So reads the nomination for inter-generational sheep and beef farmer Emma Crutchley, from the Maniototo, who leant her weight to the relaunch of National Lamb Day in February, alongside her other farming and community duties.
Emma acknowledges stepping into hard conversations, when she knows it is the right thing to do, can be "bloody uncomfortable" — "it feels like I’m cursed to be unpopular at times" — but she can sleep at night knowing she has stuck to her values and has not just taken the easy path which would be to stay silent.
Emma is all about enabling positive change and enjoys working with positive people on positive projects.
"I really enjoy getting stuck into stuff — even if it’s complex stuff — that enables healthy rural communities and the primary sector."
She particularly enjoys big wicked conversations around freshwater, where it was often very hard to see solutions. She loves relationships she has built almost outside the sector, where those threads of common ground could be found and built on, for it was sometimes those hard conversations "where the gold lies".
Emma is a director of Irrigation New Zealand and was previously involved in governance of local irrigation schemes. In 2020, she co-founded and worked to establish a $6 million multi-stakeholder catchment restoration project, Tiaki Maniototo, for the Upper Taieri Wai catchment group.
A Kellogg Rural Leadership scholar and Agri-Women’s Development Trust Escalator graduate, Emma farms with her husband Kyle Hagen, on her family’s sheep and beef farm at Puketoi. An agronomist by trade, she came home to the family farm, which totals just under 3000ha, in 2009.
Life was also about striking balance with family and the couple’s two children, Evelyn and Reuben, were priorities. As she chased her children around school and sporting activities, she reflected how her dogs were not getting the work they used to.
Sometimes the best thinking time was that time spent in the hills with her dogs.
"I have an incredible amount of gratitude for the people I get to work with on a lot of these topics. It just gives you so much energy. The people that have supported me have given me so much momentum towards supporting others that are coming through. I love doing that where I can.
"There’s such an incredible amount of awesome people just getting on with solutions," she says.
It was about accepting the things that you could not change — "because you could dwell on them forever and they make you really unhappy" — and it was also "not just all about the hui, it’s about the do-ey."
