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On Farm Story
FARMERS WEEKLY – farmersweekly.co.nz – April 18, 2022
Giving back to the community The saying goes that if you want action, ask a busy person. OIivia Weatherburn is a busy person. She tells Neal Wallace that she loves promoting agriculture and is about to broaden her activities with a new podcast initiative publicising career opportunities in the industry.
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LIVIA Weatherburn had the nickname Farmish when she was a student at Otago Girls’ High
School. The moniker reflected the reality that she was about the only student at the Dunedin high school with an agricultural background. “I remember giving a speech in the fifth form on the seasons of farming and remember people laughing a lot when I talked about drenching and crutching,” Olivia said. “A lot of that reaction was due to the fact that they did not know what they did not know.” Similarly, she would take city friends out to the farm her parents were managing on the Maungatua Hills, which overlook the Taieri Plains. For virtually all of them, it was their first time on a farm. “That was an eye opener, I learnt a lot,” she said. It was an experience that still resonates with her. “You don’t know what you don’t know and you have to put yourself in other people’s shoes to understand them,” she said. Her passion for the primary industry is rooted in an upbringing spent on farms in Otago and Southland, a lifestyle she considers a privilege and one she feels worthy of sharing “I had such a cool childhood,” she said. Olivia lives with husband Willy, who manages Braxton View, a 500ha sheep and beef farm near Mossburn in Northern Southland. An earlier back injury, while working as a shepherd, forced her to change plans to be a farm
worker or farm owner to a career in rural servicing. The change allowed her to unleash her boundless energy, passion and enthusiasm for the primary sector, along with strength as an organiser and motivator to encourage people into the industry and run programmes to upskill farmers. Her orderly office reflects a busy person, but being organised and having practical attributes assists her to relate and interact with farmers.
I was living the dream. I had a team of dogs and a young horse that I was barrel racing. Olivia Weatherburns Farmer Olivia was born and bred in Western Southland, where her parents managed farms. Initially she boarded at Southland Girls’ High School in Invercargill before moving to Otago Girls’ High School when her parents moved to a property near Dunedin. After leaving high school she went to Lincoln University where she initially studied a Bachelor of Agricultural Science, but her strength in things practical rather than science came back to haunt her. “Chemistry and I did not get on at high school and we did not get on at university,” she said. After a year she switched to a Diploma in Farm Management,
A BUSY LIFE: The post-it note wall in Olivia Weatherburns’ office.
which she says still opened the same doors but with skills learnt in a different way. She took a year out between courses and worked as a shepherd on Linnburn Station in the Maniototo and then a property near Middlemarch. It was perfect for her, with low-lying paddocks rising up to tussock hill country. “I was living the dream. I had a team of dogs and a young horse that I was barrel racing,” she said. It was while working there that she was taken out by an angry cow, hurting her back for which she, regrettably, did not immediately seek treatment. “Ten years later I had three surgeries on my back and that angry cow was the cause,” she said. Returning to Lincoln she completed her diploma, then headed to Australia with just $300 cash in her pocket. She had work arranged on Ross and Katrina Ford’s Forrest Home cattle station in Queensland that provided an outlet for her passion of riding horses while working with stock. It also led to a job in the couple’s sideline retail business, selling western wear at shows and camp drafts. “I got the job because I could back a Ford 5250 and a gooseneck trailer,” she said. It all added to her knowledge, skill and experience. On returning to New Zealand, she worked for five years for Outgro Bio Agriculture, a North Island fertiliser company that sold customised soil nutrient, fine particle and slurry mixes. It was her job to expand the business into Southland. “The model was healthy soil,
WORK IN PROGRESS: Olivia Weatherburn is training Patch, a new heading dog.
healthy pasture and healthy stock,” she said. “It meant meeting farmers, taking soil and herbage tests, looking at the whole picture.” During that time she bought a house and 2ha at Balfour for her horses and some sheep, but it became apparent that farm ownership would not only be financially difficult, but physically impossible due to her back injury. She met and later married Willy, who was working and managing farms in the Southland. Over winter he worked as an ice maker for the Southern Hemisphere Proving Ground on the Pisa Range near Wanaka. International car makers and tyre manufacturers use the ground during the Southern Hemisphere winter for testing and his job was to work at night, to ensure they had the right quality ice and snow for the testers. While at university, Olivia won a Beef + Lamb NZ (B+LNZ) scholarship and after five years working for Outgro Bio, in 2015 she joined the producer body as the southern South Island extension manager. It also provided an outlet and a vehicle for her enthusiasm for the sector and a chance to make a difference for sheep and beef farmers. In May last year she moved to a new role as national extension programme manager within
B+LNZ, a position to assist the management of the organisation’s extension programmes. That includes working with extension officers, reviewing the extension programmes delivered by B+LNZ, while also leading projects such as the B+LNZ Action Groups, which was previously the Red Meat Profit Partnership (RMPP). The list of further initiatives she has been, and is still involved in, is extensive and varied. One area of particular interest is exposing young people to the primary sector using some innovative techniques. At the 2020 Southern Field Days in Southland, she launched an amazing race-type event with local schools, called a Food and Fibre Discovery Challenge. Three hundred students were split into teams and given challenges to complete that were associated with agriculture. Later that year a further 300 students competed in a similar event at Ag Fest in Greymouth. The event required students to visit 40 prearranged sites at the field days, on which they had to answer questions or undertake challenges but were also exposed to potential careers. “It was like a game and if you put some fun into it, it helps them relate and then you are winning,” she said. Many companies involved in
