Women in Agriculture: Lisa Rowntree VP of the Australian Olive Association

Lisa Rowntree is Vice President of the Australian Olive Association, which represents olive growers and olive oil producers all over Australia, and is President of Olives South Australia. Lisa is also Managing Director of Rowntree Management, which provides project management services to medium and large olive orchards in South Australia. In 2005 she was named Rural Woman of the Year for services to the Australian olive industry.

Lisa Rowntree (pictured) was born and raised in the city. As a young woman she fell in love with a dairy farmer and married him before moving to his property near Coonalpyn in South Australia.

After devoting several years of their married life exclusively to dairy farming, the couple decided to diversify into olive growing about 12 years ago.

Lisa explains, “We travelled to Israel to see what they were doing because we are 35 degrees south of the Equator and the Mediterranean basin is 35 degrees north. Israel has a very similar climate to South Australia and like us they have water issues and don’t like to waste any water. Israel also has sandy soils and they grow very similar things to us.”

“It’s one of those things you really need to see first hand and ask the farmer questions, rather than talking to people who just want to sell you something. It’s been a very valuable experience for us. When we started this orchard about 11 years ago there wasn’t that many people doing it on that sort of scale. So we had to go further afield to find the answers we wanted. I’ve also travelled through Italy and Spain and my husband has just come back from California to look at how they are doing the high density farming.” Read more

Increased Role for Women in Agriculture

A new survey has found that farm wives are becoming increasingly involved in the financial aspects of running the family farm.

According to the quarterly AgScan by Solutions Marketing and Research, almost half of the 1,356 farms surveyed stated that research and final decisions regarding banks and insurance providers was the result of joint decisions between husbands and wives.

The survey also revealed that throughout the country, both husbands and wives share responsibility for collecting crop protection and animal health products (45% each), though when the data was analysed according to farm type, women were primarily responsible for collecting these products on sugar cane (70%), cotton (63%) and grain (54%) farms. Read more