7 minute read
Rising to the occasion
BY RENEE CLUFF
A Tully sugarcane and banana grower is armed and ready to serve her farming community after completing an intensive mentoring and networking program.
Jenny Crema views herself as an accidental leader. But from an outsider’s perspective, the leadership qualities she possesses are no accident, born from the passion she has for the community in which she lives and works.
“My biggest motivation is that I love where I live and I want to use my skills to invest in community and build a better community,” she told Australian Canegrower. “I’m invested in lots of things around youth because I want our community to be strong into the future. Being able to live in a rural setting and still be able to access the opportunities that kids in bigger centres get I think is really important.”
Jenny already serves many leadership roles within her community. She’s been a school teacher for decades, is heavily involved in local sport, manages community events, and of course is a key contributor to many agricultural and business organisations, including as a founding member of the Australian Banana Women’s Network.
However, like any good leader, Jenny’s not the type to rest on her laurels. Her unquenching thirst for new learning opportunities recently led to her graduating from the National Farmers’ Federation’s (NFF) Diversity in Agriculture Leadership Program. It’s the NFF’s flagship initiative to fix the under representation of women in agriculture’s leadership ranks. CANEGROWERS is one of 33 program partners of the 2024 Program.
“I saw their ad for the program in the Australian Canegrower magazine and I thought I might give it a crack,” Jenny said. “I saw it as a great opportunity to get the leadership education I needed to fulfill my role in the industry and to step up and see past the office walls, to get myself into a better position to participate in the banana and sugar industries.”
Jenny was one of 12 women across Australia selected to participate, joining the group in chilly Canberra for a three-day retreat and workshop sessions covering everything from leadership styles to digital and social media capabilities, to mental health and wellbeing.
“As farmers, we just get stuck in our own bubble,” Jenny mused. “The other women involved in the program were from such diverse agricultural backgrounds and I was quite in awe of listening to their stories and what they do and the challenges they face and that makes you so much richer as a businessperson and an industry person. The learning that comes from that is empowering.”
For the subsequent four-month intensive mentoring program, Jenny was delighted to be paired with CEO of Plant Health Australia, Sarah Corcoran. “Sarah’s really connected with Sugar Research Australia and with the banana industry and she gets it, she understands our challenges,” Jenny said. “I have found a safe space with her to test my ideas, to bounce them off her. It’s a supportive environment to help me shape my knowledge, my ideals, my opinions. That is the backbone of getting the confidence to be involved in industry and to be seen in a different perspective in that I’m not just the farmer’s wife.
“I want to be a good role model for the girls in the community. I want them to see the value of coming back to their community after they’ve finished their studies and to highlight the opportunities that exist within their own community.”
Apart from being a top role model, Jenny has many other plans for putting her newfound skills, knowledge, confidence and contacts to good use.
“The value of a woman participating in agriculture in this area is all about diversity,” she said. “We’re so diverse in our industries in this area, I think we are better represented as a collective, Women in Ag. I’d really like to use those leadership skills and the outcomes of the program to try to embrace agriculture as a diverse group, particularly across the Cassowary Coast.
“From a leadership perspective, I really need to understand the world of sugar more so I’m hoping to get involved in Women in Sugar but with my own goal of bringing all industries together and promoting women in agriculture as a collective across the Cassowary Coast.”
The Crema family, headed by industry stalwart Angelo Crema, is now in its fourth generation of growing sugarcane and bananas in the Tully district. Jenny joined the family business when she married Adrian Crema.
The couple has now transitioned to owning and managing their own banana and cane farms, which are dotted across the Tully and Murray valleys. Angelo continues to be a great mentor, contributing a wealth of knowledge and experience which he now shares with his grandson, Rohan, who is starting his journey in farming in the family business.
“Even though we have been part of a cane farming family for a long time, we’re fairly new to the sugar industry in that our focus has traditionally been on bananas,” Jenny explained. “We are close to the properties in the Tully Valley affected by Panama TR4 (Tropical Race Four disease), so that was our biggest motivation to try to diversify and protect ourselves from the impact of disease incursion.”
Over the same period, Jenny has cut back on her teaching career to focus on farming, taking on responsibility for all the bookkeeping, compliance, human resources and marketing. One of the matters she’s already taken a leadership role in is speaking out against unnecessary red tape, particularly in the area of compliance. She said it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with changes to food safety and quality compliance, labour laws, reef regulations and workplace health and safety rules –among other protocols.
“I feel like I’m drowning in it, it’s just changing so fast, and it takes me away from my core business,” she said. “I feel like I’m having lots of conversations with other growers about this all the time and I’m having to engage external consultants more and more just to make sure I’m complying to all the regulations and keeping all the records we need to keep.
“With passion for what we do and a wealth of experience under our belt, we have learnt to understand, adapt and change to meet the demands of modern-day farming. I worry that the increasing demands of compliance and the ever-present threat of pests, disease and extenuating weather on productivity make it hard for future generations to have the vision, confidence and skill set to give farming a go, and successfully take agriculture into the future.
“That said, farming is in our blood, it’s who we are, and despite the challenges we will keep finding a correct course and inspire the next generation.”
Jenny’s certainly tackling the issue from all fronts and laughs when asked whether she ever tests the waters or just jumps right in.
“I jump in, that’s what I do, that’s my personality; I’m all or nothing.”
