How I learnt to stop and say g'day!"

When Katie O’Brien noticed that her husband was struggling with his mental health, she started a movement to open farm gates and end loneliness in the bush.

- AS TOLD TO SUE SMETHURST.

No matter which window we looked out during the drought, the view was the same – bone-dry bush. The fertile red loam that once grew lush pastures was dust. Mother Nature had sucked the life out of our place, and when we thought it couldn’t possibly get any drier, it did. As the fourth generation on the land, we knew that farming was boom or bust, a land of drought and flooding rain. Our 2600-hectare cattle station at Five Ways, two hours west of Dubbo, NSW, sometimes had it all on the same day, but nothing could prepare us for the drought that arrived in 2019. It sent us to the brink and almost cost my husband’s life.

Although it’s still raw to talk about today, as the saying goes, every cloud has a silver lining. Out of that struggle we created Check your Mates, Open the Gates, an ongoing campaign to support struggling farmers all over the world.

Five Ways was the perfect place for me and my husband, Justin, to raise our boys, Harrison and James, and our beloved Santa Gertrudis herd. There’s something very noble about feeding Australians, and we loved our local farming community. In 2016, however, things started to become challenging after we had an unusually wet season. Normally we’d be grateful for the rain but this time it was so wet our crops were ruined and we couldn’t grow any feed for our animals. By the time the rain tap turned off, we’d exhausted our fodder stores, and were hand-feeding cattle to keep them going. Little did we know it would be three very long years before it rained again.