Bury St Edmunds sheep farmer Kitty Russell talks about post-natal depression and misogyny in farming in wide-ranging interview with SuffolkNews

"You suck it up at times, but you shouldn’t have to. That’s the worst bit. No-one should ever have to suck it up.”

Shepherd and sheep farmer Kitty Russell, from Bury St Edmunds, was talking about her own experiences of misogyny in farming as part of a wide-ranging interview about the job she loves.

Kitty, 44, who also teaches a fast-track-to-farming course, said while she had been carrying out seasonal work on some farms in Norfolk, she wasn’t allowed to drive the tractors or the telehandlers because, she was told, ‘that’s not a woman’s job’.

That time, which was in the last five years, she had to ‘suck it up’ as she needed the money, said Kitty, a single mum who takes on seasonal work to supplement her living from her small flock of sheep.

She said misogyny in farming was a ‘massive problem’ and something she had faced more of in recent years.

“There are more women definitely coming now into farming. But the trouble is the elite, the experts, are still these misogynistic, old cantankerous … who poison it for a lot of other people,” she said.

“It’s not just that they are misogynistic and very sexist, it’s also that they have a real issue with what they call ‘new-gen’ farmers.

“So anyone who’s new generation like me – it’s not been passed down my family line – are starting from fresh, from nothing, and they are so judgmental of people like that because ‘you can’t possibly know and you can’t do and you can’t learn’, and so we are not considered real farmers. So it’s really divisive.”

Kitty, mum to Jake, 11, grazes her flock of roughly 90 sheep on about 65 acres of private land on the edge of her town.

Originally a Londoner, her first insight into farming was through her granny in north Essex, near Great Bardfield; Kitty would visit in the holidays, bottle feeding lambs and ringing tails.

But it was while she was volunteering at the National Trust’s Ickworth estate, helping the shepherd Paul ‘Chap’ Seabrook with lambing in spring 2012, that she ‘just got the bug’.

“There was something about the lack of politics and something about something else really needing you, but you could still walk away from it,” said Kitty, who had previously worked in clinical and admin services at hospitals, including at the Macmillan unit at West Suffolk Hospital.

She added: “I was literally just me. I just loved it.”

She had struggled with post-natal depression after having Jake and says she ‘lost who I was’, but volunteering at nearby Ickworth helped her find herself again.

“Animals just are the most wonderful therapy anyway,” she said.

Volunteering turned into a job, with Kitty learning what she knows from Chap, whose father is the well-known shepherd Richard Seabrook, who featured in a BBC series in the 1980s.

She said: “The way I was taught to look after sheep is everything is in-house. You very quickly become a nurse, a doctor, a vet, a midwife, a diagnostician, the grim reaper and you incorporate that into your life and it’s hard learning curves.”

She added: “I won’t let anyone else shoot my animals, so if something is really sick and needs to be put out of its misery I’m the only person that will do that. For me that’s a respect thing.

“They have given me so much these animals – they haven’t given me a livelihood as they don’t make enough money, because farmers aren’t well enough paid – but personally they have given me so much. I have built such a life and a bond and I have worked so bloody hard to get where I am.”

It was after Ickworth that she set up her business, JVB Shepherding, that she runs by herself. Kitty, who started her flock with two castrated males that were gifted to her, said she ‘cried like an absolute baby’ when the first lambs were born.

Kitty supplies meat to Suffolk’s only Michelin-starred restaurant, Pea Porridge in Bury St Edmunds, and has private customers all around the area.

She said Twitter had been a big selling platform for her sheep skins, but she came off it due to the ‘toxic’ misogyny from especially older, white, male farmers – and also racism (against vets).

“Its’ heartbreaking, actually. I tried so hard to push against it all the time, saying you can’t say stuff like that,” she said.

Kitty, who sees it as her duty to tackle these issues, said education was key and new generations coming through into the industry.

Speaking of the challenges of farming, she said it could be the ‘loneliest job’ and ‘brutal’, with ‘enormous’ financial strains and pressures. To make farming pay, you had to do ‘big numbers’, or you could take on a job on a farm full-time, said Kitty.

But describing what she loved about her vocation, she said ‘the community’ and how you helped each other out. And she’s passionate about encouraging new blood into farming. People tell her that whenever she talks about what she does, her face ‘lights up like a Christmas tree’.

“It’s been a hell of a journey and it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster, but I wouldn’t change it for the world,” she said. “Still now, as much as I’m getting too old to shear sheep and all the rest of it, I’m still doing it and I’ll do it until I can’t.”

Kitty's post-natal depression

Kitty said that after she had Jake, in February 2011, she put everything into caring for him – including breastfeeding him every two hours - but neglected herself.

“I can relate so much to being a parent now to the sheep world,” she said. “These brilliant ewes put everything in, but don’t look after themselves.

“I had a major wobble when my son was about eight/nine weeks old. I was changing him on the living room floor and I stood up to wash my hands or whatever and I had to sit straight back down because I knew I was going to faint.

“I was on my own in the house and I was just so terrified because what happens if I faint and my child is on the floor? And I just remember this fear just grabbing me and I stopped eating, I stopped sleeping and then I went 10 days without a solid mouthful passing my lips, because I was in such a bad way.”

She added: “I think physically I was done, but I kept feeding him and I kept going because I thought that was the right thing to do, and again no-one tells you any different.”

Kitty believes this is when her post-natal depression started.