Tara Vander Dussen left her career as an environmental consultant to launch the “Discover Ag” podcast with Natalie Kovarik, who left her job as a pharmacist. They each farm with their families in New Mexico and Nebraska, respectively. Today, their podcast has logged over a half-million downloads and is ranked among the top 10 food podcasts.

Grace Lunski and her two sisters used the pandemic to launch their own high-fiber, gut-friendly pasta company called 3 Farm Daughters, straight from Grand Forks, N.D., where they farm with their husbands and parents. Boxes of their pasta fly off the shelves.

Mary Pat Sass is a Wisconsin farm girl who married an Illinois boy, and today, they farm with his family near Woodstock, Ill. She started telling their farm story on social media, to more than 140,000 followers on Instagram and 260,000 followers on TikTok.

And Jena Ochsner is a Sutton, Neb., farm wife who launched a homegrown beef business, Double O Farms, which also gave her the chance to tell their farm story online. She left her job as a labor and delivery nurse, and she and Mary Pat just started their own podcast, “Beyond the Crops.”

It’s all as impressive as it sounds.

Ingenuity in action

Earlier this fall at the Farm Progress Show, I sat on stage with these five women and marveled. I listened to their stories and peppered them with questions about how they got where they are. Who came up with what idea? What did you do next? What did your family have to say about it?

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Tara talks at a rapid clip, making jokes easily. She was the kid who wouldn’t stop talking in school and gladly left the dairy farm for college, with no intention of working in agriculture. She didn’t hang out with anyone who had an ag background, but when it came up that she was from a dairy farm, they had questions.

“I’d spend an hour talking about where their milk comes from,” she says, laughing. “Nobody else was having that conversation about their dad that’s a lawyer.”

Tara graduated and went to work as an environmental scientist. Then she started the New Mexico Milkmaid platform and cultivated a huge online audience because she’s well-spoken, incredibly knowledgeable and quite likeable.

That she would wind up as a category-leading podcast host analyzing the big-headline stories of the week as they relate to food and agriculture maybe wasn’t the most direct route — but listen to her for five minutes and it absolutely makes sense. She’s a farm wife and hard-driving businesswoman.

Mary Pat is also endearing, in entirely different ways. She’s sharing her farm family’s story online, in the same vein that columnist Delight Weir did on the pages of Prairie Farmer 60 years ago. Then as now, young farm women relate to what she deals with every day. And she’ll be the first to tell you it’s her faith in God that gets her through the bad days. And honestly, the good days, too.

Most recently, Mary Pat launched a business called Grounded Journals, because she wanted to give farm families an easy way to record their stories for generations to come.

“That’s really my deep passion project,” she’ll tell you.

And I can’t help but love an entrepreneur like Jena. Let’s all take a look at the livestock out back and figure out a way to capture more revenue from what we’re already doing. Jena started direct-selling beef and now she’s re-branding. She left her nursing career to be home full time with her young family, and she’s making it work.

No fatal flaws

Grace’s North Dakota family motto is my new favorite: Failure isn’t fatal. That’s the kind of thing that inspires three farm girls to start a pasta company that’s got extra fiber because why not?

“We’ve pivoted so many times,” Grace says. “Let’s just have messy action and fail fast and pivot faster, because that’s really how you learn the quickest.”

If that doesn’t sum up life on a farm — especially during harvest — I don’t know what does. But those words hit deep in my perfectionist heart. Just do the thing.

If you have a dream in your heart or you’re nurturing some skill that you think might offer the world something new, why aren’t you going for it? What’s holding you back?

Because if you feel uncertain about it at all, here are five women (seven if you count all 3 Farm Daughters) who were brave enough to be bad at something new. They all say their early efforts were messy. They failed. They tried again. They studied in college for a career they no longer practice. But they leaned into their gifts, and in their own ways, each tells agriculture’s story. From her own vantage point.

Your vantage point is valuable, too. So are your gifts.

Action cures fear. Go do the thing. Even if it’s messy.

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