It’s exciting for me to see how female farmers are celebrated these days. Females have been thriving in production agriculture for a long time—they just didn’t always get credit for it.

In the 1910s, my grandmother hand-harvested a cotton crop at a young age after her father died. My mother was equally responsible for the success of my family’s business, but she didn’t receive public accolades for it until the last decade.

Yet that celebration isn’t accompanied by universal open-mindedness. This is a good time to do some soul searching about whether females have been appropriately included in your business’ history of ownership and given opportunity to lead. Have those past experiences of adult women in your family impacted their perspective on the business today?

An adult daughter shared with me that while she wasn’t invited to work on the farm as much as her brothers, she’s accepted that as the past and isn’t bitter. But she would like that history understood and acknowledged in current conversations about making shared ownership decisions.

Does she have less direct experience to inform the conversation? Yes. Was that her choice? No. Her farming partners need to be careful she doesn’t feel dismissed. The decisions of the past can’t usually be undone, but acknowledging them today can sometimes go a long way.

Then decide what you want for the future. If you hope your daughters feel welcome to join the farm, how are you showing them that? Do they see other women in their community recognized or mentored? Do you invite them to go with you to the field just as often as the boys? Do you talk to them explicitly about the opportunities? Do you connect them with potential mentors that can support their decisions?

This can be a difficult topic, and we may not all agree on the right approach. I simply encourage you to reflect and be intentional about your situation.

Davon Cook is a family business consultant at Pinion. Reach Davon at [email protected]. The opinions of the author are not necessarily those of Farm Futures or Farm Progress.