2026 Rural Women’s Award National Finalist Angie Nisbet is helping protect the hands that feed the nation

There’s no such thing as a quick trip to town for grazier and 2026 AgriFutures Rural Women’s Award National Finalist Angie Nisbet.

First, there’s the drive. It takes almost five hours from her home on a 13,000-hectare cattle station, near Hughenden in central-western Queensland, to the coastal city of Townsville. Once she’s there, the every-other-month trip means the jobs list is long. There’s farm parts to pick up, a car service due and grocery shopping and kids’ supplies to grab so, unsurprisingly, non-urgent tasks – like hair appointments – tend to get pushed down the to-do list. But after two young women close to her developed skin cancer, a job that never gets put off is regular skin checks for the whole family. Angie wants her children Hugo, nine, Tilli, seven, and Elka, five, to learn that getting your skin checked is just as important as going to the dentist.

Angie, 39, has spent most of her life outside in the harsh Australian sun. She was born and bred in Queensland’s remote Flinders Shire, learning the ropes on her family’s sprawling cattle station, beautiful Mitchell Grass Downs country, along with her two older sisters. “I went away to boarding school but always knew I wanted to get back into agriculture – I just didn’t know what that would look like”, Angie explains. “My husband Sam and I came back into my family’s farming business about six years ago.”

After school Angie fulfilled a country kid’s rite of passage and spent years away working as a jillaroo. “During this time my hands caught the brunt of a lot of sun”, she says. “A man shook my hand one day and said something like, ‘you’ve got the roughest hands’. I was mortified! I started wearing gloves after that. I started with these cotton gardening gloves, then I got put onto some fishing gloves but I’d always say to Mum, ‘if you ever see something better in town let me know’.”

In 2016, Angie’s sister Shona, who was in her early thirties with three young children, had her first skin check for a few years. A spot on her leg turned out to be a stage two melanoma. “It was such a shock”, Angie says. “She was lucky, they got it all before it spread. She now has six-monthly checks, but it’s constantly in the back of her mind.” Then in 2019 Angie’s world was rocked again when a close friend died from skin cancer. “She was in her mid-twenties when she had a spot on her back removed, but a few years later it came back”, Angie says. “I miss her every day.”

They say necessity is the mother of invention, so in early 2023, after the sisters had been out mustering, Shona lamented the lack of practical, good-looking work gloves for women on the land. Taking inspiration from pairs they’d worn over the years they did a quick kitchen table sketch and made a wish-list for their own range of gloves, FarmHer Hands. “I’d never seen anything else that met our needs”, Angie says. “Obviously, gloves have been around forever but we wanted something that was UPF 50+, really durable and stylish. Our hands get the brunt of our work. They’re the tools of our trade and we need to look after them”. FarmHer Hands now also makes gloves for men and kids. “We love seeing orders come through for kids. If they see mum and dad wearing gloves, they’ll want to wear them too. We’ve also had people from lawnmowing companies buying them, and kayakers and bushwalkers too.”

During research for FarmHer Hands Angie – who also hosts a podcast called Married to the Land – was horrified by some of the statistics about skin cancer among rural people. Her learnings naturally evolved into advocacy for the broader issue of sun safety in agriculture. She discovered people in rural areas had a 60% higher mortality rate from melanoma and other skin cancers than the general population. And, more recently, the Australian Skin Cancer Foundation’s mobile clinic reported one in every four regional Australians who used their service received a skin cancer diagnosis. “It was so frightening and I started to wonder why weren’t we encouraging more skin checks for people in agriculture?”, Angie says. “It was so glaringly obvious that it needed to be addressed.”

Angie was recently named the winner of the 2026 Queensland AgriFutures Rural Women’s Award for her roles with FarmHer Hands and The AgriSkin Project, the skin cancer awareness initiative she has developed. With her $15,000 Westpac bursary Angie will implement the Project’s first stage – a national billboard awareness campaign called Protect the Hands that Feed the Nation. The long-term goal is to pilot virtual skin checks for people in remote areas. “We’re hoping AgriFutures will open up some doors so we can learn more about rural health governance and what virtual checks might look like. And also allow us to give the health sector some feedback about what’s missing in the bush.”

Angie hopes that putting on a pair of sun protection gloves before heading out the door will, one day, be as routine for farmers as putting on a wide-brimmed hat, a long-sleeved collared shirt and sun cream. “Significant behavioural change will take time, but we’re really committed to seeing it. Shona and I live and breathe our message every day. We want to show people they can cover their hands and still work as hard as everybody else. If FarmHer Hands can leave agriculture a better place for the next generation, I think we’ll be tracking along pretty well.”