Mastering the Juggle

People are sometimes surprised our business is based out of Waipukurau. But you really don’t have to be in the central city to be an entrepreneur. It has its challenges, for sure, but we understand farmers because we are farmers. The East Coast is pretty rugged hill country, but our farm in Pōrangahau is in the Mangaorapa Basin and our hills, in contrast to the rest of the region, are very rolling. I love farming and always have. I don’t get to do the day-to-day anymore, but it’s still who I am.

I grew up in Wairarapa, where my family started out with about 120 acres and Dad also worked in town selling farms with PGG Wrightson. I did agriculture at secondary school and then went on to Lincoln University. Coming in as quite a nice girl with this small-town, everyone-knew-me urge to go and spread my wings, Lincoln was an eye-opener. I had heard all about the shenanigans and adventures at Lincoln, and I embraced it all. I’d heard about how they went jet boating and flying in planes on the weekends and I thought, “Woah, yeah!” And I got to do those things.

When it came time to do a practical year, I was determined to go work on a South Island high-country station. By then, my family had moved onto a 1000 acre farm east of Masterton and I had become very involved in it all during the school holidays. I felt like I was pretty darned capable.

This was in the day of phone books, so I went to the library and looked in the Central Otago White Pages for all the stations with shepherds’ quarters. They were the ones that would take on students and casual workers. I wrote to them all, over 100 places. But the reality was I was just a girl from the North Island with a weird surname – my maiden name is Bunny. I didn’t get a look in. Then a friend of mine who was working down south told a farmer about me. He said, “If she’s that keen, get her to call me.” I quickly got myself down there and found myself an amazing boss and fantastic community up the Rakaia Gorge.

Still, I remember being told back then that, as a woman, what I could do in the industry was limited. But I wasn’t having any of that. That year down south set me up with the mentality that if you really want something, you just have to keep chipping away at your goal. Cloud Farmer has been like that. It came out of a desire to provide farmers with a more efficient alternative to having farm info written on scraps of paper. A lot of farmers are used to recording things in their notebook or their Collins Diary, and they might even have a shelf of their dad’s notebooks. We wanted to offer something that would take minimal behaviour change, but would mean they needed less time in the office. Farmers want to be outside doing what they love.

I really am a big advocate for just jumping into life. It has had its challenges, of course. Becoming a mother has been one of those. I am a stepmother to two boys and then my first daughter, Georgia, was born five weeks early, just as we were launching the app in 2014. I was totally unprepared. I was in absolute denial and completely in business mode. I grew up in the generation where we were told we were going to be businesswomen who would take on the world. You couldn’t be a mother at the same time. But when you are in the trenches with little kids you just go into survival mode.

And then our second daughter, Hetty, came along eighteen months later, so the juggle continued. But you know what? This is me, doing all the things, and just getting on with it. The balance is easier now with the kids getting older, and I do think we all need a purpose in life. I am proud of what I have done. When I stop and really look back on it all – creating a business that is helping farmers, all while raising children and living in the middle of nowhere – it’s been pretty phenomenal. And this year? Who knows? Maybe I will slow down and maybe it will get easier. But really, who am I kidding? I say that every darned year.

This story appeared in the Ngahuru Autumn 2022 Edition of Shepherdess.