Four years ago, Justine McCarthy left the corporate world to take over PJ & CM McCarthy Family Trust Farm from her retired father. The farm has been in her family since the 1950s and is located in Victoria’s Southwest just north of Colac. On the farm, she raises calves into cows which is all extremely dependent on the climate.
Today Justine is the farm manager and has experienced the tremendous setback of drought. Justine decided to take over because the farm would have been sold instead. She was sick of the endless meetings to get just one thing approved and wanted to experience the “freedom to be your own boss and try new things on your terms,” she says.
“I run it singlehandedly with a little bit of help from contractors.”
Justine’s farm focuses on beef farming and grows her own hay to feed her cows where she has spent “a quarter of a million into food” ($250,000).
Justine’s region was affected a year earlier than other parts of Victoria.
“The southwest went into the drought a year earlier than everybody else,” she says. “We were in this tiny pocket that had a drought first.”
Justine raises a group of cows to sell them every January.
“We get paid once a year, and I haven’t had a paycheque in two years,” she says. “It’s been a really rough journey, you still gotta work out how you pay your bills and how to keep a business running in the hope that the season will change at some point, and at some point, you’ll start to make a profit to pay back all the debts you’ve racked up.”
And the state government? “They’ve kicked us when we’re down,” Justine says.
On this year’s State Budget Day (May 20th) CFA firefighters and farmers from rural Victoria protested against the new Emergency Services and Volunteers Fund (ESVF) in front of the Parliament of Victoria which planned to increase the levy by 189%. Many volunteer CFA fighters are farmers.
“I was one of those farmers standing on parliament steps protesting. We’re barely surviving and now we’re gonna pay for emergency services three times what we’re already paying? I was standing on the streets of parliament saying ‘stop taxing us and by the way we’re in a drought.’ That was really when it started to move forward.”
Initially, Justine felt unsupported by her local community because, to non-farmers, everything appeared alright.
“I live 20 minutes from Colac, people didn’t know about it,” she says. “The first year they call it the green drought. We had enough rain to make the grass green, but the grass was like a centimetre tall. So, if you drove around and knew nothing about farming and saw ‘oh everything’s green so everything must be fine’. It was a lack of understanding, and I don’t think we went to the media and told them ‘Hey this is bad,’ farmers have a bad habit of just getting on with it.
“It was hard to convince people how bad it was when everything looked green, but green has to have some height. The local media started to pick it up then we started to see support from the local rural area and then the city finally followed eventually.
“I know that the GPs had farmers on suicide watch because they kept losing so much of them.” At McCarthy’s doctor’s appointments, she was asked more questions than usual as an informal way of doing a mental health check.
Personally, McCarthy doesn’t access mental health services but believes that services are now adequate enough to support farmers after GPs first handedly witnessed the severity of circumstances the farmers faced.
“Certainly, the GPs were on the ball,” she says. “Farmers are a bit of a stubborn group, and it really takes a lot to get to them.”
Help is available at 13 11 14.
This story is part of a project exploring regional Victoria and the issues farmers are facing. See the whole collection here.
