Anthea Yule fit for the job as first female Hawke’s Bay Federated Farmers president
Handover time as Anthea Yule succeeds Jim Galloway as Federated Farmers Hawke's Bay provincial president at the annual meeting on May 14.
Federated Farmers Hawke’s Bay has its first female president, after a decision by Raukawa farmer Jim Galloway to stand down after eight years in the role.
The successor is Anthea Yule, who stepped up at the annual meeting in Napier last week, following seven years as provincial Meat and Wool sector chairwoman and about four years as vice-president.
She comes as the camera-ready version, a multi-generational sheep and beef farmer who grew up as a Lyon on a South Canterbury farm.
Politics and discussion of the topic were embedded in the family lifestyle, all of which prepared her well for the lifestyle when she moved to Hawke’s Bay in 1987 and settled at Otamauri. She farms 400ha there and has overseen family succession in the business, with two other blocks (one leased) and about 8000 stock units.
She had four children, with a big moment in the family timeline coming when son Charles and wife Mandy were made Farmers of the Year at the 2026 Hawke’s Bay Primary Sector Awards.
“I’m a great believer in family succession,” she says, and she’s also a great believer in the teamwork that goes hand-in-glove with farming, as she saw from an age at least as young as 5.
She remembers standing on a box trying to “rousie” as her father’s second-cousin, Pleasant Point gun shearer and later an industry legend Peter Lyon helped shear the family sheep.
Beef finishing farmer Galloway became president in 2018, being not long back in Hawke’s Bay, and stepping up when a vice-president nurtured for the chair became unavailable for the more full-on role combining daily farming, internal administration, and being the at-call spokesman on farming and farm-political issues in Hawke’s Bay.
The outgoing president at that time, Takapau farmer Will Foley, became a Hawke’s Bay Regional Council member and last year was elected Mayor of Central Hawke’s Bay, and former president Bruce Wills became national president, among numerous other roles leading to him being touted as a potential for a seat in Parliament.
Galloway doesn’t plan heading down the same track, although he last year took up a role nationally as chairman of the Fertiliser Quality Council.
Yule, recognising the role he played in keeping on top of the issues on behalf of the Hawke’s Bay farmer, says: “He’s kept farming issues front and centre, and he will be a hard act to follow.”
At 61 and “a [baby] boomer by a month”, there was an indication she’s not just here for the short term when she completed the Kellogg Rural Leadership programme last year.
“I was the second-eldest on it,” she says.
“It’s great being the first female president. But I’ve been eating, sleeping and breathing farming all my life. I grew up in a family where we talked politics all the time.”
She says Hawke’s Bay farmers have done it tough in recent years, with such challenges as drought in 2019 and other weather events such as Cyclone Gabrielle, and the downturn in the sheep industry, both in numbers and prices.
“At the moment we are in a bit of a boom, where people are cautiously buoyant, where people are busy shoring things up,” she says, recognising it’s not quite like the day of wool’s pound-for-a-pound where farms, machinery, implements and homes were bankrolled on a windfall.
She says local government reorganisation, water storage, and pest and weed problems are big issues for Hawke’s Bay farmers, along with such things as rural education – a special interest, given she was once a teacher.
Showing the almost umbilical attachment all-round, on Tuesday she was reading stories to a grandchild’s class during Book Week “in town” in the morning, back on the farm drenching the lambs and weighing bulls in the afternoon, before heading “into the office” in the evening.
They reckon she should be writing a book, and she reckons she will one day, but in the meantime there’s another job to be done, at Federated Farmers.
“We’ll see how it goes,” she says.
Doug Laing is a Hawke’s Bay Today reporter with 53 years’ experience in journalism – from the kitchen table while at school in Masterton, to 39 years continuously in Napier since starting a second stint with the Daily Telegraph in 1987.