The humble mother of three owns a dairy farm with her husband Christopher near Hokitika and despite growing up a "town girl", she has embraced the rural sector and has become a fiercely loyal advocate for it.
Siobhan’s nomination said she was a well-known campaigner for the rural sector. She co-founded the Meat the Need charity and more recently co-launched the innovative knitwear company Hemprino.
She and her husband sat on several community organisations, "and she is one of those people that say yes to everything", the nomination said.
Siobhan graciously accepted the nomination but was quick to add she was not perfect.
"I don’t have a big garden or an immaculate house. It’s just not where my priorities lie."
Her involvement in the well-known Meat the Need charity came about while the couple were on their journey to farm ownership.
"We moved around a lot as sharemilkers and ended up in the Tasman region, which is where I got to know Wayne Langford.
Wayne had this vision and I got on board to help him make it happen. New Zealand grows so much food it just doesn’t compute that there should be Kiwis that are going hungry."
Over four years, Meat the Need has gone from strength to strength. It supplies foodbanks around the country with packaged mince and recently added milk to its offering.
"I helped set up the strategy and governance of the charitable trust and worked on the logistics, making sure it was extremely easy for farmers to donate and extremely easy for food banks to accept. For example, the staff and volunteers that run the food banks can’t be expected to lift big heavy boxes, so we keep the packaging under 12kg.
"The way the country has embraced the charity has been phenomenal. We have achieved in the last three years what I expected might take five to 10 years to do. But there is more demand than there is supply — we still have around 100 foodbanks on the waiting list."
Now the trust was set up and "ticking along nicely" she had stepped back from her involvement to focus on a new business called Hemprino, which she launched with Harriet Bell and Paul Ensor whom she met while doing the Kellogg Rural Leadership Programme in 2018.
"Hemp is extremely strong and holds its shape so replaces the need for polyester in a garment. Combined with the merino we are producing warm, sustainable New Zealand-made garments."
Asked how she achieved so much while also being involved in the dairy farm with her husband, a mother to three children and working full time as a teacher at Westland High School, Siobhan said it was about doing things in small and achievable bite-sized chunks.
"I don’t watch television at night. I will use that time to write an email or do some research. I still get imposter syndrome and feel out of my depth at times, but it’s all growth. All those little pieces snowball and suddenly you realise you are getting somewhere," she said.
