Indiana Agriculture Student Wants to Be the Role Model She Needed When She Was Younger

Gracie Lee grew up in a small rural community in eastern Indiana, the kind with farms all around it.

But she lived in town. Her parents didn't farm. One of her grandfathers did, but that was long before her time.

“Growing up in a rural area, I saw it happening all around me and I took a liking to it,” said Lee, 18.

That interest turned into a dream of becoming a farmer. She loved being outside, working with plants and animals, and tending to the earth.

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But growing up, she never really thought it was a possibility. She didn’t have the family connections. She didn’t come from a multi-generational farming family. And, she was a girl.

“In our area, specifically, lots of families have been farming for a long time,” Lee said. “And most of them are male.”

The extent of that gender divide struck her one day in fifth grade. Lee still remembers how it went. She'd worn a John Deere sweatshirt with that classic green and yellow logo of deer mid-jump. It wasn’t long until one of her young classmates took issue with her clothing choice.

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“A boy in my class told me ‘girls can never be farmers,’” Lee recalled.

For Lee, however, that only made her interest stronger.

Still, she struggled to find like-minded people when she was younger. Lee didn’t have many women-on-the-farm role models. But that changed with her introduction to women working in two different youth farming organizations: Future Farmers of America and 4-H. That's when she really started see a path to agriculture.

“What I needed when I was younger was women in agriculture to look up to,” Lee said. “Once I got older and saw other women doing it, it showed me I could, too.”

All she needed was a chance, which came working on a teacher's dairy farm in high school. She also showed dairy cattle. Those experiences helped convince Lee she could do farm work. They also helped inspire her to be confident and speak up for herself.

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Now she is doing a different kind of farming — she is raising ideas and awareness before heading to Purdue University to study ag education. She is finishing a "gap" year between graduating high school in 2022 and going to university in the fall. During this time, she's working as one of seven state reporters for the Indiana chapter of Future Farmers of America.

Source: indystar.com

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