The high-energy young woman was a finalist in the Ahuwhenua Trophy Young Māori farmer award this year, is completing a Diploma in Farm Management and is very active in NZ Young Farmers.
At 25 her pathway within agriculture hasn’t been in a straight line but she now has an air of absolute confidence and certainty when she talks about what she’s doing and where she’s heading.
There’s a sense that agriculture is exactly where she belongs and the clarity she now has, she believes, has come in part from her experiences within Whenua Kura.
Ash-Leigh says she almost stumbled on the programme and scholarship that paid her fees for her Diploma in Agriculture last year and is also funding her current study.
While she’d known her great-grandmother was Māori she hadn’t connected with her whakapapa.
“I definitely grew up as Pakeha. I knew I had an affiliation with Ngāi Tahu but I’d never connected with iwi or really had a tie there,” she says.
But that’s changed and now Ash-Leigh not only has a deeper sense of her own background but also a strong appreciation for cultural and spiritual links with the environment – particularly land and water.
“I don’t think all of this was a coincidence – I was the girl at school who thought of being an air hostess or a teacher so my friends thought it was hilarious when I started milking cows.
“But I really feel this deep connection pulling me back to the land.”
As well as training onfarm and supporting education, as in Ash-Leigh’s case, an integral part of the Whenua Kura programme is to nurture the participants’ knowledge of Māori culture or tikanga Māori .
“We have four noho marae (stays on the marae) weekends through the year where all of us spend the whole time learning a whole range of cultural things.
“We’re really immersed in the culture and you know there’s just so much love – lots of hugging and kissing – it’s just this really warm way of doing things and you come back just feeling so warm and happy.
“It really does add this whole new dimension to how you view yourself and agriculture and our connection with land and water – with the environment.
“It’s a big journey to understand it all and I’m only really just over 12 months into that journey. I’m open about that and people respect that honesty. They’re so willing to share though – share their knowledge.”
She now has a much greater understanding of how important a healthy environment is to Māori because of its connection with the health of the traditional food source.
“If our water isn’t healthy that stops you being able to use it, stops you being able to harvest those traditional foods but it also stops the older generation being able to pass on the old ways of harvesting and looking after it.
“So much is connected to food – to kai.”
Although she’d grown up near Lincoln, at Greenpark on a lifestyle block, with dairy farms around her, Ash-Leigh’s first real experience of farming came back in 2007 when she was at high school and her parents made a car available to her.
“To get to use it though, they said I had to have a job. I didn’t want the typical check-out chick job so looked for something else and saw an ad for relief milking.”
It was a total departure from her usual interests but she wanted to give it a go. She got the job on the 200-cow farm milking purebred Friesians after school and occasional weekends and liked it enough to look at an agriculturally linked option for further study.
When she left school in 2009, she enrolled in the rural valuation and property management degree course at Lincoln University but says she really didn’t know where she was heading with it.
“I was a bit of a lost cause there because I didn’t know what I wanted to do and at the end of the year I left.”
She wasn’t totally lost to agriculture though and took on a job calf rearing on one of Trevor and Harriet Hamilton’s TH Enterprises farms at Dunsandel. She was then offered a full-time job as a dairy assistant on the farm and decided to take it.
That’s when she saw there was a pathway that could take her towards further opportunity.
Both farm manager Johnny Hamilton and operations manager Dion Gordon were strong supporters of education and training.
“I learnt so much from them but they also pushed the idea of doing training so while I was working I also did a lot of courses with PrimaryITO.”
She went right through to level four during her 2.5 years there.
It wasn’t all work though – Ash-Leigh joined NZ Young Farmers during that time, helping her meet other young people around the district and further afield. The network brought a big opportunity with the offer of a job managing a drystock operation at Sheffield that reared, at peak, 2000 R1 and R2 heifers.
“That was a massive learning curve for me and a huge step up. It was tough but when I look back on that it’s something I’m really proud of.”
After another 2.5 years she felt it was time to either carry on working her way up in her career in the workforce or go back to study full-time and gain university qualifications.
“I didn’t really make my final decision to come back and do a Diploma in Agriculture until a few days before you had to enrol. I was only going to do one year but I could see the benefit of doing the Diploma in Farm Management so here I am.”
But Ash-Leigh might not be finished with university study at the end of this year either. She’s thinking of completing a couple of papers towards a Bachelor of Agricultural Commerce at summer school and then studying part-time to complete the 10 remaining papers for the degree over a couple of years while getting back out into the farming workforce, perhaps on the Ngāi Tahu farms at Te Whenua Hou at Eyrewell.
In the longer term Ash-Leigh says she has an interest both in building her own dairying career and acting as a cultural consultant to farmers.
She’s open to challenges and opportunities, and doesn’t want to be too prescriptive about how she gets there.
In the meantime she’s making most of her high energy working on a Canterbury dairy farm near Dunsandel from spring as well as completing her diploma.
She’s also still throwing herself into Young Farmers activities. She’s vice-chairwoman of Tasman Young Farmers and is heavily involved in the organising committee for the Tasman Young Farmers conference.
“Sometimes people tell me to slow down and take it easy but I say no way. I love all this. A busy life is a good life. I don’t want to slow down – I want to gain all the knowledge and experience I can.”
