“No two days are the same,” Dingle said. “You get to go different places, maybe Edgecombe one day and Hawera the next. I thought I knew the Waikato but I certainly didn’t until I started driving.”

There can be hairy moments on the road though. Dingle said in stormy weather she has to be super aware of what the public are doing around her.

“There are people who don’t drive to the conditions and they make our job harder when they are driving like lunatics. We are just trying to get from A to B and people pass us in the wet and on bad corners.

“I don’t think the public realise how long it takes a fully loaded truck and trailer to react and stop. It can be quite scary.”

Even once the truck leaves the road it can be another three kilometres of farm driveway to get to the milking shed and drivers need to be ready for anything. “We come off a main highway, go onto a farm track and their could be a tree down. We deal with it as it happens.”

Dingle also said it was not a good idea to wear shorts on farms at night because you never know when you might feel a wet dog nose against your leg.

Fonterra has office back-up at the depot at all times. Dingle has just got a position as office support. “It’s a big step for me, considering back in 2013 I’d never set foot inside a truck!”

Dingle said women are represented all over the industry. “A lot of younger girls doing stock trucks, tractors and harvesters, you’d be surprised how many of the contractors out at the moment are women.”

Justine Archer has been driving tankers for four years. “I worked my way up through the ranks. I got my class four and started with tippers, then I jumped onto my next license and drove freight.“

“I learnt the hard way, driving in Auckland doing all the metro deliveries and unloads. There were a lot of tears and swearing too.”

Of the 130 staff at the Te Awamutu tanker depot nine are female and although Archer has experienced people doing a double-take when she arrives on the farm she said there are no barriers to women becoming tanker drivers.

She thinks it would be great to have more women tanker drivers. “We do well. Because we are the minority we try that little bit harder.”

Pictured left to right: Julie Dingle, Justine Archer and Donna Ward
DJ MILLS / WAIKATO TIMES

Donna Ward has been driving tankers for five seasons and said that she did see discrimination against female drivers when she first started but it has got a lot better.

“They have the right people here at Fonterra dealing with it. When women voice their opinions they get listened to.”

Ward said tanker driving is better than her past industry jobs such as fencing, hay and silage contracting and loading helicopters. She said she experienced threatening behaviour from a couple of men while she was contracting. “My equipment was also stolen so I stopped doing it.”

Ward loves driving tankers around the countryside. “It’s an easy job. I get paid to be a tourist and I get to meet a lot of people.”