Caitlyn Hiskins traded pharmacology for farming (and never looked back)

It took two weeks for Caitlyn Hiskins to realise the pharmacology course she’d been studying wasn’t for her.

Her first university placement was at a chemist in country New South Wales, where she’d envisioned herself chatting with locals, talking symptoms and side effects. “But that was not my experience,” she says. “It was mostly compliance — not a lot of interaction.” 

Caitlyn loves a chat. In her current role as an agribusiness manager based out of NAB’s Business Banking Centre in Albury, New South Wales, she spends up to three days a week on the road, visiting clients over almost 500 kilometres of the New South Wales–Victorian border.

If coverage is good, she’ll be on the phone the whole time. “Especially if it’s sowing or harvest,” explains Caitlyn, 32, “because my clients are typically on tractors or in headers. With the technology we have nowadays, they have the ability to chat while they’re driving along. It’s a good chance to call clients that maybe you haven’t spoken to in the last month or so, just to see what’s happening.”

In 2012, following her two weeks at the pharmacy, Caitlyn returned to university. She threw caution to the wind and signed up for the course she’d always wanted to do: ag science. Growing up in Victoria’s High Country, she spent her weekends riding horses and helping out on the family’s 40 hectare block.

Caitlyn loved ag classes at high school, but had stopped short of enrolling in a uni degree after a careers adviser told her, “There is not a future in agriculture.”

“Once I got to uni, I realised that, yes, there is a future in ag and it probably wasn’t the end of the world to go and study that,” says Caitlyn. She soon found work at Lilliput Ag in Rutherglen, Victoria, eventually becoming the operation’s livestock manager. Then she travelled to the UK, where she spent time on a sheep and dairy property. 

“I came back from there and I really wanted my own farm,” she says. “But working in agriculture, you weren’t paid a lot of money at that time and I knew I didn’t have the skills to prepare a cash flow and understand financials.”

Caitlyn set her sights on NAB’s Regional and Agribusiness graduate program and once again enrolled at university, this time studying for a graduate diploma in agricultural business management. 

She joined NAB in 2020 and is now one of three female agribusiness managers at the bank’s Albury office. Her 45 clients span various sectors, including cattle, sheep, dairy, cropping and post-farm gate services. Caitlyn spends her days assisting clients, analysing their budgets and proposals, and keeping abreast of industry developments.

Contrary to popular belief, she says there’s more to her job than helping farmers buy new farms. “Maybe 10 per cent of my time is spent doing that,” she says, “but that’s the good part of the job: being able to support someone into a new farm or help their transition to retirement with a house in town. Or when kids come home to the farm, we can integrate them into the trading business and, eventually, property ownership.” 

Caitlyn knows how hard it can be to get a foot in the door. She and her partner, Bryce Tresidder, have finally secured their own block, using vendor financing to buy land from her grandmother in Carlyle, not far from Rutherglen. It’s a small operation, a mix of cropping and sheep spread over about 360 hectares (including a nearby block in Springhurst, which they lease from Caitlyn’s parents). It means Caitlyn can spend her weekends as she did in her youth, drenching lambs and riding horses.

It’s the realisation of a years-long dream but, like everyone else in the region, Caitlyn and Bryce are awaiting rain.

“It’s a challenging environment at the moment,” she says, speaking as both a banker and a producer. For her cattle clients, the market is strong but water is an issue. “Most people are feeding stock now,” she says. Clients in irrigated cropping areas west of Albury are at about 20 per cent of their water allocation. “And temporary water is very expensive.”

With skin in the game and decades of farming experience, Caitlyn knows growing seasons and production processes.

As she puts it: “I have a little bit of an understanding of a lot of types of industries.” It means she can work with her clients to come up with solutions that suit their particular way of operating.

She says if there’s one thing that’s surprised her about banking, it’s how personal the work can be. Caitlyn had signed up to NAB’s graduate program thinking it would be all dollars and figures. “But there’s often more to it than that,” she says. “Money is not always everyone’s biggest problem — I learned that last year when it didn’t rain.” She’s had heartfelt conversations about parents requiring care and grown-up children planning their next chapter. In many ways, it’s exactly the sort of work she’d hoped to find behind the counter at a country pharmacy.

This article is a Graziher x NAB collaboration. Find out how NAB can work with you by visiting nab.com.au/agribusiness.

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