WIA Female Producer Panel: Shining a Light on Trailblazing Women
By Michelle Pelletier Marshall, Women in Agribusiness Media (December 10, 2024)
NOTE: Parts of this article were reprinted with permission from Successful Farming magazine/Agriculture.com. Copyright Meredith Operations Corporation 2024. All rights reserved.
Through the years, the Women in Agribusiness Summit has grown to include four “regular” panels – Ag Innovations, Executive Profiles, Transforming the Workplace and the Female Producer Panel. The later – the Female Producer Panel – has become wildly popular for providing an honest, firsthand view into the production side of ag, along with the many ways that women in these positions – owning, managing and operating farms – face business challenges head on, precariously balancing theses duties against the numerous other responsibilities they may have such as another job, or in their roles as mother, wife, caregiver and more. The insight they provide is invaluable in helping decide the actions of agribusinesses.
In the past, this panel has included producers like Sara Preston, a sixth-generation farmer, who along with her husband, and in addition to raising three young children, are owners of Preston Farms in Iowa where they grow corn and soybeans, have a cow-calf herd and beef cattle feedlot. Or Kimberly Ratcliff, who is owner of Farm to Freezer Meat Company and the manager of Caney Creek Ranch, started by her parents. Ratcliff left her job with Bloomberg in New York City to help the farm in its mission to provide the highest quality ranch-direct beef possible, in a simple, convenient, and responsible manner. Or Amelia Kent, who is a fourth-generation farmer and owner and manager of Kent Farms, LLC, in Clinton, Louisiana. She and her husband, Russell, have a diversified cattle operation that includes a cow herd, replacement heifers, as well as backgrounding and grazing stocker cattle.
This year, at our 13th annual Women in Agribusiness Summit in Denver in September, one of the Female Producer panelists, Sarah Morton, caught the eye of one of the agricultural journalists in the audience, Lisa Foust Prater with Successful Farming, who reached out to Morton for a feature interview.
Said Foust Prater – who is Successful Farming’s family and farmstead editor – in the introduction to the interview/podcast, “I first met Morton at the Women in Agribusiness Summit in Denver earlier this year, where she left a room full of women feeling energized and empowered after speaking as part of a female producer panel. In this episode, we talked about equity, equality, and how we can all better support each other in agriculture.”
With that, Morton, who is a third-generation farmer in Central, Virginia, and serves as Executive Director of Virginia Career Works Piedmont where she is known as a passionate, innovative pioneer with expertise in transforming concepts into high-impact results, embarked on a “15 Minutes with a Farmer Podcast” with Successful Farming.
In the interview, Foust Prater and Morton discuss Morton’s ownership of Cattle Run Farm and its connected food hub tasked with supplying locally sourced protein to food banks across the region. They highlighted Morton for being recognized as a trailblazer for her work with nonprofit and community projects in order to promotes equity, access, local food sovereignty and sustainability.
And, they discuss the farm’s whole protein food resiliency program, Morton’s professional brand (Engage, Educate, Empower! Creating Equity and Access for All) and how the Women in Agribusiness Summit brings together “strong, like-minded individuals”… there to create a networking and an ecosystem of support, an ecosystem of collaboration, of convening, of just really looking at how do we coordinate this effort in a bigger way…”
Look here to listen to the enlightening podcast in its entirety.
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