Forum aims to help empower and mobilise

A forum aiming to empower influential women within Australian agriculture may also help them to save the face of their industry as it battles its own image problems.

After winning the RIRDC WA Rural Woman of the Year Award in March, Catherine Marriott of Kununurra held her first Influential Women forum in Broome last week.

It kick-started a movement she hopes will mobilise women as communicators to tell the real story of agriculture in Australia, to counter bad press the industry has endured in recent times, for example in the wake of the Indonesian live cattle export ban last year.

As a consultant to the live cattle sector, Ms Marriott said she had seen, first-hand, an opportunity for rural women to improve their skills in media and communication, and better advocate on behalf of their industries.

“What I wanted to do was to build capacity and confidence in rural women,” she said.

“If we are going to effectively engage with the consumer, it’s super- important to build relationships between producers and consumers, and by having confident women representing agriculture, I think we’ll achieve that.”

Ms Marriott said she and her business partner Lizzie Brennan had designed the forum with three main goals in mind: celebration, communication and collaboration.

“We need to celebrate the role we play in producing food,” she said.

“It’s so romantic to be mustering cattle in the outback – to spend all day on a horse and camp under the stars at night, looking after animals and the environment. It’s an honour to be in that position, so why are we not celebrating it?” It was also important to not only communicate, but to engage with people, she said, and for agricultural industries to better work together – and a great example of this need was working to educate the consumer on animal welfare issues.

“The beef industry has its problems with live trade, the chicken industry with caged chickens, pigs with sow stalls – these are all pressure being put on us by the consumer,” she said.

“So why don’t we collaborate across the industry and find out how we can engage the consumer.

We are all genuinely passionate about doing the right thing, but now we need to celebrate that through conversations that are more effective.”