Management program links female farmers

MONTGOMERY CITY, Mo. - Working a combine was no problem for Ann Whitehead, one of five daughters who grew up on a farm. But with little understanding of the business side of agriculture, she was lost when she asked a local banker for a farm loan.
The banker's response only made matters worse. "Bring your dad with you next time," he told her.
"It was very intimidating," recalled Whitehead, 48, who owns 100 valuable but long-dormant acres in central Missouri.
Those experiences are all too common in what remains a male-dominated line of work, said Ruth Hambleton, a University of Illinois extension agent who founded Annie's Project, a farm management training program, four years ago.
"One of the things women tell us is the worst teacher they have is the man they're married to," said Hambleton, who is based in Mt. Vernon, Ill. "Sometimes when you ask questions, especially when you married into a (farm) family, you're looked at with suspicion."
Annie's Project has since grown to seven other states, including Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Minnesota and Missouri, Hambleton said. The program is named after her late mother, Annette Fleck.
Participants in the program - started with the help of a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant and which Hambleton hopes to expand nationwide - are farm wives, farm widows, divorced farmers such as Whitehead, and the occasional single female farmer.
More than just managing spreadsheets, understanding crop insurance and mastering market plans, the six-week program extols the virtues of strength in numbers, said Karisha Devlin, a University of Missouri extension agent in Shelbyville.
"Women, once they share what's going on in their lives, they see they're not the only one faced with this situation," said Devlin, who is also married to a farmer.
The bonds forged in the classroom continue long after the formal lessons end, Hambleton said.
For Whitehead, the pain of that meeting with the insulting banker remains fresh. She has since secured a farm loan from another lender and has made modest progress clearing brush and repairing erosion damage on her land.
She hopes to cultivate that acreage to help pay for her eventual retirement. Each week, she drives 75 miles round-trip to attend the Annie's Project class after working all day as a project manager for the local conservation district.
Married at 19 and divorced by 33, the grandmother of three is looking for hard facts - and a dose of confidence to make it alone in a world she has mostly witnessed from afar as a child.
"Our biggest role was to help get the meals on the table," she recalled. "It's been a challenge. Before, I didn't make a lot of decisions. I was the helper. Now I find myself second-guessing myself a lot."