Why You Should Hire Farm Girls
By Marney Andes
It was wheat harvest in Wallace, the summer following my sophomore year of high school; a year that ended in me making a state basketball appearance and being recognized again as one of the best young basketball players in the area.
My dad purposely bought me a basic pair of basketball shoes in eighth grade that were several sizes too big so I could get through as many years as possible in them, but now, it was the time for a serious upgrade, and I had my sights set on a pair of Air Jordan’s.
I’d begged and begged him for new shoes, and he finally agreed that if I spent all summer working on the farm, he’d buy me a flashy new pair (that fit) for my upcoming year. My brother just came back from college, and we were each assigned one combine in preparation for the summer harvest.
A couple of fields into wheat harvest activities and after driving the combine to cut the wheat about three-quarters of the way around an untouched field, I turned around to see all of my hard work, and I froze.
Nothing. No grain in the collection tank. It wasn’t even halfway filled.
I grabbed my CB radio and called out to my brother Cris, who was in the same field, ahead of me, asking him what might have gone wrong.
To which he responded, “Well, did you turn off the auger?”
After the combine separates the grain from the chaff (wheat) or stalks (corn), an internal conveyor moves the grain up and into the grain collection tank, which sits right behind the cab, where the driver sits (where I was sitting). The driver is separated by a glass window so it’s easy to see the grain falling into the tank and filling up as you drive the combine and cut the wheat. An auger is how the grain is moved out of the combine and into a grain truck, or in my case, how the grain was moved from the combine and onto the ground.
At that moment, I knew I hadn’t turned off the auger. The uncomfortable silence practically poured through the other side of the radio to Cris and my dad. What this meant was not only that I’d spent a full drive around a new field cutting wheat only to dump it back onto the ground, but that my dad had lost part of his profit (an amount equal to three pairs of the Air Jordan’s). I had lost our family money that day.
Farm girls have a business-owner mentality.
Starting that very moment in the field, I had to work, think, and live like a business owner because if my parent’s business went down, it meant I went down, too. My father had given me responsibility not only with the combine-- and a lot of other heavy machinery-- but with the understanding that I’d be in charge of helping him make a profit for that day. Equally, by putting me in that position, he also gave me the responsibility, knowing fully well that I’d make mistakes. Looking back, I’m still in awe at how much trust he placed in me both with the machines and by putting me in charge of our family’s livelihood.
When farm girls mess up, they learn how to take responsibility for it. I remember promising him that I’d make it up to him and fix it, not only because I wanted those Air Jordans but because I wanted to regain his trust. We’re constantly in a mode of risk-mitigation, trial-and-erroring, as we go. Still, simultaneously, we know that if we make too big of a mistake, we could risk damaging equipment, killing crops, or in my case, spending hours and hours in the field while never collecting a single piece of grain.
Farm girls are resilient.
Years before that summer, I remember the first responsibility my father gave me: being in charge of the lawnmower. I was pretty young, but I remember not having a doubt in my mind that I wanted to get down and dirty. “You’re going to use the lawnmower today,” he said, and a couple of hours later, I was driving it like I’d done it all of my life.
When you’re a farm girl, there isn’t a user manual or training you need to attend before mowing weeds or using a combine. You’re told to tackle a problem, and with enthusiasm and eagerness, you hop into it, knowing it’s for the well-being of your “company.”
When you’re a farm girl, there’s nobody to outsource your work to when you’re feeling under the weather or there to pick up your pieces when you mess up or break something. Your “co-workers” are typically working hard on another project, leaving you to your own devices and with the immense responsibility of figuring it out on your own (even if you've never done that before).
You’re resilient when you’re a farm girl because there’s no other way to be.
Farm girls know how to deal with things that are out of their control.
So much of life on a farm is dependent on things that are out of anyone’s control. A hail storm wipes out your entire wheat crop. A calf dies because its mother couldn’t give birth properly. A piece of machinery breaks that you’re relying on to make your profit at the market the next day.
When you’re a farm girl, your “co-workers” teach you how to handle problems that are out of your control. Sure, you can be angry or upset that things happen. My dad sure did. His hard work had gotten trampled on plenty of times. But instead of wallowing in the defeat, he pulled up his bootstraps and said, “okay, what’s the solution? How can we fix this?”
Farm girls know how to ask good questions.
Dealing with hardships is one of the most considerable skills that I think a farm girl owns because they’re living in the solution instead of the problem. In this comes another quality: asking good questions. Solid questions. See, farm girls have already gone through the trial-and-error, as we’ve seen, but when there is a roadblock like technical problems or mother nature, she’s there to find the solutions through strategic problem-solving. They think ahead.
All pieces have to work together seamlessly for the farm to continue to run, so for our own sake, farm girls need to know the right questions to ask, so they’re prepared for anything. After that long pause on the CB radio with my brother and my dad, I learned how to ask good questions from the start, so I didn’t run into that roadblock again. Though we lost out on some of the profit that day, I always turned off the auger after transferring the grain from the combine collection tank to the grain truck used to haul the grain into town-- that problem never happened again. I’d precursed the next combine task with thoughtful questions before I spent all afternoon picking up the pieces.
“What happens if something gets caught in the header?”
“What if a warning light goes off; do I call for help or try to fix it first on my own?”
“What if I find myself in an unfamiliar situation?”
Farm girls bring a new meaning to “stretch assignments.”
Most of the companies I’ve worked for have projects and initiatives that require expanding one’s knowledge and wheelhouse for something new. Most of them call them “stretch assignments,” but the term I’d switch it to is “cross-functional learning,” which leans more towards inclusion and collaboration.
When you’re a farm girl, you’ve been doing cross-functional learning from the get-go. You’re working in the back office, the front line, doing your “boss’s” job, and having your "boss" perform yours. There’s no sense of pride because you’ve seen things from all angles.
As a farm girl, you have an appreciation for other people in the business. You understand how everyone and everything works together to make your business effective, and you have the humility to step into somebody else’s shoes to do this. There’s an untold willingness to step in and do something and the innate confidence to learn how to tackle new projects.
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Being a farm girl is a marketable asset beyond the cornfields. I’ve come across many women who’ve grown up in what they think are humble beginnings, but are in fact, training wheels to big jobs and big successes. By taking these lessons seriously and applying them to day-to-day life and big-picture work, any girl who’s grown up on a farm has habits that can last a lifetime if they’re applied on a daily basis.
I owe many of my successes to the lessons I’ve learned on the farm from my late dad. You can find 8 of them in my book, Start with the Give-Me Shots. In it, you'll learn valuable lessons I've learned from my childhood growing up on a farm and how they can be used universally in both work and life.
No matter where I'm living, who I'm working with, or what greater mission I'm serving, the lessons I learned as a farm girl stretches far past Wallace, Nebraska.
The best part? In all of my new endeavors, I give myself permission to have a "combine fail" just like I did that afternoon back on the farm...
...Just to make sure the farm girl in me is still learning and growing. ;)
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