It’s a Q&A episode. Gillian and Katja answer listener questions straight up, no notes prepared: hair dramas, what’s really behind the scenes, and what city people still get wrong about farming.
#80 | Q&A: Gillian's Hair Drama, Our "Oh Sh*t" Moments & What City People Still Get Wrong About Farming – Agsolutely Fabulous
What’s actually happening behind the scenes
Two very different operating styles run this show: one host plans everything, weeks and months ahead, treating every project like an iceberg with most of the work invisible underneath. The other makes zero plans and simply works ten times as hard to make things happen anyway, discovering commitments the night before and going regardless. Neither approach is wrong. Both add up to the same result: everything, in agriculture and in running a passion project alongside full farm and family life, takes longer than anyone on the outside assumes.
As for a biggest “oh sh*t” moment since starting the podcast: genuinely, not yet. No legal threats, no major public blow-ups, just the ordinary chaos of two working women recording a show around full-time jobs, farms and kids. If anything, the bigger surprise has been the reach: knowing that political staffers and the occasional minister’s office tune in changes how seriously you take getting things right.
If you could interview one woman in ag, dead or alive
One host’s answer looks backward: any of the women who crossed the Blue Mountains in a dray with a handful of sheep and started a new life in the western districts, in full skirts and petticoats, building English cottage gardens out of nothing. The scale of what those women endured and built with essentially no support puts most modern complaints about being busy into fairly stark perspective.
The other answer looks sideways rather than back: the real value is in the ongoing conversations already happening with women currently living it, whatever their role, farmer, partner, off-farm income earner, because someone else going through the same problem right now has usually already found a workable answer, and those conversations, kept evergreen on podcast platforms, keep helping new listeners years after they’re recorded.
Where the hosts genuinely disagree
Homesteading, raw milk, and microplastics are the honest answer, one host has zero interest in jam-making or homesteading projects and isn’t losing sleep over microplastics, the other is fully committed to both. The disagreement itself isn’t the point. Neither one expects the other to change, and that’s arguably the more useful lesson: two people can hold genuinely opposing views on lifestyle choices without it affecting mutual respect, provided the thing being disagreed on isn’t actually harmful.
What city people still get wrong about farming
Two answers worth sitting with. First: the sheer skill required is consistently underestimated. Farming is treated as unskilled or basic work by people who’ve never tried to keep a backyard vegetable patch alive, when running a farm business well requires agronomy, animal husbandry, mechanical skill, financial management and constant adaptive problem-solving, often all before lunch.
Second, and just as persistent: the assumption that anyone driving a late-model four-wheel drive or sending kids to boarding school (often the only schooling option in remote areas) must be wealthy. Second- and third-generation farm families in particular are frequently reliant on Centrelink-style family payments, without independent income or superannuation for the partner not directly drawing from the farm business, living genuinely precarious financial lives behind equipment that looks expensive because it has to be fit for purpose.
The wildest listener story so far
A listener who moved to Nyngan, worked as a nurse until a flood forced a helicopter evacuation of her last patient, then became editor of the local newspaper with zero journalism experience, launched a working stockdog magazine after her first child was born, co-founded a dance school with a woman she met at a cake stall (and kept it running for 30 years after her business partner left), bought two properties, started a kelpie stud, and wrote two children’s books. It’s exactly the kind of story this podcast exists to surface: women who describe their own extraordinary lives as “nothing special” purely because nobody’s ever pointed out otherwise.
How the show got its name
A small piece of trivia for anyone who’s wondered: Agsolutely Fabulous was named by a stranger on Twitter (now X), who suggested it in reply to a post asking for name ideas, and then more or less vanished from the platform. If that person is somehow reading this: get in touch, there’s a merch pack waiting with your name on it.
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