What's your job about?
I’m the Corporate Affairs Coordinator for Nutrien Ag Solutions.
I can imagine the look on your face reading that role title and wondering what on earth that even means. I get that look a lot.
My role is very broad and varied and most of my work is behind the scenes in a business like ours, so it’s hard for people to understand easily what I do.
Right now, my role is largely focused on community investment; supporting our business to go further for farmers by strategically investing in the rural and regional communities that support Australian agriculture. Basically, I help to coordinate how we as a business give money out to contribute to the strength and vibrancy of rural and regional communities.
Most of my role is project focused, meaning my days, weeks, months, and years are constantly different and varied, depending on the project/s I’m working on at the time. Each year I coordinate the rollout of two community investment programs: the Nutrien Community Grants Program and the CRT Primary Schools program. I also manage our partnership with CareFlight, through which we are providing emergency trauma training to rural and regional communities across Australia. I work closely with Nutrien colleagues and teams in both Australia and North America, developing our community investment strategy, telling the amazing stories of our people and their communities, and supporting our business and people and their important causes such as Do It For Dolly Day. I work from home, on our farm in Tasmania, but every day I speak to Nutrien people from across Australia, hearing about the incredible things they are doing in their local communities.
To many, my job would sound like a boring office job. It’s not. I’m constantly working on new and exciting projects that support our overall business and what we do. And I am constantly learning and meeting new people. Although most of my work is behind the scenes and not everyone understands what I do, it’s a job where I know I’m making a difference or supporting others to make a difference and in turn, supporting those rural and regional communities who are incredibly important to us and agriculture.
What's your background?
I grew up mostly in regional South Australia, in the Flinders Ranges and Adelaide Hills, as well as spending some time in Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.
We moved a bit due to my parent's work but we always lived on rural properties. I always wanted to be involved in farming or agriculture and moved back to South Australia for years 11 and 12 to attend an agricultural high school where I could follow that passion. I’ve been riding horses since my first pony arrived when I was 5 years old and as well as being interested in ag, I wanted to work in the equine industry. This led me to attend Marcus Oldham College after school and complete a Diploma in Equine Business management. However, I couldn’t shake the ‘ag bug’ so after working as an equine vet nurse for a couple of years following Marcus, I moved to Tasmania and signed up for and completed an Associate Degree in Agribusiness at the University of Tasmania and the rest they say is history!
At the end of uni, I set my eyes on the Rural Co (now Nutrien) grad program, and after spending a summer working for a local Rural Co joint venture store doing grass seed sampling and testing for harvest, I joined the 2019 cohort of the Rural Co grad program.
For the next two years, I spent time in the different areas of the Nutrien business here in Tasmania including agronomy, livestock, and merchandise. I loved working with livestock however also had a keen interest in business development and marketing. In my second year of the grad program, I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to support the newly appointed manager of the Tasmania Livestock Exchange to develop the first mixed agent livestock selling center in Tasmania. Owned by Nutrien but operating as its own entity, we brought the state's premier livestock agencies together under one roof at a centralized livestock selling complex and implemented the use of the industry-leading, sale yard management software system, Agrinous. Thus offering Tasmanian livestock agents, buyers,s and vendors a streamlined, one-stop-shop, premier livestock sale yard experience like they hadn’t seen before!
As my grad program came to an end and TLX was up and running, I was looking for long-term opportunities in the Nutrien business and thanks to one of my incredible mentors, was introduced to my now manager who asked me to join her Corporate Affairs team. I was offered the very newly created role of Corporate Affairs Coordinator thanks to my skills in project management and the advantage of my exposure through the grad program to so many aspects of our business.
The first project in my new role was co-ordinating the Nutrien Ag Solutions Community grants program and from there, my role has continued to grow and develop to focus mainly on Nutrien’s community investment.
That was at the beginning of 2021. I’ve since had my first child, ran two successful years of the Nutrien Community Grants program putting over $500,000 back into rural and regional communities, launched another gifting program from rural and regional primary schools, developed Nutrien Ag Solutions' first community investment strategy and worked with many incredible people, teams, and businesses along the way to leverage Nutrien’s support of rural communities. It’s been a busy few years!
Could someone with a different background do your job?
Suppose someone wants to do the same job as you do, would that be also possible with a different background?
100% they could. This was not a role I ever envisioned for myself (or even knew existed before I started doing it!) and there’s been a lot of twists and unexpected turns on the way here. But it goes to show the opportunities with a company like Nutrien are unlimited and that just because your skills aren’t necessarily out in a paddock or driving a tractor, doesn’t mean they won’t be useful somewhere else.
The main reason I believe I fell into this role was not because of any degree or qualification, but because of some of the key characteristics and skills I’ve learned along the way, through education and life experience. In a job like mine, you need to be organized and be a good communicator as well as a good listener. The ability to work flexibly in a team and on your own is very important, especially in my position of working from home. So much of my work is engaging with stakeholders across the business and industry but is also then putting my head down and getting the work done, so feeling confident to do both is a must.
What's the coolest thing about your job?
I always say I’ve got the best job because most of it is supporting incredible people and communities across Australia to do amazing things and become stronger and more vibrant. I’m currently coordinating the rollout of our Emergency Trauma Training in partnership with CareFlight, which is literally teaching people in our business and agricultural communities how to save lives. I also have the most amazing team and people around me in the business who I have learned so much from, there’s so much more to agriculture than you think!!
What are the limitations of your job?
My role is very demanding when it comes to being disciplined and organized. When managing projects that engage with a lot of different stakeholders, you need to be confident in yourself to execute what needs to be done and prepared to be put out of your comfort zone and be able to pivot if something or someone isn’t going to plan. I also work with lots of different people whose personalities, traits, or work ethics are different from mine, and this can sometimes be challenging and can impact the work that I am doing so you need to be a problem solver and have the flexibility to work with all sorts of different people in a positive way.
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