Katie Milne was the first female National President of Federated Farmers. Not unfamiliar with breaking through glass ceilings, she now has her sights set even higher.
She is throwing her name into the hat to become the President of the World Farmer's Organisation.
Photo: Sharon Brettkelly
Milne tells Jesse Mulligan she has been part of environment action as early as 2004, when a group of female farmers in the West Coast district joined hands to combat a trending rise in Lake Brunner’s phosphorus levels.
“We took the bull by the horns and have had a series of farm plans done and made sure everyone understood what their point discharges were and did a lot research around what we could do about it,” she says.
“We halted the decline of water quality and turned it around within five years, which everyone said we couldn’t do, so that was pretty exciting and satisfying stuff.”
She turned her focus to Mount Te Kinga, wanting to turn it into a type of “predator-free island”, which ultimately led to her to be on the Predator Free 2050 board, Milne says.
While dairy farming has been a contentious point as climate change increasingly comes into the spotlight, Milne says there has been incredible work around improving soil profile by farmers and intensive winter grazing.
“It’s been a moving fest, but the improvements are ongoing, and everyone’s committed to it, which is brilliant.
“When you’ve got the buy-in of the farmers, you can make things happen at a faster pace than what you probably thought, which is what we proved with the Lake Brunner catchment project all those years before.”
All these issues – water quality, farming intensity, pest control – exist wherever you go, she says, but the difference on the ground needs to be addressed.
“It’s quite complex in that policy settings need to be able to cater to all farmers around the globe.
“When the likes of the UN … discuss how agriculture should look in the future, they have to understand properly that it’s not just looking at European or an American or a Kiwi farmer who’s got hi-tech and got lots of tools and things at their fingertips, and does need more development to help them, but you’ve also got people who literally would love to have a rotary hoe to be able to cultivate more land so they can feed their families.”
One of her biggest drivers has been frustration over a lack of understanding about food production and advocating for farmers to get a fair deal, she says.
“The old unintended consequences keep falling out of people who have great intentions around policy but the implications and practicalities on the ground can be devastating to people’s livelihoods.
“And knowing that people genuinely heart and soul, when they’re people of the land, want to do better and try to do their best and they’re limited to the tools and resources they have and the science available at the time and there’s an assumption that everything can be fixed tomorrow.
“Farming being biological, we don’t have necessarily that sort of luxury. You’ve got animals that have got their own idiosyncrasies, if you like, and we have to go with the flow of the seasons, so what you can change from one week to the next in a production business, in a manufacturing factory, we can’t do, it takes a year or years to change the systems.”
As a livestock farmer herself, Milne says she understands the complexity of the food systems and believes that gives her a competitive advantage for the presidency at the World Farmer's Organisation.
“Lots of countries in the world right now as we speak, in the last week or two weeks have stopped export of their staples because of the worry of food scarcity and most of those are crops, and on the side of that you’ve got people saying we must remove livestock from the picture, because of greenhouse gas emissions and climate effects.
“That diversity of food source and proteins that come from animals are so important nutritionally, that I’m horrified when I keep hearing it.”
The World Farmer's Organisation will hold its next general election in Budapest in June, and Milne hopes to be there in person if travel restrictions allow.
