Nicole Saunders is a dairy farmer in the Maffra district who, with her husband Brendan, has developed a multi-faceted business in the eight years they have been in Australia.
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Like many dairy farmers, Nicole spends a lot of her time on the farm, managing animal health and production and making decisions in a volatile agricultural landscape.
She also has a young family, and had to develop new support networks when she moved to Australia.
Nicole recently told Dairy News Australia about how she has also had to implement strategies to look after her mental health.
Nicole and Brendan arrived in Australia in 2018 as a newly-wed couple, leaving behind their lives in New Zealand’s dairy industry.
They began working in the Australian dairy industry in a share farming partnership in the Macalister Irrigation District, in Gippsland, Victoria.
Brendan and Nicole bought land and progressed to leasing and owning two dairy farms in the MID.
They changed both herds to spring calving, to take advantage of irrigation licenses that helped optimise pasture growth and milk production.
Four years ago, Nicole and Brendan developed plans for a pick-your-own strawberry farm on their Maffra dairy farm.
Nicole and Brendan planted the first of their initial 20,000 strawberry plants in winter 2023. They also built a café and supporting infrastructure, as their plans developed for the strawberry farm to become a summer tourism destination.
The couple also had two young children, and Brendan’s older children visited periodically.
Then a flood hit the Maffra farm in October 2023, followed by two other floods leading into peak production time and Christmas 2023. The natural disasters reduced their strawberry plants by 30 per cent and impacted their dairy platform.
On the surface, Nicole was coping, as the couple regrouped, planted more strawberries in winter 2024, and in the following year received several industry awards.
She is hands-on with the business and managing employees, alongside raising their children.
Nicole was aware her mental health was being challenged.
“I’d done a lot of learning about mental health when I had anorexia in my teens,” she said.
“I had depression when I was a teenager, so that awareness has always been in my background.
“Then in the past couple of years there’s been a lot of stress.
“I had two little kids and a lot of financial pressure while I was developing the café business.
“I realised the way I was operating and my workload wasn’t really long-term sustainable; and probably really impacting my health.”
One of the things that Nicole was doing was scrolling social media on her phone.
Some of that time was justified, because she was using social media platforms to build an audience for the strawberry farm, café and its associated infrastructure such as the petting zoo. She was also building an events calendar around the strawberry farm and café.
But Nicole was reaching for her phone first-thing when she woke up, scrolling through social media and checking news sites.
“You do that and there’s your spare time – your me time – gone,” she said.
Nicole identified how to improve her personal habits like changing her diet and making time for exercise. She is now productively using her phone to help her better manage her life.
“I’m more focussed on segmenting my time so there’s clear time for family, for me, and for the business,” she said.
“I started making little changes, and now I’ve made quite a few changes.
“Every morning my alarm goes off and I get up and do my exercises.”
Nicole uses an app on her phone for her workout routine.
“It's only 15 minutes, but it's something I struggled to fit in with the kids and everything,” she said.
“The app helps me make exercise a priority first-thing and that just puts me on the right side of the day.
“I then sort out the kids and get them to school.”
Nicole is also using apps to manage her phone and computer use.
“I found out you can set time limits now for using your apps. So I've done that as well.
“I don’t use any social media apps until after the kids are at school. I still use social media for the business, but I don't actually use personal social media more than once a month.”
Nicole is using apps to set time limits around use and clear time segmentation between family and work.
“I am now balancing my personal and family time against work responsibilities,” she said.
“I’ve set my phone so it kicks me off at 10.30 and it sends me a weekly report to let me know how many hours I've used my phone each day.
“Now I'm trying to reduce that time every week.”