CBH director, mother, farmer and wife are just a few of the hats Natalie Browning wears.
Ms Browning farms a 6400 hectare continuous cropping enterprise with her husband Karl and their three children Jace (10), Noah (8) and Chloe (3) in the Kondinin shire.
With a passion to test how far she can push boundaries, in February this year Ms Browning was elected as the first female director at CBH.
After two years of sitting on the CBH Grower Advisory Council and the current chairwoman of Narembeen District High School board as well as being on the WA Rabobank client council, Ms Browning has experienced all aspects of being a board member.
Ms Browning stood up in front of 130 women at last week’s Liebe Group Field Day and told her story of how she made it to the board room.
“My positions are a result of the experiences I have been through,” she said.
“It’s a bit of a personal story that I never thought I would be sharing.”
Ms Browning outlined the events in the past decade that led to her board position.
“I love every role I hold, which give me many different perspectives into the agricultural industry,” she said.
Her exposure to farming started in 2000, when she started dating her now husband Karl Browning.
“I was one of those people that had no idea what I wanted to do when I left school,” she said.
“Having a boyfriend from the country I thought I needed a job I could do in the country.”
Her mother suggested she start nursing but with her lack of ambition to study a full-time degree she decided to start an 18-month enrolment course in Bunbury instead.
Ms Browning started nursing, then after a few years she thought she could extend herself more.
Receiving a scholarship to complete her registered nursing degree, Ms Browning turned it down.
“It was just something that wasn’t there for me and wasn’t my passion,” she said.
Instead she let the scholarship fall through and joined Karl on a trip to Canada in 2004 to work on a farm.
“Being in Canada made me realise that farmers in WA are pretty smart with what they have set up with CBH, we have a great system which is a lot more efficient than over there,” she said.
After 10 weeks in Canada the pair came home and she started nursing again.
Returning as a casual worker, Ms Browning picked up night duty shifts for 12 months.
“It worked out quite well because it allowed me to help out on the farm during the day,” she said.
The farm in Kondinin was growing and at the stage where they needed to look at employing extra labour.
“I started helping out during seeding and harvest and I think it was the first time I felt like I had found my place,” she said.
Ms Browning had the chance to work side-by-side with Karl and she loved it.
Over time her nursing shifts became less and less frequent and her work on the farm became more and more.
“Eventually I was on the farm full time and stopped nursing,” she said.
In 2009, at quite a young age – about 26 – Ms Browning and her husband took over the farm.
She said her mother and father-in-law are fantastic farmers and in 2005 trading markets became available which the farm was involved in as a way to contract grain without the physical risk.
In 2006 they brought in an adviser and there was a 10-year high in grain prices.
“My father-in-law and the adviser decided to lock a percentage of grain three-years forward,” she said.
That was the start of a massive market where the price continued to go up.
“They would have been OK because the physical grain price was OK and it should have made up for it, but in 2008 we suffered our worst frost ever and we lost most of our crop so we didn’t have the physical grain to back it up,” Ms Browning said.
The fall continued with the next year in conjunction with fertiliser and chemical prices hiking to an all new high.
“Within two or three years the business had been turned on its head,” she said.
“It was stressful for my father-in-law because everything he had ever worked for suddenly, through a few bad decisions, got them close to losing everything.”
She said they started out and their equity was terrible, the cash flow was non-existent and they had a massive loan.
In 2010 they suffered their worst drought ever recorded with 90 millimetres for the growing season.
With rainfall records dating back to 1915, 2010 was by far the driest year the farm had experienced.
“It was about this stage that I said to Karl why would anybody farm, this is just crazy,” she said.
“But we decided to keep chipping away.”
With the farm 100 per cent cropping, they started to look for a lease with the idea to diversify geographically.
In 2011 it was a dry start to the season and a lease came up at the end of April.
She said her father-in-law encouraged them to take the lease, but the only catch was that it was 250 kilometres south of Kondinin.
“On April 27 we jumped in the car, went and had a look, signed a lease that day and three days later we were seeding there,” she said.
“The property was at Jacup and we cropped 1618ha down there plus putting in our program in Kondinin.”
The experience was interesting because all of their seed, fertiliser and fuel was in Kondinin.
With small kids and no liveable house on the property, they found themselves camped in the shed with a camper trailer.
“We got the water working so we could shower but there was no power,” she said.
The next year they both worked and Karl’s mother looked after the kids.
“We came to the end of that year and we liked the idea of geographical diversification but a 500km round trip was too far,” she said.
“So we decided to go back home to Kondinin and look for a lease a bit further west.”
At the end of 2012 a lease came up 80km to the west at Pingelly.
Ms Browning said they decided to go for this lease, as did about 20 other farmers.
“We stuck our neck out and paid well above market rates for it so it really could have gone either way,” she said.
“On top of that I wrote a letter to the land owners explaining how we farm and a bit about us and we got the lease.”
It was a three-year lease and they were back in the shed camping, although upgrading to a few caravans this time.
Also in 2012 Ms Browning was invited to sit on the Client Council at Rabobank.
She was one of eight growers to sit on the Narrogin Client Council.
The council was a group of clients who met with the management of the bank twice a year.
“It just provided a forum between clients and the bank to discuss issues in the ag industry and to try and come up with ideas to combat the issues,” she said.
Ms Browning said in 2013 they had the breakthrough they were looking for and she said “in the history of the farm you couldn’t have written a better season”.
When the Pingelly lease ended in 2015 they moved back to Kondinin and expanded the farm there.
“We have got farming in different districts out of our system, but it has been great to farm in different areas,” she said.
In 2014 she joined one of the CBH grower study tours and went for 17 days to Japan, China and Vietnam.
Ms Browning said this opened her eyes to the industry again and what went on beyond our shores.
“This trip really spun up my interest in joining the Grower Advisory Council,” she said.
After joining the council, Ms Browning has involved herself in leadership courses.
Ms Browning said something that has really stood out to her at these courses is mindfulness and self awareness in leadership.
“When I joined the grower advisory council, we were sent off to do a six-day executive leadership course,” she said.
“It was a course to study co-operative and mutual business models which really sparked my interest yet again in wanting to go further with CBH.”
Ms Browning said the course taught her about herself.
“I’m a perfectionist and I never knew it,” she said.
“Like when I do the farm books, I’m not content with just knowing the books so I had to go out and do an accounting degree to make sure I am doing a good job.
“And when I coach sports, I don’t just want to be a coach, I had to get accredited to the highest standard which has taken me years.”
Natalie graduated from the Australian Institute of Company Directors program and is now studying a Bachelor of Commerce at Curtin University, majoring in accounting with the intention of completing a double major in accounting and business law.
“It has put a really good business head on our shoulders and over the last 10 years and we have been able to turn that around,” she said.
“We started with our backs to the wall, looking forward to where we are today it’s the best thing that ever happened to us.”