About Kristy

The Story

I grew up on a farm in central Victoria, where I got my love of all things rural. I studied agricultural science and completed my PhD. Finishing it taught me something I hadn't expected: I was good at the science, but it wasn't where my heart was. What I loved was the people, and how you really help them change. That's what took me into extension.

I spent 14 years with the Victorian Department of Primary Industries designing, delivering and evaluating extension programs for farmers across the state. That was the groundwork for Inspiring Excellence, which launched in 2008. Since then, I've worked with MLA, AWI, AgriFutures, Agriculture Victoria, NSW LLS, NSW DPI, Murray Dairy, farming systems groups and a lot of farmers and rural women in between. Programs designed. Impact evaluated. Farmer groups facilitated. Leaders developed. Professionals mentored. I've loved most of it.

Then life did what life does.

In 2020 my husband was diagnosed with cancer and died 30 days later. My father followed within 18 months. I kept the business running, kept my teenagers together, and kept myself going, because there was nobody coming to do it for me. Those years were the hardest of my life. They were also the years when I found out what I'm made of.

In 2025 I gave myself a whole year to work out what came next. Five months camping solo up the east coast and through outback Queensland in my Ute, then Bali, Europe, UK, Ireland and South America, mostly on my own. I came home to my 85 acres of Victorian bush a different woman from the one who left. Clearer. Fiercer. Less interested in performing a life that looks good from the outside and far more interested in building one that truly fits.

I'm not the same consultant I was six years ago, and I'm glad. I bring everything now. The 30 years of technical knowledge and the hard-won understanding of how people really change, grieve, grow and find their way forward. The two are not separate. The woman who learned to drive a 4WD through the outback alone is the same woman who can sit with a room full of farmers doing it hard, or walk beside someone rebuilding their life, and know how to help.

This is what I do now. I develop the people who change agriculture, and I walk alongside people ready to change their lives. Both come from the same place. I've done the work, I've lived the life, and I genuinely want to help people move forward.