Tash Johnston knows just how harsh farming life can be. She was raised between a 16-hectare property south of Brisbane and another in the Darling Downs, where her hardworking parents grew crops and raised cattle. But in the early 1990s, when interest rates soared to 20 per cent, her family faced immense financial pressures.
“Mum returned to nursing and did double shifts to keep food on the table and to help stop them from losing everything she and Dad had worked for,” says Tash. “One night, Mum broke down on the kitchen floor. That’s burnt into my memory. When you see your parents go through something like that, it stays with you forever.”
Familiar terrain
Her family weathered that storm but in late 2013, when Tash read the tragic story of a farmer who took his own life because he couldn’t pay his bills, the memory of those hard times came back. She decided to try to stop more farming families from losing hope.
“I read about a farmer who’d tried to sell his stock during the drought. The truck came to take his stock to market but the cattle condition was too poor so the truck drove away and left the farmer with his stock. He felt the only way out was to end his own life,” she says. “I remembered what my family went through and I wanted to do something—anything—to help.”
When Farm Angels began in early 2014, Tash was running a cleaning company and working in a café near her home in Chinchilla, Queensland. With friend Nicki Blackwell, Tash organised fundraisers and social events at local venues, raising money for farming communities. “I thought I’d only do this for six months but farmers started reaching out to us and asking for help. So we started organising collections to drop off hampers to families.”
