Sisters Lydia Holste and Faith Kemme, and sisters Beth and Amy Marcoot are carving out their own careers on their family farms, but in very different ways.
Holste and Kemme are using their skills to add value to the family’s grain operation, Wendte Farms Ltd. The Marcoot sisters helped their parents build a value-added operation around the family’s historic Jersey dairy farm, making cheese and hosting tours on the farm.
Related: Female and farming
The four women are part of a growing number of young women choosing production agriculture as a career. It’s tough to capture the change in women farmers nationally and within Illinois, but USDA says the number of female producers increased by 27% from 2012 to 2017, to 1.2 million female farmers working 388 million acres and racking up $148 billion in sales.
Related: Women: Picture a future on the farm
Granted, USDA revised its census questions in 2017 to better capture that demographic, which likely resulted in higher numbers. Still, anecdotally, farmers, agribusinesses and Illinois FBFM report a moderate but significant shift in women doing the work and making the decisions on Illinois farms.
Flexible farmer embraces seasons
Lydia Holste may only be 31, but she has already experienced three seasons of life as a farmer. Maybe more.
As a young person, the Altamont, Ill., farmer was working ground by age 10, feeding livestock and baling hay. By the time she was in college, she was putting on anhydrous, helping with the family seed dealership, and learning payroll and accounting.
But before Holste and her younger sister, Faith Kemme, went off to the University of Illinois, their dad told them they had to work off the farm three years before coming back — and bring a skill with them.
So Holste went to work for Case New Holland doing technical support for precision agricultural and construction equipment. You guessed it: She was on-call remote tech support for her dad before she ever came home.
True to her word, she came back to the farm after three years, bringing along her husband, Adam Holste. Kemme did the same, securing a master’s in agribusiness and agronomy and bringing her husband, Matt Kemme, back to the farm. Now all four of them work with the sisters’ parents at Wendte Farms Ltd.
Starting in 2014, the Holstes rented and bought ground using a Farm Service Agency loan for beginning farmers. The Kemmes have done the same.
Today, the Holstes have three children and one on the way, so Lydia’s days are less full-time tractor driving and more seed invoicing and accounting, communications, and parts runs — jobs she can work around her duties raising the next generation on the farm.
“Farming is my job. It’s full time. But it’s not like I go to the farm from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. My mom reminds me of that: ‘Yes, you stay at home, but you work on the farm,’” she says.
You can bet Lydia’s still on tech support. This spring she heard the crew on the radio trying to solve a problem with the GPS receiver. She called Adam and told him what to try. It worked!