A new survey targeting farming women across New Zealand has just launched, aiming to build the evidence base that researchers say is largely absent from rural mental health policy and service design.
Dr. Nicky Stanley-Clarke, who is leading the study with co-researchers at Massey University and Lincoln University, says the project grew out of earlier work with younger farmers that kept surfacing the same gap.
“We’ve been doing research on young farmers, and through this research we’ve increasingly heard about the role of women in farming,” she says.
“There’s not a lot of formal research in this space.”
The survey focuses on what Stanley-Clarke describes as a “triple burden” documented in UK and US research: farming women simultaneously manage care responsibilities for children or elderly relatives and contribute to farm work.
“We know that our farming women are crucial, and they’re also often in off-farm paid work, and they are giving a lot to their community.”
A UK study found farming women had lower mental health and wellbeing than the general population, facing pressures from environmental unpredictability and seasonal volatility on top of domestic and care demands. Stanley-Clarke says the New Zealand research aims to establish whether similar patterns exist here.
“We don’t know a lot about what’s going on in terms of their mental health and wellbeing from an academic standpoint, which is why we wanted to do the study, so that we could then say, ‘We’ve got this data. Please, people, use it to build support services.”
The team also wants to understand whether the same stigma around seeking help documented among male farmers extends to women in the sector.
“We suspect there’s still across the agricultural industry that she’ll be right, box on through, but we want to know more.”
The research draws on growing student cohorts at Massey and Lincoln, where women now make up a rising share of agricultural programmes. Stanley-Clarke says the team wants to hear from women of all ages involved in farming anywhere in New Zealand.
“We’re about doing research that matters.”
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