Tracy Brown is determined to ensure the dairy industry is fit to thrive in the 21st century, when she takes on the role of DairyNZ chair in October.
For Brown, that comes down to taking others on the journey through collaboration, inclusion, transparency and leading by example.
It’s a far cry from when she started her leadership journey in 2010. At the time, she was a full-time mother to four young children and working with her husband Wynn on their 310-hectare, 700-cow farm Tiroroa near Matamata.
That year, they entered and won the Farm Environment Awards for Waikato, and Brown was asked to be regional coordinator for the awards. The part-time role also allowed her to step back into the workforce.
“Dairy was seen in a really poor light at that time because that was around the time of dirty dairying. I had all of these little kids and I thought I had to do something about the public perception of dairy.
“I was getting angrier and annoyed and I thought that there’s got to be something that can be done.”
She decided on a two-prong approach of telling good farming stories while getting farmers who needed to change their on-farm practices.
“I literally woke up one morning and thought, ‘What can I do to help those two things?’”
Brown also started to look for other roles and she got her first experience with governance when she chaired the Matamata Kids Toy Library.
“I was president of that. What’s interesting about those community governance roles is that it gave me a really good set of transferable skills to go on and do other things later on.”
She then went on the Matamata Intermediate School board for six years and chaired that for three. The school’s enrolment encompassed a whole range of people with different socioeconomic backgrounds, and the experience further enhanced her governance skills, particularly around setting objectives, creating change and measuring outcomes.
“I’ve had a lot of roles where there have been challenges where I have had to lead change processes and I’ve learnt transferrable skills, from the school board to some of the environmental roles later on.”
After encouragement from the Dairy Women’s Network (DWN), in 2017 Brown completed an AWDT Escalator programme, which helped grow her network and get her out into the sector more.
Brown said her leadership journey was a combination of transferrable skills learnt in community governance along with training and opportunities.
“It was never about having a role, it was always about, ‘What change can I make?’”
Another major influence on her was Sir Dryden Spring, who she interviewed as part of the AWDT programme.
“I told him I wasn’t a leader, I just wanted to help people. He said to me, ‘For goodness sake Tracy, those are the best leaders – the people that want to help other people improve. If you don’t do that, you can never be a good leader. It can’t be all about yourself.’”
Brown now acts as a mentor for many young people wanting to get into leadership. One of the first questions she always asks them is what difference they want to make in the world.
“If they can’t tell you, I say ‘Go away and think about it and if you still want my help, come back.’”
The ones with good leadership potential take that on board and once they can articulate that, Brown can help them. If they are in it just for the title, they are in the wrong business, she said.
“It’s got to be about taking people on the journey with you and I’ve always remembered that.”
At a farm level, convincing farmers to make positive change comes down to role modelling what is possible and empowering other people to share their stories and be relatable role models in their community.
This also personifies what the Dairy Environment Leaders Forum is about and why Brown got involved.
“It’s about building enough people that believe in what you believe in.”
Brown will become DairyNZ’s first female chair after Jim van der Poel steps down at the organisation’s annual meeting.
She said representation has come a long way.
Groups like AWDT, DWN and Rural Women NZ have done a lot to support women.
“The pendulum has fully swung in a lot of ways.”
Brown missed out on her first attempt to get elected to the DairyNZ board, in 2018. She initially decided not to stand again but changed her mind the following year after a former DairyNZ chair, the late John Luxton, told her the board needed people like her.
“He was a huge role model for me in terms of his leadership style. He was always very collaborative and inclusive and led from a place of humility.”
At the same time, she was offered a role by the then environment minister, David Parker, as a member of the Independent Advisory Panel for Essential Freshwater.
“It was a really challenging time when I first came on the board because I was also on that Essential Freshwater panel. I considered stepping off, but I was the only farmer voice on there.”
Being on both boards was a difficult tightrope to walk as she tried to manage potential conflicts of interest, she said.
“It was the most challenging role I’ve ever been involved with, but it was a really important role because it was so essential that there was some farmer voice in there.”
Brown noted that many of the issues that she raised but was unable to influence at the time have since been relooked at.
The lesson that the role taught her was that often people want the same thing, they just come from a different place. Finding the middle ground is key.
“Everybody wanted better water outcomes for New Zealand, but people came from different perspectives of how that can be best achieved.”
Brown comes into the role at a time when DairyNZ launches its new strategy in June. Senior staff and board members have spent a lot of time focusing on how they can ensure DairyNZ is best placed to tackle the future challenges the industry faces.
The strategy change needed to happen because the political and economic environment in which the industry operates has changed so markedly in the past decade.
“DairyNZ needed to evolve as well and we need to be able to continue to deliver on the value that we deliver to farmers.
“We only have a limited pool of levy investment, so we need to make sure we are investing in the right kinds of projects to get the best outcomes.”
