WOMEN IN AGRIBUSINESS
Crunch time By Cheyenne Nicholson
Sometimes it takes life being tossed upside down to get on the right path. When a Southland dairy farmer was diagnosed with breast cancer, she had to reevaluate her life. And when it came to the crunch, the red-haired farmer launched Ginger Crunch Caravan.
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ou’d be forgiven for thinking that the Ginger Crunch Caravan specialises in ginger slices. While the delicacy has certainly graced the menu of the funky little retro-styled food and coffee caravan at one stage, the name was born from owner Claire Burgess’ journey with cancer. “In 2017 I found a funny lump one day, followed it up and was told I had grade 3 invasive ductal carcinoma. It was serious but treatable and kicked off the year from hell but ultimately is how Ginger
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Crunch came to be,” Claire says. Claire, her husband Deryck and their two children, Tessa and Olivia, had made the move from Waikato to Southland to further their dairying careers just 12 months before. Hit with a serious diagnosis and facing a challenging year of chemotherapy, a mastectomy and radiation, Claire says she’s still heartened by how the community rallied around them and supported them. “Coming into a new community is always hard,” she says. “We were lucky that we had family
living down here already, but we found that the farming community hustled around us as well, and oddly, I think the whole thing made us more a part of the community.” Hailing from the Waikato, dairy farming wasn’t on her radar. She grew up on a sheep, beef and deer farm on the Napier-Taupō highway until her teenage years when her family moved to Taupō. She quickly got involved in the hospitality industry, which she took to like a duck to water, obtaining a chef’s apprenticeship and at just 19 years old,
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As well as running Ginger Crunch Caravan, Claire Burgess is a marriage celebrant and enjoys being part of couples’ special days.
DAIRY FARMER
May 2022
