Dairy farmers nurture and feed so effortlessly that they become nearly invisible to the wider world…
Recently, I interviewed a young dairy farmer, Melissa Thibaudier of Pickmick Dairy in Delta, who took me through one day of her life from morning until night. Her day starts before dawn, in the lowing of barns and the cool of dewy fields, in the constant rhythm of feeding, watching, cleaning, tending, and beginning again.
I found myself thinking about how women farmers nurture and feed so effortlessly that they become nearly invisible to the wider world, and how maybe it is time we celebrate these women farmers.
Melissa is a dairy farmer, a mother, a daughter, a sister, and part of a life shaped by both inheritance and hard daily work. She believes with all her experience and heart that this life, demanding as it is, has meaning because it is shared across generations.
Her grandparents came from Holland in the 1960s and built their future through dairy farming. Pickmick takes its name from Pete and Mickey, and their story still seems to breathe through the place. Melissa understands what they built, and what it took to build it.
“Everything we have is because of that chance,” she said.
That feeling remains central to how her family treats people, how they care for animals, and how they continue the work they were given.
As a girl, Melissa and her brother Ryan were trusted, encouraged, and expected to do things well. They were allowed to find their own strengths. He was drawn to machinery and crops. She was drawn to animals and, later, as she put it, to people.
Melissa also spoke quite a bit about being a woman in agriculture. She was not raised to think in limits, she said.
“It was never like this, you’re a woman, you care for the babies, and you’re a boy, and you look after the equipment,” she said. “We found our own way.”
Should every child have such an opportunity to be free to be themselves, what a wonderful world it would be. For Melissa, that freedom matters now because her life carries motherhood and farming together as naturally and purely as the milk they produce.
She knows that when she is out shopping with her children, most people would never guess she is a farmer. Yet her children know exactly what she does.
Quite often, while waiting at the checkout beside strangers with milk in their carts, they smile and strike up conversations, proud in that way children are when they understand the importance of their family’s work. They know what it took to get that milk into someone’s cart.
What moved me most was the wider circle around her. Melissa spoke with enormous gratitude about the support of her family in raising her children. Grandparents, parents, siblings, partner, all helping to hold life together.
“We’ve had huge family support in raising our two kids,” she said. “It’s so many generations.”
‘It takes a village’, that age-old adage is deeply beautiful in its truth. The strongest people are rarely built alone, they are carried by many, many helping hands as they grow tall and proud, successful and caring.
That same helping spirit extends into the farm itself. Melissa employs young women who did not grow up in agriculture, choosing them for their love of animals and trusting that the rest can be taught.
She believes in giving people a chance and sharing knowledge, and that was reflected in Pickmick Dairy’s recent international recognition for reproductive excellence.
Yet, Melissa spoke of it not as glory, but as the long result of attention, discipline, and stewardship. In that way, farms like hers become living examples of sustainability…nurturing the cattle with care while tending the land that feeds them.
In the end, what stayed with me was not simply that Melissa works hard. It was the tenderness and dignity threaded through that labour. She is caring for animals, feeding a community, raising children, and carrying forward something her grandparents began.
In a world so detached from the origins of food, Melissa and all the young farmers out there are a stark reminder that we don’t survive this planet alone, we have millions of invisible farmers working day in and day out to keep our species alive.
Read the original article in the Georgia Straight’s Young Farmers Series.
Images courtesy of Melissa and BC Dairy