Don’t get me wrong, I often don’t either. While I don’t work onfarm a lot, I do live here, and I see what James has to navigate every day,” she says.

“It came from the heart and I think that’s why it was so popular, people could relate. I was really scared to post it, but the feedback was amazing.”

At her lowest point two years ago, her struggle with anxiety and a binge-eating disorder were at an all-time high and are

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Steph recently completed the Queenstown 10km.

Although Steph does not spend a great deal of time on the farm where husband James is the manager, she is just as invested in the farm as he is.

topics she touches on regularly in her social media posts.

“With the binge-eating, what used to happen is when I’d get hungry, I’d panic. It was a fear of being hungry I guess, so I used to eat like it was life or death because, in my mind, it was,” she says.

As a result, any food that was quick to eat and easily accessible was top of the list, which meant a lot of take-out and quick snacks.

Over time she has learnt her triggers. A key factor in managing her disorder is making sure meals are planned out, so she always knows when and what she’ll eat next. But it’s a challenge she faces day-to-day with the support and encouragement from James.

She describes her anxiety like everything is cloudy and moving at 400km/h with every decision being made in survival mode with no time to think. Since starting her medication things have slowed down and the cloud has cleared.

“I have time to think now. I’ve got the strength to make decisions too. With anxiety and binge-eating, it gets tiring trying to regulate things all the time. I think since I started working for myself, it really helped. I’m in control of how my day looks. I’ve learnt a lot about myself since leaving my full-time job,” she says.

“With the bingeeating, what used to happen is when I’d get hungry, I’d panic. It was a fear of being hungry I guess, so I used to eat like it was life or death because, in my mind, it was.”

Scheduling is hugely important for her to keep on track and to manage everything she has going on, armed with a digital and hard copy diary, there’s scarcely a day that goes by that isn’t busy. As is the support she gets from James. She says they work well together because they don’t hide away from how they are feeling and he helps ground her.

“When we met, we moved quite quickly. But we are really similar, and we’re both loud and verbal. We don’t hide away from feelings. I guess you’d say I’m the dreamer and he’s the realistic one though,” she says.

Reflecting on her journey so far, her job changes and her social media platform, Steph says she has found over time that she’s okay with her weight and how she looks and she wants to encourage other women to feel good in the skin they’re in too.

“I want to take Project Steph global. It’s really important. There are a lot of women empowerment groups out there, but as I found, not many who are real, authentic and live a farming lifestyle as I do,” she says.

There’s nothing my thighs have stopped me doing and other women need reminding of that.” n