“That makes it sound like the dark ages, but DWN really ticked a lot of boxes for me,” she said.
“At that stage of my life I was busy with children, the school and the farm, but there wasn’t anything for me as a dairying woman.”
Karen, the new DWN North Island convenor, has worked alongside her husband Maurice for more than 30 years, but at community gatherings found men would stand together and talk farming while the women talked about children and the community.
It was refreshing to find DWN which offered a community network with a more professional capacity.
“That really appealed to me,” she said.
“It meant I could go and seriously talk about farming.”
The Forlongs both worked in the banking industry before they decided to go farming. They followed the traditional pathway from contract milking to sharemilking in Waikato then bought their farm 18 years ago. The 200ha property on the boundary of Bay of Plenty and South Waikato has a rolling to steep terrain with sections of native bush and only a small proportion of flat paddocks.
On the 140ha effective they milk 300 crossbred cows producing 130,000kg milksolids. They will step up to 360 cows this season.
The operation is a System 3, feeding 200 tonnes of palm kernel blend through the farm dairy. All cows are wintered on the property on 8ha of winter crop. They irrigate 16ha with water from the Tahunaatara Stream that runs through the farm.
They have two children; Laura, a graphic designer in Auckland, and son Grant, who with wife Vanessa has returned home to contract milk. This freed Karen up to apply for the DWN position.
She’s helped organise three of its conferences and is also completing the Agri-Women Development Trust’s Escalator Programme this year.
“It’s all part of a journey to help give back into the industry that has served us really well.”
In her new DWN role she will support 18 North Island regional convenors to aid their planning process and encourage them to share ideas about training and events to cater for experienced farmers through to women new to the industry.
“Women coming onfarm are often given the reins of the office without question and they are confronted by human resource issues, cashflows and budgeting.”
DWN could help them develop the skills required to run a multi-million dollar dairy business, of which they were an integral part.
