The United Nations has declared 2026 as the International Year of the Woman Farmer. So, we’ve chosen someone whose passion for agriculture started at a very young age on her family’s grazing property in Queensland. She’s turned that passion into a career with a focus on exceptional land management. To further her skills in the area, she’s currently completing her PhD.
Ang Hammond’s varied agricultural career and her passion for horse-riding, haven’t necessarily come easily. Ang had an authentic rural childhood – from a tiny school with eight children, to catching yabbies and riding in Pony Club. But despite all that, being a female in the 1980s, meant taking over the family property wasn’t a consideration. “The inheritance was always down the male line. That’s not me carrying baggage about it, but it was never going to happen because I was a girl.”
“I knew I wanted to work on the land. I also, for some reason, didn’t ever want to get married or do any of that.”
Ang set her mind to, ‘getting a trade’, so to speak. A rural science degree propelled her into agronomy with a couple of detours along the way, including school teaching and riding racehorses. Her current role at Landcare brings a lot of her prior knowledge and her passions together. “Taking information from our producers on the land – our graziers and our farmers and helping them do what they do better,” she explains.
“People that are good at agriculture care deeply about their land. They’re environmentalists too.”
Ang loves helping farmers learn new strategies that both help them and the environment. An important balance when consumers are more engaged than ever before. “They can feel good about wearing and eating these products that have been produced in the best environmental way that we know how to,” she shares.
An emerging area is eDNA – a method of tracking species on farm to know where they are and how certain practices may impact that biodiversity. Plus, integrative pest management to reduce pesticides. Other management options include nature corridors and different grazing management strategies.
In the small gaps in her life, around doing all that, she’s also studying. Ang’s PhD topic is around engaging remote pastoralists both Indigenous and non-Indigenous to understand and engage with emerging biodiversity markets.
“To be able to do the research in specific communities like that will mean we can take the message to Canberra and the politicians need to understand what we need out there.”
She could probably also write a PhD about being a woman in agriculture. “Still in some meetings that I’m in, it’s still very male dominated, which is fine, that’s because there were more men in the industry back then… But now there more women coming in and through leadership roles, which is great.”
On a personal note, Ang hasn’t entirely forgotten her Pony Club days. She plans to ride with her husband through Argentina. She’s a lover of landscapes already, and plans to add a new horizon to her bucket list soon.
