Society gives us the title of ‘farmers wife/managers wife/her indoors’ and many more, but do many folk stop to realise what our so called job title involves on a day to day basis?

From a simple roar of for “f@;k sake, Jack” which has multiple meanings from, opening the wrong gate, standing in the wrong gap, to office type meanings of, where is certain paperwork? To have blood tests been organised? We, as the above named, have to work out what the roars mean and convert them into an appropriate response and action which avoids more roaring responses.

We always reply “Yep! No problem,” and with a smile to the “If you’ve got a minute, can you...” when all you want to do is clean your kitchen before you plead with the farm reps to really leave their boots on while having a cup of coffee, that’s if you are lucky to have cups in your cupboard and not littered around the yard or in breeding groups in various tractors used for feeding/bedding.

We enforce all house occupants that certain shelves in the fridge are off limits and do not touch anything that looks like frozen milk in the freezer especially if the tab is broken.

We, without complaint, become the middle of the night calving assistant, can run blindfolded to fetch the calving jack, think nothing of a 24-hr day during lambing, cook a Sunday roast and have a sixth sense knowledge of which vet is on-call while pressing the speed dial on our phones while being roared at.

It is fair to say that all family members eat, sleep, breathe and has the heart and soul of the farm that they own/live on/ rent or work on coursing through their veins and hearts. For all of the family it is not just a job or a hobby, it is their home, their way of life, the only life that they know and love.

A lot of employers/owners/ managers/ factors probably never stop to think of the behind the scenes day to day events of their employees. The dramas of illness, old age, marriage difficulties and depression, to name but a few, that all farm workers keep quiet in the name of the job and just voice their worries of grain prices, impending pd’ing and, of course, the weather.

As for us girls, just a simple thank you or recognition is all what we need, not from our other halves, as we get those eventually at the end of the day, but a thank you from those others would be priceless...

Thank you Jackie Riddle, Blackford Farms, for highlighting to the rest of the world, just what we farming females have to put up with on a regular basis...